Caring for choice: Fur,anthropocentric orderings and ethicalisation in consumer culture

Abstract

This paper responds to calls that theorising care using approaches that move beyond the human is particularly useful for engaging in debate in consumer culture on environmental challenges. Despite this call, we note that recent analyses have remained anthropocentric in content and tone, with consequences for how care and choice are conceptualised. We speculate that the impasse in advancing beyond human-centric perspectives relates to anthropocentric leniencies in consumer culture research but propose that moving beyond the human is possible and using feminist STS approaches for ‘thinking with care’ (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2011, 2017) enables attending to anthropocentric ordering. We present a historical analysis of how fur (animal skins) used in women’s dress was discussed in the cultural intermediary, US Vogue magazine. Focusing especially on what is foregrounded and excluded (Giraud, 2019), we attend to the question ‘what is cared for’ in the magazine’s entangled textual creations. The analysis shows that by downplaying the significance of animals, over time, Vogue cared for choice by (re)creating the logic of choice (Koskinen and Jauho, 2024) and (re)establishing the cultural dominance of this logic. The logic of choice thus harbours and performs two salient cultural practices: rendering choice dominant and human exceptionalism. We conclude by reiterating the importance of moving beyond human-centric modes of thinking in consumption research, especially that which addresses environmental challenges, warn of the menace of human exceptionalism in drawing scholarship away from beyond human attentiveness, and propose some ways for tackling anthropocentric tendencies.

Introduction

There has been a recent surge in interest amongst consumption researchers in the notions of care and choice. The increased interest in care may be explained by scholarly interest in matters of everyday care informing consumption and marketisation (e.g. Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Godin, 2022; Godin and Langlois, 2021) and debate on ‘ethical consumption’ and environmental challenges (e.g. Godin, 2022; Gram-Hanssen, 2021; Koskinen and Jauho, 2024). It is also argued that the significance of care in consumption research demands better theorisation (Koskinen and Jauho, 2024: 80). Relatedly, early feminist theorisations of care have found extension in science and technology studies, where care seems to be ‘on everybody’s lips’ in recent years (Lindén and Lydahl, 2021: 3). It is this work in feminist STS and associated fields (Giraud, 2019: 3) on which we draw in this paper.

Moving ‘beyond human-centric approaches to care’ (Koskinen and Jauho, 2024: 88), we contend, is of importance for consumer culture research because environmental challenges encapsulate problems beyond ‘climate change’ (Godin, 2022: 403) to include pollution, depletion of natural environments, the loss of biodiversity and extinction, and the rearrangement of biomass on earth as human needs and priorities are foregrounded in justifications of ever new uses of non-human animals and environments (Moore, 2018). But awareness of the cultural practices of human exceptionalism, which harness common ways of thinking about matters of worth and worthiness of care that implicate the more-than-human (Gruen, 2021), is similarly important. In view of this, a puzzle confronts recent calls for moving in this direction for, as we discuss below, analyses remain strangely anthropocentric in content and outlook, making us wonder: ‘what makes it so hard to move beyond human, consumer and consumption in consumer culture research?’ We propose that a partial answer to this question is that consumer culture scholarship is performative of human exceptionalism, without showing awareness of this.

It may of course be argued that the worlds of markets, consumer culture, cultural intermediaries, and consumption are very much human worlds, and that an anthropocentric stance is therefore only to be expected. Yet, these worlds have important consequences for non-human others, and indeed, human exceptionalism is widely practiced in human cultures with deep roots in Western philosophy, where it guides what questions and concerns come to be regarded as important. Furthering understanding of the ways in which consumer culture research is subject to anthropocentrism is especially important when addressing environmental challenges. It is therefore constructive to start a conversation on anthropocentric leanings in consumer culture research. At the very least, doing so raises awareness about the ways human exceptionalism informs debate and what the consequences are. But through self-reflection and re-imagining of the human-centred worlds created in the field, here is an invitation for consumer culture researchers to join endeavours in careful thinking about what liveable future worlds for all might look like. We contribute to this task in this paper by returning to the matter of the logic of choice (Koskinen and Jauho, 2024) in an analysis of how animals and fur (animal skins) are embedded in the entangled realities of the cultural intermediary and women’s fashion magazine US Vogue, during the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Posthuman feminist philosophers have posited human exceptionalism as a set of cultural practices where hierarchies are created between entities: between humans, between human and non-human animals, between non-human animals, and so on. Entities are categorised differently and attached to ideas of relative value, worth and importance. In turn, this informs understandings - or, as argued by Barnett (2024: 163), ‘rhetorical achievements’ - of what is worthy of care, and what is not, or to a lesser extent (also: Martin et al., 2015). We therefore draw specifically on a long line of feminist debate concerned with how hierarchies of worth are achieved through processes of invisibilisation and exclusion (DeVault, 1990; Giraud, 2019; Puig De la Bellacasa, 2011, 2017; Star and Strauss, 1999).

Below, we first explore debates on ‘ethical consumption’ and market ethicalisation in which care and choice are often brought together. We reflect on how care is theorised in this work, in what respect it moves beyond human and what this means for the conceptualisation of choice and care. We then discuss theories of human exceptionalism, leading into a reflection of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s approach to ‘thinking with care’ (2011; 2017). But it is Eva Giraud’s subtle critique of entanglement and advocacy of the importance of attending to ‘frictions, foreclosures, and exclusions’ (2019: 3) that informs our methodological inquiry into the absenting of animals in the cultural intermediary and women’s fashion magazine, US Vogue. Here, we first explain how we conducted visual discourse analysis on fur in this magazine and then move onto the analysis, focusing on the different ways Vogue responded to tensions created by animal rights discourses and calls for sustainability in fashion. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of the anthropocentrism of the logic of choice for theorising care in consumer culture research and return to the question of human exceptionalism in consumer culture scholarship.

Choice and care in debate on ‘ethical consumption’

Choice often makes an appearance in critical analyses of ‘ethical consumption’, and in recent years, the concept of care has been pulled in, too, and set to work as a critique or alternative to the world of choice. Whilst Gabriel and Lang (2015) argued some time ago that ‘the consumer’ is more than simply a ‘chooser’, Koskinen and Jauho (2024: 77) argue that ‘the choosing consumer seems persistent in accounts of consumption, especially outside the social sciences, as well as in our shared cultural imagination and public discourses of consumption’. Drawing inspiration from Annemarie Mol’s (2008) work on care in the sphere of health, they conceive of the logics of choice and care as ‘ideal types’ representing ‘contrasting styles of navigating decision-making, ethics and questions of the good life’ (2024: 77) and propose that a logic is a ‘fragile yet coherent rationale for conduct’ that is not always ‘explicitly articulated’ and may implicitly be ‘embedded in habits, materials and practices’ (p.81). Even so, the logic of choice is ‘the dominating position’ and the world that it materialises is one of ‘autonomous individuals making clear-cut choices after weighting between different options based on personal values and informed by facts’ (p.77). The review Koskinen and Jauho offer of the ‘ethical consumption’ literature pays witness to the logic’s dominance. Here, we not only find work that performs the logic, for instance, by helping ‘the individual’ and ‘ethical consumer’ into the world but also work that critically appraises the truth values of the logic and questions the idea of the sovereign, freely choosing consumer in theories that foreground relationality. Clarifying their position as aligned with relational thinking, Koskinen and Jauho outline their aim as finding ‘care in the world of consumption currently dominated by choice and its emphasis on the sovereign consumer’ (p.78).

The cultural dominance of the logic of choice has been acknowledged in early appraisals of ‘ethical consumption’ scholarship. Jo Littler (2008), for instance, questioned the ‘optimistic’ interpretations of ‘ethical consumption’ presented in arguments by Barnett et al. (2007), and proposed instead that it could be seen as damaging because people’s concerns were channelled into neoliberal solutions, burdening them with overwhelming choice and responsibility. Littler sees ‘ethical consumption’ as characteristic of an individualised society, in which people must tackle poverty, exploitation, mass industrialisation, pollution and many other matters of concern, through their solo purchasing. Debate has since moved in two directions. The idea that consumers are enrolled into the logic of choice where the range of choices on offer is increasingly complex is one thread (e.g. Brans, 2023; Frig and Jaakkola, 2023). Koskinen and Jauho (2024) outline how, in the logic of choice, the problem of complex choices is solved by providing consumers with information and transparency, allowing them to make better choices. As it creates a condition where consumer selections are fraught with ambiguities and anxieties (see Warde, 1997), the complexity of choice forms the underlying rationale for their paper. Building on these ideas, Frig and Jaakkola (2024: 16) conclude that in the fashion industry, sustainability is envisaged as about consuming more by ‘choosing right’ over consuming less, and they point out that the possibility of being careful in ways other than through consumption is not parsed here.

The second strand of debate concerns how morals, ethics and politics are performed in market practices. Markets actively engage in ‘ethicalisation’ on different levels. Spheres of market exchange perform and organise ethical concerns and thus constrain possibilities for the expression of ethical intensions and the logic of choice plays an active role in this (Foden et al., 2022; Godin, 2022). On a broader cultural level, a specific ethico-political social and cultural organisation is created when care is individualised through commercialisation, with worries this project destroys collectives and undermines interdependency ethics (Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Godin 2022). Because markets shape opportunities for ethical conduct, we prefer the concept ‘ethicalisation’ over ‘ethical consumption’ and it is usefully summed up by how markets shape ‘who is able to care, for what, and in what ways’.

Given the emerging consensus that ‘beyond human-centric approaches to care’ offer useful tools to ‘think about what a sustainable world could look like’ (Godin, 2022: 404), what can be learned from arguments that the concept of care is promising for advancing scholarship on ethicalisation in consumer culture? Godin and Langlois (2021) and Godin (2022), who argue that the consumption and work of intimate care and gender/social inequalities are key themes, closely align with early feminist theorisations of care (e.g. Fisher and Tronto, 1990). Godin also interestingly incorporates themes from posthuman literature, drawing specifically on Puig de la Bellacasa in seeing care as relational, but also associated with unpaid and paid work, and ‘now inseparable from consumption’ (2022: 399). Following Mol’s (2008) work, Koskinen and Jauho (2024) tie ‘care’ to ‘logic’, where the two logics of choice and care are described as ‘contrasting’. Unlike the logic of choice, which strives ‘for a logical world of perfect information’, the logic of care offers ways of acting ‘in the imperfect context of consumption, with its complex socio-material relations’ that requires ‘continuous attuning’ (2024: 87) and ‘careful tinkering’ (p.81). In the knowledge that trying to make a difference is acceptable and as good as it gets, the logic of care offers an ethos whereby consumers can live without the guilt generated by the logic of choice.

Puig De la Bellacasa (2011, 2017) explains that scholars participate in the making of worlds through the questions they formulate, and the language used in their explanations, and it is only by showing awareness of this, that ‘thinking with care’ is performed. The work of scholars like Godin (2022) and Koskinen and Jauho (2024) is interesting because, despite the explicitly formulated intention to move ‘beyond human-centric approaches to care’, other-than-human considerations remain sparingly addressed. Instead, the narrative leans heavily towards the human, with arguments that lend themselves well to beyond human-centric reflection (community, vulnerability, relationality and interdependency) anchored to human concerns instead. The narrative is also shaped by frequent usage of key human-centred concepts of the discipline, including ‘consumer’, ‘consumption’ and ‘ethical consumption’, and contains constructions that unquestionably place ‘human’ in front. In Koskinen and Jauho (2024: 83), for instance, the non-human is left behind in the research questions (‘what consumers like’, ‘how consumers act’, and ‘where consumption happens’) formulated to guide the analysis. For Puig de la Bellacasa, ‘thinking with care’ is necessarily and always more-than-human, and it is a mode of thinking she specifically invites colleagues to partake in. Following the succinct criticism offered by Sato (2022: 2), conscious effort must clearly be made to think about ideas of community, interdependency, vulnerability and relationality in more-than-human ways.

Finally, the main message conveyed in these recent reflections on care and the more-than-human is that thinking with care is important. Given the emphasis placed in the ‘ethical consumption’ literature on the complexities of choice, the fact that much can potentially be cared for in and through consumption is not addressed. Koskinen and Jauho (2024) explain how care is practiced by consumers in ways that are different from the rigours of the logic of choice, but no insight is provided into how, in their empirical vignettes, care is performed for some matters of concern to the exclusion of others, and to what extend the caring they found their cooks performing show anthropocentric tendencies. We are especially interested in the question ‘how we come to see some things as worthy of … our concern and care’ (Barnett, 2024:163), leaving other things behind, and in the next section, we introduce and discuss ‘beyond human’ feminist literature that is useful for attending to this matter of care.

Beyond human feminist thinking and anthropocentric ordering

‘Modern’ thinking creates a dichotomy between a ‘natural world’ and a ‘world of human culture/technology’ and Latour has argued that this split has been constructed alongside a belief in the goodness of ‘being modern’ (1993: 104). Modernity is not an illusion but a terrain where the split of human from nature is actively performed, but it also evokes a sense of ‘the birth of man’ which, in turn, assumes the ‘nonhumanity’ of beasts, things and objects (p.13). The ‘Man of Reason’, whom Latour conjured up as the ideal liberal subject of science and humanism also upholds the white, European, able-bodied, rational man ‘who’ has been criticised by feminist scholars (e.g. Braidotti, 2013). These ideas associated with modernity produce an anthropocentric ordering that places white men and machines at the top of a hierarchy, with ‘others’ - including humans other than the rational white male subject, non-humans, and even geographical areas (Elam, 1999: 4) - ordered below. Haraway (1991: 331) concurs that hierarchical ordering is achieved through invisibilising and exclusion (see also Star 1990). That caring is socially devalued in the capitalist and patriarchal order, and that this is achieved through invisibilisation, is an enduring argument in feminist scholarship on care (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Puig De la Bellacasa, 2011), resulting in a consensus that ‘caring has virtually no place in the description of ‘the good life’ that provides a focus for Western philosophy, even though caring permeates our experience’ (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 29). The invisibility of care and the consequences of this are key analytical components in Puig de la Bellacasa’s synthesis of feminist and feminist STS analyses. She argues that the invisibility of care sits ‘at the heart of (feminist) concerns with exclusions and critiques of power dynamics in stratified worlds’ (2011: 86). And she makes another important move by pushing these rehearsed feminist concerns on care in a beyond human-centred direction because, as she says at the start of her account, ‘our beautiful planet is sore, and bearable living conditions continue to be inaccessible to many’ (p.85).

What it means to ‘think with care’ ‘beyond the human’ is developed in different ways. On one hand, Puig de la Bellacasa appreciates the ‘beyond human’ awareness that sits in the most frequently cited definition of care formulated by Fisher and Tronto (1990: 40) at a time when ‘beyond human’ conceptualisations were few. Fisher and Tronto defined care as ‘a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’. Yet, Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 161) was also critical of the human-centred notions of ‘our’ and ‘we’ in this definition of care, arguing for a more ‘radically displaced nonhumanist’ phrasing to disrupt the subject-collective ‘we’ to consider nonhumans’, enabling a more inclusive conception of care that acknowledges ‘that humans are not the only ones caring for the earth and its beings’ but that ‘we are in relations of mutual care’. Thinking with interconnectedness or relationality highlights that the humanist ‘we’ exists through becoming with others (see also Haraway, 2008).

Haraway, Puig de la Bellacasa, and debate in Critical Animal Studies (CAS) recognise the ways humans and animals cohabit but also construct relationships of otherness. Orderings not only exist between humans, but also between humans and animals and between animals and ‘power is often distributed a-symmetrically in relations between species’ even when these constantly reconfigure (Westerlaken, 2021: 538). For example, scientists who test on animals normally classified as ‘companion species’ (i.e. pets) revealed how their ‘test subjects’ were conceptualised as ‘ontologically different from the pet dog or cat at home’ (Bekoff, 2002: 47), justifying their status as suitable test animals. For Haraway this means that ‘ontology is continuously in the making, in the process of becoming-with’ (Puig De la Bellacasa, 2012: 200), implying, as Mol (2008) does, that ontological realities are fragile and thus subject to change. Rendering ‘things’ ‘invisible’ and thus unimportant, Giraud (2019) argues, precedes justification of ‘practices that are damaging to those deemed nonhuman, other-than-human, or less-than-human’ (2019: 5), and she makes the case for an ‘ethics of exclusion’, where she warns that entanglement thinking risks hiding ‘asymmetrical distributions of agency that constrain what ways of being are possible in a given situation’ (p.177). These ‘beyond human’ feminist conceptualisations not only provide tools for thinking in ways that challenge human exceptionalism but also for engaging with care and choice in a way that departs from recent efforts to move beyond human-centric approaches to care.

In the analysis presented below, we return to the logic of choice and matters of care with an interest in how this logic historically gained and maintained cultural dominance in the entangled textual realities created by US Vogue magazine, and what is cares for, as the magazine responds to cultural frictions or tensions. Informing our analytical approach is Giraud’s philosophy of an ethics of exclusion, which advocates paying ‘attention to the entities, practices, and ways of being that are foreclosed when other entangled realities are materialised’ (p.2, italics in the original). The questions that guided our analysis are: ‘how does US Vogue portray animals and their skins over time’ and ‘what is cared for in this portrayal’.

Analysing US Vogue magazine

The analysis we present in this paper is part of a larger study on the history of fashion and political tensions during the 20^th and 21^st centuries (see Dawson, 2024). US Vogue was analysed due to its longevity, aiding inquiry into consumer culture logics over time. The magazine became a high-end women’s fashion magazine in 1909 and has since targeted middle- and upper-class women. It is also known for its strong pro-fur stance, with editor Anna Wintour clashing with animal rights groups on numerous occasions (British Vogue, 2010). Other fashion magazines, like Cosmopolitan, shifted towards the pink-collar demographic in the 1960s, whilst Harper’s Bazaar did not have the same pro-fur reputation as US Vogue. With a focus on luxury designer brands rather than artistic expression, Vogue is a ‘cultural intermediary’ or ‘authority of legitimation’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 96) where ‘taste makers define what counts as good taste […] constructing legitimacy and adding value through the qualification of goods’ (Maguire and Matthews, 2014: 15). The magazine represents a classed status quo and has been shaped by and continues to shape neoliberal philosophies of individualism that ignore structural issues (Favaro and Gill, 2018: 183).

The online ProQuest archive contains the complete publication history of US Vogue and enabled our visual discourse analysis with a two-part search strategy. During the first search strategy, documents from the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s and 2010s were analysed by selecting the January, May and September issues from the first, middle, and last years of these decades, with 36 issues read from front to back and notes logged alongside these ‘full reads’. This method allowed for the development of contextual knowledge of the magazine, its layout, and any changes that took place over time. The analysis was extended to allow more targeted full reads to inform different case studies. The second search strategy utilised the ProQuest key word search tool, where we searched for relevant words, which for the case study on fur, included fur, faux fur, fur coat, mink, beaver, seal, and other animals. Figures 1 and 2 present the results from searching for ‘fur’ in the title of items in the ProQuest archive, organised by decade, with Figure 2 comparing adverts and Vogue content. Of interest is that Vogue content was more prevalent than adverts in the early part of the 20^th Century, whilst the 1950s show abundant content, with the post war years showing growth especially in advertisements until this dropped off from the 1990s, when the fur industry went into decline (see below).

Figure 1.

Number of results for ‘Fur’ by title only.

Figure 2.

Number of results for ‘Fur’ in title by document category.

This search strategy led us to the final stage of analysis; a visual discourses analysis around points of tension relating to animal rights activism and environmental challenges which ‘focuses attention on the processes whereby the social world is constructed and maintained’ (Phillips and Hardy, 2002: 2), both textually and visually. It also maintains a Foucauldian commitment to uncovering power, shared by feminist scholarship (Mansfield et al., 2000: 10, 73). Combining a Foucauldian visual discourse analysis with the work of Puig de la Bellacasa, Haraway, and Giraud gave us the tools to investigate the more-than-human but also allowed us to maintain the feminist STS commitment to power and injustice, and ultimately offers consumer culture research the ability to question exclusions and foregrounding.

Fur, fashion and narrative entanglements in Vogue

In much consumer culture scholarship, research that focuses on animals and ethics tends to be about food and meat eating, with the uses of animals in fashion - whether this be for fur, feathers, wool, or leather - not receiving similar interest. In comparison to meat, which is commonly perceived as an ‘everyday right’, in today’s affluent world, fur is a luxury. The meaning of fur has shifted historically from a necessity for those living in colder climates (Dolin, 2011: 15) towards a status symbol for the wealthy, and finally, associations with criticism and high-profile backlash from animal rights and welfare groups that became especially vocal during the 1980s. Although it is currently considered a dying industry, fur keeps reappearing on cat walks, reigniting old ethical controversies, for unlike wool, this material always entails the death of animals whilst it is not, like leather, a by-product of the meat industry. Promoting and advertising fur thus comes with the contextual battle between care for furry animals and the right to choose consumer luxuries embedded in powerful classed symbolism. During the period of fur’s necessity, animal pelts were most often used to accessorise winter garments for protection from the cold, adorning cuffs and collars, or turned into scarves. Yet, the introduction of full-length fur coats in the 20th century came with a symbolism of enhanced luxury and wealth, as more fur was needed (Skov, 2005: 21). With the introduction of Dior’s New Look, the 1950s featured a boom in the popularity of fur when long mink coats for women became fashionable and glamorous and mink farms reached their peak in popularity at this time (Strege, 2014), soon being replaced by the 1960s ‘mod’ styles where fur was seen as outdated. It demonstrates that the fur industry has also always been sensitive to changes in consumer tastes and preferences.

A central theme in the existing literature on fur in fashion is the detrimental impact animal rights campaigns and policy change had on the fur industry (Müller et al., 2021; Skov, 2005). The popularisation of garments made with beaver, buffalo, seal and chinchilla fur had led to the near extinction of these animals during the 19^th Century. The North Pacific Fur Seal Hunting Convention of 1911 saw the US, Russia, Canada and Japan agree to a ban on open water seal hunting (Strege, 2014), and the fur industry responded with ‘replacements’ such as dyed muskrat and rabbit. One of the most influential policies was the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which protected big cats, seals, and otter species (ibid.: 424). The fur industry was forced to shift from hunting animals to farming them, and by 2005, 85% of fur processed in the world came from farmed species. The remainder came primarily from wild species that were culled because of their abundance, including the North American racoon and New Zealand opossum (Skov, 2005: 20).

The 1980s and 1990s continued to feature an escalation in animal rights protests, often led by Greenpeace, Lynx, and PETA, gathering at seal hunts and publishing pictures of rabbits blinded by lighter fluid (Beers, 2006: 162). Their campaigns helped to remove harmful practices rather than modify them (Beers, 2006) and catalysed national legislation banning fur production. Fashion brands, including Calvin Klein, banned fur in 1994, and between 2018 and 2020, Chanel, Gucci, Versace, and Armani followed. These reflect the deep cultural tensions between the fur industry and animal rights politics, but also the contemporary importance of brand reputation (see Littler, 2008; Welch, 2020). Fur sales decreased between 1950 and 1979 but witnessed a nosedive between 1985 and 1990 (Strege, 2014: 426). Figures 1 and 2 show that this decline is mirrored by a steep decline in Vogue on fur content. US Vogue responded to the tensions posed by animal rights activism through an array of techniques, which we have organised by analytical theme in our discussion below, starting with the absenting of animals, attacks on animal rights politics, and the entanglement of fur in narratives on durability, nature, and choice as Vogue responded to charges of environmental damage. The analysis highlights how animals and fur are portrayed over time and what is cared for in the process.

Absenting and distancing animals

Starting our analysis on the way animals and fur are portrayed in US Vogue over time, we drew on documents from the early 20^th century to develop understanding of the language used around fur. We found a clear acceptance of animals as ‘fashion commodities’, but an interesting emerging attitude that it was no longer appropriate to wear the heads or paws of the animal. The November 1910 issue announced that: ‘The squaw ¹ like fashion of wearing tails, heads and paws [has been] discarded by well-dressed women’ (Vol. 36, Iss. 9: 24), entangling this change in fashion in anthropocentric ordering and the othering of Indigenous women. Animal death was discussed with humour in the magazine, where the increasing popularity of rabbit generated phrases like: ‘one wonders what the poor rabbit wears’ and ‘the collar is just one more rabbit gone!’ (July 1916, Vol. 48, Iss. 2: 35). Excluding animal heads and paws was, therefore, not about concealing animal suffering but fashionable trends based in hierarchical categorical orderings that normalised cruelty towards othered humans and animals. Evans and Miele (2012: 304) note similar tactics used in the food industry, where marketing meat to consumers involves practices that make the animals not matter by removing their ‘living’ features, such as faces, bones, and legs. Such processes absent animals in a move that is the opposite of making more than human others worthy of care (Barnett, 2024). In the October 1977 issue (Vol. 167 Iss. 10), a fur coat featured multiple animal tails dangling from the hemline whilst a double-page advert from Royal Black Velvet showcased three fur coats with the name of the animal used in each listed alongside (ibid, 230-1). At this time, the magazine was not challenged by animal rights activism and no attempt was made to hide the animal in question.

During the ‘anti-fur’ period of the 1980s and 1990s, there is evidence of Vogue and advertisers discursively removing animals from their portrayals of fur. In a 3-page advertisement for Bukhara Furs (August 1980, Vol. 170 Iss. 8: 104-5), the usual practice of labelling the animal next to the garment was replaced by listing them on the last page, which created literal and physical distance between them. In other promotions, the animal of origin was completely omitted and, at times, knowing whether the fur coat was real or faux was a guessing game. Adverts by companies Saks-Jandel and Valentino (September 1985) featured fur coats revealing only the brand name and omitted information on the animal and whether the fur was real. Grosvenor and Mary McFadden Furs (November 1987) listed the animal source in small print in the corner of the advert. Creating confusion around fur by omitting information continues to be common practice today, amounting to several well-documented cases of real fur labelled as faux (Müller et al., 2021: 104, see also BBC News, 2018).

In addition to the visual changes that took place in adverts, the discursive disappearance of animals was also found within editorial articles on fur by Vogue. In the article ‘Fur Appeal! Mink’ (August 1980, Vol. 170, Iss. 8), the magazine discursively turned fur into a simple material. The piece stated that ‘you can dye it, shear it, strip it, suede it, knit it, quilt it. The one thing that’s hard to do – resist it!’. Through a foregrounding of variety of choice and styles for the reader, the article emphasised how modern processes could create ‘combinations of colors sometimes so complicated that the designs are worked out by computers’ (ibid.). Here, references to technological ‘innovation’ mobilised and maintained narratives of human exceptionalism, rendering animal bodies commodities to be used at will to expand consumer choice within fashion. Evidence of similar invisibilising tactics in Vogue harbours answers to our second question on ‘what is cared for in the portrayal of fur’ when modern human technologies are celebrated for the choice these create and the realities of animal suffering and death in the fur industry are hidden behind the façade of ‘simple fabrics’.

Although appearing prior to the 1990s (for instance, July 1970 saw a photoshoot called ‘Fashion for Fake Furs’ where a range of faux fur coats were showcased), faux fur became popular in the magazine during the 1990s. Faux fur may be seen as an alternative for consumers seeking ethical ways to wear fur. Yet, Vogue promoted faux fur as a cheaper, fun alternative for those on a low budget, mobilising the logic of choice as it offered an expansion in fur fashion whilst entirely sidelining discussion on animals. A feature from September 1990 entitled ‘Faking It’ (Vol. 180, Iss. 9: 620-7) stated: ‘as real furs are beginning to look fake, faux furs are beginning to look real’, and ‘new technology allows faux fur to be softer, more lightweight’. By figuring faux fur as a budget friendly option - the featured coat was priced under $400 - this novel manmade material was positioned as furthering the democratisation of fashionable choice, made possible by the wonders of modern consumer capitalism, and not as an ethical solution that acknowledged animal rights.

Attacking animal rights groups

Alongside the approach of invisibilising animals, the magazine also attacked animal rights activism directly, attempting to discredit their values whilst proceeding to foreground modern technologies and practicing human exceptionalism in the contest to defend fur. Countering PETA’s ² co-founder Ingrid Newkirk’s philosophy that humans should not have special rights over animals, in September 1989, Vogue author Fred Barnes used scientific male experts to argue that animals must be used in medical research, ignoring the mistreatment of animals in the fashion and cosmetics industries that the magazine was closely tied to (Vol. 179, Iss. 9: 542). Barnes stated: ‘No longer dismissed as weirdos, animal-rights groups are now threatening medical research’ (ibid.). Continuing the attack 5 years later, in July 1994, Charles Gandee argued: ‘if PETA has its way, more than fur will soon be flying. Say goodbye to wool, silk, and leather, to meat, fish and dairy – even biomedical research’ (Vol. 184, Iss. 7: 28, 30). Rendering them the ‘charity du jour’, Gandee suggested that PETA’s popularity stood in the way of attending to other important (human) matters, such as AIDS and homelessness. Constructing animal rights activism as illogical and against the tenets of democracy and choice, these writers reaffirmed anthropocentric orderings in response to the tensions posed by the norms of meat eating, fur wearing, and testing on animals.

A complex tension emerges for Vogue when animal rights activists question how Western industries - including fashion, food, and medicine - can be perceived as ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ when so much harm and suffering is caused to animals. Norbert Elias’ work on civilising processes in the West highlights that throughout the Middle Ages, the taming of aggressive behaviours and violence coincided with an increased sensibility towards suffering (Wouters, 2004: 200). It meant that ‘the slaughtering of animals’ was ‘removed from the public scene into slaughterhouses’ and carving meat took place in the kitchen rather than on the dining table (ibid.). Challenging the acceptance of the death of an animal for fashion purposes, PETA attempted to renegotiate what it means to be modern at this time, posing a direct attack on Vogue. Entangling the logic of choice with the powerful modern notions of rationality and technology, the magazine in turn fought to save fur from falling out of fashion. However, legislation and major fashion house fur bans meant that the number of adverts and articles in Vogue on fur have dwindled over recent decades.

Entangling fur, choice, indigeneity and sustainability

Sustainability and concerns over textile and production waste produced by the fashion industry became a major tension addressed by Vogue in the 21^st century. In the entangled narratives with which the magazine responded, fur was celebrated for its ostensible environmentally friendly, biodegradable and natural qualities, and closely interwoven with the tenets of the logic of choice. The ‘Natural Fur’ campaign ³ , featuring in the October and November issues of 2018, presented fur as ‘the responsible choice’ and urged the ‘younger generation to wear fur to combat the crisis of plastic waste’ (Nov 2018, Vol. 208, Iss. 11: 126). Arguing that ‘the earth-friendly item […] will completely biodegrade in a matter of months’ (ibid.), the campaign aimed to reignite an industry drenched in controversy and heralded choosing fur as the best way for consumers to act on behalf of the planet. The discourse takes advantage of what Choi and Han (2023) term ‘the animal moral dilemma’ in fashion today, where a tension exists between synthetic materials (that biodegrade slowly, shed microplastics, and damage ecosystems) and animal fur (durable, biodegradable, but requiring animal death and harm). In addition to continuing silence on the violence committed against animals in the fur industry, it is worth noting that the environmental and health implications posed by the chemicals used to prevent animal skins from biodegrading were foreclosed in these entangled narratives.

To further the positive image of fur as environmentally friendly and natural, the magazine featured a fashion photoshoot/interview with Indigenous model and activist Quannah Chasinghorse wearing ‘fall’s best feathers and furs – both real and faux’ (2021, Vol. 211, Iss. 10: 132-139). On closer inspection, all the garments featured were made with faux fur, reflecting previous ambiguity around the true nature of fur in the magazine. The model’s previous activism towards protecting her Indigenous homelands was briefly cited but the interview largely focused on her positive experiences with the fashion industry that have allowed her to represent Indigenous women. By featuring a young Indigenous model in work to figure fur as positive, the magazine risks reinscribing ‘inequalities rather than overturn [ing] them’ (Haraway, 1991) through a foregrounding of anthropocentric orderings that ‘legitimise the silencing or exploitation of those perceived closest to the ‘natural world’ (Giraud, 2019: 30). Ironically, as Indigenous women were degraded in the introduction of new fur fashions in the 1910s, 110 years later, an Indigenous model is used in a positive way to herald the return of fur in an entangled response to environmental impacts.

Reintroducing fur against a backdrop of such a controversial recent history, the magazine included a compilation of interviews with a variety of fashion designers and their standpoints on fur (September 2019, Vol. 209, Iss, 9: 312, 316). Here, prominent pro-fur designer Silvia Fendi argued that fur is a natural fabric and that the brand likes:

to give people the freedom of choice, and I think that this is the most important issue […] you want to see where the fur comes from. I believe in total transparency – for every material we use, we have a certificate that you can trace (p.312).

With the emphasis on transparency and freedom of choice, the logic of choice dominates in this response. Although appearing as a reasonable solution for consumers ethically inclined, scholars have pointed out the problems with transparency as most fashion supply chains are complex or opaque (Brans, 2023) and that the ethical treatment of animals raised for slaughter is difficult to ensure (Müller et al., 2012). Also, ‘the consumer’ would require a complex understanding of the industry and production transparency, which, according to Brans (2023), is not realistic. This highlights the continuing effort made by Vogue to normalise the logic of choice through anthropocentric practices in which animal suffering is hidden in narratives that sketch fur as a suitable and fashionable material in the fight against environmental challenges, to which the fashion industry has significantly contributed and still does today.

Conclusion

The logic of choice is formulated and maintained over time in the entangled realities around fur found in US Vogue magazine. Our analysis shows how this logic is cared for in the magazine’s textual work especially when the tenets of the logic are questioned (see also Bertuzzi, 2022). This happened when animal rights activism posed a tension for the journal during the 1980s by suggesting that the use of fur in fashion should not be a matter of choice. Vogue responded by positing animal rights activism as illogical and in direct opposition to the tenets of democracy and modernity, whilst muddying moralities around justifiable uses of animals for human purposes. Anti-fur sentiments also initiated various obscuring tactics on the origins of fur and the magazine engaged in the rhetorical practices of ‘(not-)naming’ and ‘making (in)visible’ suggestive, according to Barnett (2024: 163), of whether care is enacted. And when the sustainable qualities of the fashion industry were questioned, Vogue attempted to revive the image of fur in an interesting move where it was labelled a sustainable and environmentally friendly alternative to faux fur and fast fashion, at the same time cementing the logic of choice as the key principle of ethical consumption and foregrounding the idea that care for the environment is about choosing the right product.

Our analysis builds on Koskinen and Jauho (2024), not only by showing how the logic of choice and its cultural dominance are preserved through careful textual maintenance work by a cultural intermediary, but also by demonstrating how this logic is deeply entangled with human exceptionalist ways of thinking. Attending to anthropocentric orderings, like those found in Vogue magazine and reflected in consumer culture scholarship, was made possible by drawing on a distinct set of more-than-human theoretical resources on care that includes work from feminist STS. This opens alternative ways of thinking about complexities, choice and care in market exchange. When complexities have primarily been conceptualised as posing decision-making challenges for consumers, recognising the anthropocentric qualities of the logic of choice illuminates how this logic performs hierarchies of what is deserving of care, and what is not, or to a lesser extent. The logic of choice is thus also a specific mode of market ethicalisation in that it organises ‘who is able to care, for what, and in what ways’, with the analysis showing that animals and ‘othered’ cultures are easy targets for invisibilisation and commodification. This further suggests that thinking about care and choice in relation to environmental challenges and ethical conduct ought to mean thinking across spheres of consumption, retailing, and production (Foden et al., 2022), where matters of care can be attended to in a range of actions and practices not limited to human consumers.

Fur is in some ways an extraordinary case for the discussion of choice and care. It is hard to see that care is enacted in the provisioning of fashionable clothing that requires animals to be killed when their skins are turned into fashionable fabrics: here, caring for choice seems to be barely about caring. But can the same be said when we consider other empirical examples, for instance, relating to food provisioning, and are consumers better at caring than other market agents? Is choice necessarily always a bad thing and is care, as commonsense understandings of the concept have it (and which have rather easily crept into thinking about market ethicalisation and environmental challenges) always a good thing (Barnett, 2024, 2025)? The case of fur highlights the entanglement of choice and care: it shows that choice cannot be separated from care, since choice is always about caring for some things over others; it is a mode of caring selectively. As Martin et al. (2015: 627) argue: ‘… acts of care are always embroiled in complex politics’ and ‘care is a selective mode of attention: it circumscribes and cherishes some things, lives, or phenomena as its objects.’ Despite early and earnest efforts to advocate the importance of moving ‘beyond human-centric approaches to care’ in debate on ethics in consumer culture research, there is much scope for elaboration, extension and stretching the move beyond the human to uncover not only the complexities of choice and care, but also to acknowledge and address the resident anthropocentrism in consumer culture research. Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion ‘thinking with care’ recognises that scholarly knowledge has world-making powers and encourages scholars to be reflexive and open about the ethico-political intentions embedded in their work. In view of this, let us finish with some reflections on the charge we made at the start of this paper that consumer culture research has anthropocentric tendencies that remain implicit, and make some suggestions for moving beyond this.

In this paper, we questioned common usage of key concepts in the field, which have the effect of giving agency to a certain kind of subject (human-consumer) and what they do (consumption; ethical consumption; sustainable consumption). How does the frequent (and sometimes copious) occurrence of these concepts matter, we ask, and what is the purpose it serves? And what might be the benefits of decentring ‘consumption’ and ‘human’ (Sato 2022: 1) in consumer culture research? The beauty of language, as illustrated so well by Haraway (2015), is the power authors can wield to challenge ‘the expected’ by using concepts in unexpected ways or by changing them altogether. Concepts like ‘the consumer’, ‘consumer’, ‘consumption’ and ‘consumer culture’ are temporally specific, having gained normality as the field of consumption studies evolved only recently. In relation to care, the key concepts used to refer to ‘the subject’ in and of ‘our stories’ have also changed over time. In DeVault’s (1991) work on food and care in family life this subject was ‘woman’, and in earlier work still, it was ‘housewife’ (Oakley, 1974). In scholarly talk on food and cooking in everyday life, ‘worker’, ‘practitioner’, and ‘cook’ are all possible alternatives for ‘consumer’. The point we are making is that there are alternatives to ‘consumer’ and the repeated usage of it is neither innocent nor co-incidental. Indeed, as a community of practice we might ask whether ‘we’ are participating in reification and whether this is done unwittingly? Pyyhtinen (2016: 7) suggests that relational thinking in more-than-human scholarship provides a useful antidote for this.

A final observation is that recent studies on care and ‘ethical consumption’ could have moved into a more-than-human direction rather easily if relatively small changes had been made in the way the authors talk about their work and the challenges this speaks to. Doing so means thought going into what ‘our narratives’ exclude, and what might be done to foreground beyond-human concerns more. We propose that reading beyond the field of consumer culture research may be useful for making ‘our’ endeavours less insular and bounded. Whether it is complexity, interdependency or relationality that is of interest, telling stories other than those pertaining to ‘human’ broadens the contribution consumer culture research can make to debate on ethics and environmental challenges.