Trendsetting U.K.-based retailer Topshop teamed up with PETA U.K. to make over the window of its Oxford Street flagship store for the weekend and send a message to shoppers that exotic skins are not in. (Take that, Beyoncé.)

In order to make handbags, shoes, and Super Bowl halftime outfits, snakes are commonly nailed to trees and skinned alive, and alligators and lizards are bludgeoned with hammers. It can take several agonizing hours for the animals to die, usually from shock or dehydration. Watch PETA's shocking exposé, narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, to learn more about the suffering that lies behind those crocodile backpacks and python pumps. Reptiles may be cold-blooded, but wearing their skins is cold-hearted.

Please follow Topshop's lead (it doesn't sell fur or exotic skins) and pledge to keep wildlife out of your wardrobe.

Take the Pledge. 

Happy New Year! Yes, already—at least in places where the Lunar New Year is observed, including China. To join our Chinese friends in celebrating the start of the Year of the Snake, we're featuring one of PETA's most memorable snake-themed ads, in which lovely actor, dancer, and producer Jenna Dewan-Tatum exposes the distinctly not-so-lovely side of the exotic-skins trade. 

Jenna—who is preparing to deliver her very first bundle of joy with husband Channing Tatum—recently appeared in American Horror Story: Asylum. But what happens to animals killed for their skins is every bit as gruesome as anything perpetrated by that show's mad scientist or serial killers. Snakes have their bodies cut open from one end to the other and their skin ripped off before being tossed aside to struggle and thrash in pain for hours or even days until they die. Most alligators used for accessories are raised in filthy tanks until they are stabbed or beaten to death.

What You Can Do

Millions of snakes, lizards, alligators, crocodiles, and other reptiles are violently killed every year so that their skins can be torn from their bodies to make wallets, belts, boots, and handbags. Don't buy into this cruel rip-off—instead, choose accessories made from chic, cruelty-free materials such as fake snake, mock croc, and pleather. You'll look (and feel) better knowing that you got the glam—without stealing someone else's skin. 

Last week marked the end of legal public nudity in San Francisco—and you wouldn't expect PETA to sit it out, would you? Several all-star volunteers gathered full-monty style at City Hall to protest the theft of animals' skins by declaring that they are comfortable in their own skin. 

Unlike humans, who can (or at least used to legally be able to) choose how much skin to expose in public, animals raised and killed for their skins often have their flesh unwillingly ripped off their bodies while they're still alive. Please don't ever buy leather, fur, or other items made from animals' skins and fur—choose garments and accessories made from pleather, faux fur, and other cruelty-free materials instead!

The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, when the holiday gift-shopping season really gets underway. But for animal rights advocates nationwide, it's Fur-Free Friday, also an occasion to hit the stores—to urge consumers not to buy into the cruelty of the skins trade.

Yes, "skins." Even on Fur-Free Friday, it's important to remember that fur isn't the only material used for clothing that results from the suffering of animals. Like fur, leather, for instance, comes from animals who are raised on crowded farms and killed using cruel methods—some are even skinned while they're still alive. Whether it comes from a snake or a sable, a cow or a chinchilla, it's all skin—and we, not they, can live without it.

PETA hopes that everyone heading out to (or returning from) a Fur-Free Friday demonstration will be able to answer the question, "Whose skin am I in?" with the reply, "Only my own!"

As the song goes, I've never been to Spain (but I've been to Oklahoma). They say the ladies are insane there, but folks visiting Madrid's Plaza Mayor on Monday's Constitution Day holiday were still surprised—and delighted—to encounter two PETA lovelies wearing little more than body paint on the latest stop of the now-international "Animal Prints, Not Animal Skins" tour. They were eventually joined by "Charlie Chaplin" and a group of superheroes chanting, "No pieles animales!" ("No animal skins!").

But the real superheroes are the folks who opt out of cruelty by refusing to buy clothing and accessories made from the skins and fur of animals. As one woman in the crowd remarked, pointing toward the demonstrators' signs, it was "muy, muy bueno!"

Written by Jeff Mackey