Judging by the energy of the Pretenders concert at New York’s Roseland Nightclub, you would never have known that Chrissie Hynde, the band’s 48-year-old founder, had spent the previous night in jail.
She hit her guitar chords with gusto and sang passionately about new love, fickle pop stars, bikers, exes and hurt feelings. She even broke into a wild, spontaneous dance that left the audience gasping and cheering. But toward the end of her hour-and-a-half set last month, Hynde couldn’t resist a reference to her night of infamy.
“This one goes out to the officers at Precinct 18,” she quipped, and then launched into her mid-’80s hit “Back on the Chain Gang.”
The day before, Hynde and her fellow protesters from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), were arrested on charges of criminal mischief after destroying window displays and ripping apart leather garments at a Gap in midtown Manhattan.
Hynde was held overnight and released at 5:30 a.m. the day of her show, March 10.
“It was fun,” she joked later that night. “It was the first time I was thrown in jail since I kicked out the windows of a cop car.”
Always a rebel, Hynde now finds herself raging against something that–in addition to being fashion’s current obsession–accompanied her on much of her rise to rock stardom: leather.
The hot red motorcycle jacket she wore on the cover of the Pretenders’ self-titled debut album in 1979 was earned after years of dabbling in the punk music scene in Britain, where the native Ohioan moved after college (but not before taking part in the deadly protest at Kent State University).
In London she worked at designer Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop Sex, which sold bondage gear and the ripped T-shirts that became synonymous with punk rock. There she befriended the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious and grew intent on forming her own band. With her solid guitar chops, hard-edged vocals and tough-girl looks, she eventually did.
Leather seemed as indispensable an instrument as her guitar. It looked good, wouldn’t rip and would proclaim her punk identity.
“Back then, leather was considered your armor,” she says. “It was all about being obnoxious and rubbing society’s nose in its own weakness.”
But now her crusade against the status quo has taken her right to the heart of the skin trade.
“We’re trying to expose an industry that until a year ago we knew very little about,” says Hynde, whose tour to support the album “Viva El Amor!” came through Chicago–complete with a Gap leather protest on Michigan Avenue–on Feb. 26. “We think that if people know more about this corrupt trade, they will stop buying leather goods.”
Ironically, the Gap contacted Hynde last year to use the Pretenders’ hit “Stop Your Sobbing” as the music for its “Everybody in Leather” campaign. Needless to say, she did not oblige.
But Hynde is hoping the apparel chain soon will dance to her tune and stop importing leather from India.
“They’re taking part in a totally illegal and unethical trade,” she says. “Most of the world’s leather comes from India and it’s largely illegal to kill a cow there. Cows are considered sacred.”
Hynde has been a vegetarian for more than 30 years and hasn’t bought a leather garment since she joined PETA a decade ago. But among animal-rights sympathizers, leather is always the last thing they part with, she says.
“You think of leather as being a slaughterhouse byproduct, so you can justify buying it by saying it would be a shame to waste it,” she says. “But in India, they only slaughter cows for their skins, and they are tortured and starved in the process.”
To be sure, a PETA video account of cattle marked for slaughter in India is grisly:
Because they can be killed only in certain states, PETA says, often the cattle must march for hundreds of miles to the slaughterhouse, their tails broken deliberately and tobacco and chili peppers rubbed into their eyes to keep them awake. Their hooves often are bleeding by the time they arrive, starving, thirsty and near death from exhaustion.
Other cattle are transported in trucks that are so crowded that the animals often trample one another or gouge each other with their horns, PETA contends. When they are unloaded, the cows still standing are forced off the truck in such a manner as to break their legs or pelvises. Some of them are skinned alive.
“And it’s all done to meet the Western demand for cheap leather,” Hynde says.
The Gap denies that most of its leather is imported from India.
“We source it globally,” says Gap spokesman Alan Marks. “But we do contract garment factories in India to manufacture leather goods. The leather, itself, does not come from India. It’s just where the garment is made.”
A conclusive verdict is hard to come by.
Hynde and PETA don’t believe the Gap’s leather is imported into India for manufacturing, but Hynde hasn’t given up on the fashion industry altogether. She cites the Body Shop as an example of a retailer advocating humaneness, by insisting on no animal testing for its bath and beauty products.
And designer Stella McCartney, daughter of Hynde’s friend Linda McCartney, seems as dedicated to animal rights as her mother was before her death in 1998. Stella McCartney has it built into her contract at the Parisian fashion house Chloe that she does not have to use any leather or fur.
McCartney isn’t the only designer who uses synthetic fabrics as an alternative to leather. Dr. Martens make a vegan version of its classic military boot.
Hynde says, however, that no one should feel regard for animals is an all-or-nothing proposition. She knows it’s tough to find shoes that don’t at least have leather soles.
“Whatever concessions a person is willing to make is fine,” Hynde says, who calls her anti-leather protests the most gratifying work she has ever done. “I just want to raise awareness and I am thrilled that my tour could have some higher meaning.”
The current leather craze, Hynde says, amounts to a nostalgia for a punk symbol that has lost its punch.
“There’s nothing subversive about it anymore,” Hynde says. “I’m almost 50 years old. I grew up with the James Dean leather references. That’s over now.”
But her own disavowal of leather isn’t stopping the design world from hailing her as something of a fashion icon. Her signature look is in, from those choppy, vision-obscuring bangs and heavy black eyeliner she still sports to–yes, that red leather jacket that has been referenced by several designers this year.
“I never expected them to come around to me,” Hynde says. “Our look was very `up yours.’ “So besides the fact it has inspired others like it, what has become of that original famed motorcycle jacket of hers?
“No one loved that more than me,” she says. “I’ll never throw it away. You just won’t see me wearing it anymore.”
Anyway, that’s not Hynde’s ultimate symbol.
“You want to look cool?” she offers. “You don’t get that from wearing leather. You better be playing guitar.”
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For a selection of manufacturers who don’t use leather, check the PETA Web site at www.cowsarecool.com.
