Vegan Clothing Companies

What is a vegan clothing company?

Many clothing brands, including most high street shops, use animal products such as wool, leather and down. Some brands may be vegan themselves, but be owned by a conglomerate that uses animal products or employs animal testing elsewhere. 

A totally vegan company will not use animal products at any point in their manufacturing, and won’t be linked to issues like animal testing. This allows consumers to be sure that none of their money is going to animal exploitation. 

Lots of brands say that they are working towards improving animal welfare in their supply chains. But for many vegans, any use of animal products exploits their rights and causes unnecessary suffering. 

Which companies use animal products?

All the companies included in Ethical Consumer’s guide to high street clothes shops use animal products. Major animal rights campaigns have persuaded brands to ban the use of particularly controversial products, such as fur and crocodile skin, but wool, leather, and down remain almost ubiquitous in the sector.

Ethical Consumer rated all the companies on their approach to animal welfare: 48 out of the 52 high street brands scored 0/100. 

Some companies have even come under fire for mislabelling animal products in their clothing. In 2023, for example, a report by advocacy group Collective Fashion Justice and animal welfare organisation World Animal Protection found that brands including Boohoo, Asos and Selfridges had falsely labelled real feathers as ‘faux’. All three brands told the media outlet Business of Fashion that they had removed the identified products and were looking to tighten their policies following the investigation. 

Vegan clothing brands

Luckily, there is a growing number of alternative ethical companies that do not use animal products. We have listed these in our ethical clothing guide. 

Explicitly vegan ethical clothing brands – which have made a statement about their decision not to use animal products – include Lucy & Yak, MUD Jeans, Ninety Percent, Rapanui and THTC. Our guide also lists brands that only sell secondhand clothing using animal products. 

Are there any certifications for vegan clothing?

While certifications abound in many sectors, there are few labels specifically for vegan clothing brands. 

Campaign group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals runs a ‘PETA-Approved Vegan’ label for companies selling clothing, shoes, jewellery and other items. Companies can get the certification either for their whole brands if they do not use any animal products, or for specific vegan items. However, no other checks are required – for example audits or fabric testing – so the label is unlikely to be watertight.

There are also many certifications for animal welfare in the sector which, for example, examine conditions around leather and wool production, and which we discuss in more detail in our article on animal rights, animal welfare and clothing. 

How to find a vegan clothing company

We've listed a few ways you can find out more about vegan clothing companies below:

What animal products are used in clothes?

Animal products commonly used in clothing include:

What are the problems with animal products in clothing? 

Every year, millions of animals are farmed for their use by the food and clothing industries and other sectors. Many of these animals are kept in ‘factory farming’ conditions - big farms, where large groups of animals are housed in crowded indoor conditions, sometimes all year round. 

These kinds of conditions cause animals major stress, as well as making them more likely to contract diseases or become injured. 

The clothing industry’s use of animals is also associated with a number of specific animal welfare abuses. For example, merino wool has been associated with ‘mulesing’, a practice that involves cutting part of a sheep’s flesh off to avoid it becoming infected, sometimes without anaesthetic. Silkworms are almost always killed during the harvesting process, and birds and angora rabbits are sometimes plucked while they are alive to obtain their down or hair. 

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