Steven Kolb restrained a PETA protester at the COS runway show during New York Fashion Week.
Photo: PETA
On Sunday, a PETA protest at the COS runway show went viral when Steven Kolb, the CEO of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, roughly restrained two activists during the presentation. Online, a video showed Kolb pinning a female protester down with his legs and covering her mouth and later pushing and covering the mouth of a male protester. The Cut spoke to a protester and witnesses who were at the show.
Kolb has led the CFDA, the trade organization that represents most major U.S. designers, since 2011 and is a fixture at New York Fashion Week.
On Sunday, hours after the show, Kolb addressed the incident in a statement on his personal Instagram account, writing, “I reacted inappropriately to an incident at a show earlier today. It wasn’t my place to do so. I should have let the security team handle the situation.”
On Monday, a representative for the board of the CFDA, which is chaired by Thom Browne, said Kolb “will be on leave pending a full review” in a statement shared with The Cut. “The CFDA as an organization is committed to working with dissenting voices to find commonality and is leading efforts to move the American fashion industry forward while upholding the values of our membership, including respectful engagement with differing viewpoints,” it said.
Kolb, meanwhile, posted another handful of Instagram Stories after the CFDA’s statement, writing that he “inappropriately restrained” the protesters and apologizing for his behavior. “There is no justification for physically restraining another person,” he wrote, describing the incident as “completely out of character for me.” He characterized his leave from the CFDA as “voluntary” and said that he’s accepted an invitation from PETA to meet and “apologize in person.”
Speaking with The Cut, Mason Melito — a senior campaign manager for PETA and one of the six protesters at the show — said, “The violence that the CEO Stephen Kolb showed us in his attempt to silence us just completely mirrors the violence that’s inherent in the wool industry.” Melito happened to be sitting near Kolb when he tried to walk out onto the runway toward the end of the COS show. “Our lawyers and teams at PETA are deciding next steps to take, and we just want Kolb to know that we would like to meet with him,” said Melito, who declined to share how he and the other protesters made it into the venue. One editor at The Cut remembers seeing one of the protesters posing as a publicist before the show and later realized that two others were pretending to be guests and looking for empty seats before the show started.
“I personally was shaken. I think people around me were a bit shaken,” said Steph Saltzman, the beauty and style director for Fashionista, who was sitting close to Kolb and captured the altercation on video. She said the COS show was disrupted from the very beginning by PETA protesters who walked out onto the runway. The first one she saw carried a sign that read “Sheep Beaten and Bloodied for Wool, Don’t Buy It!” He was quickly taken away by security. Saltzman heard others yelling but couldn’t see them from her seat. Then a female protester sitting near her tried to get up when Kolb intervened. “He ripped the sign out of her hands,” she said, as the woman yelled. “At one point, he did wrap his leg around her. He had his hand on her mouth, trying to stop her from speaking. Everyone around me was, I think, in a little bit of a frozen moment of not really processing what was happening and trying to understand if they could intervene.”
Eventually, Kolb let the protester go and she walked onto the runway. Melito was sitting nearby and waited until the runway finale to try to walk out when Kolb restrained him. Security eventually came over and took Melito away. Melito said he and the other protesters were escorted out. They didn’t realize who Kolb was until they saw Fashionista and others posting about the altercation online.
“It was quite stressful,” said another fashion editor who asked to remain anonymous. “Security were basically nowhere to be seen, even though there were so many of the protesters and they kept popping up.”
Melito, a senior campaigner with PETA, said the animal-rights group is currently targeting H&M and urging the group, which owns COS, to stop using wool. PETA claimed that a recent investigation found workers harming sheep at a farm certified by Nativa, a group that designates responsible sources for wool and is used in H&M’s supply chain. PETA put up an anti-wool billboard near one of H&M’s Manhattan stores and organized a protest outside Rockefeller Center last week.
A representative for the H&M Group told The Cut that it “takes allegations of breaches of the third‑party certifications we rely on very seriously.” The company says it only sources virgin wool and mohair from farms certified by third parties: the Responsible Wool Standard and the Responsible Mohair Standard. (Nativa is a separate certification, but it says its wool is certified by the Responsible Wool Standard too.) The representative for H&M said that PETA’s allegations, which first came out in April, led the certification service that oversees RWS and RMS to investigate the farms involved, and they are no longer certified. “Licenses for one mohair and one wool farm have been suspended, and these farms are no longer permitted to sell certified materials,” said the representative. “We welcome investigations such as these, as they play an important role in strengthening standards and driving progress, and we remain committed to continuously improving animal welfare across our value chain.”
Representatives for COS and Nativa did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This post has been updated.
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