Vegan Hats | Ethical Fashion?

Being vegan and wearing vegan clothing is so in right now. For those of you unfamiliar with the tenants of veganism, a simple description of the phenomenon is that veganism is both a diet and away of living that excludes the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.

So essentially, a vegan hat is a hat that is not made with animal products. Which sounds good, right? Good for the animals and whatnot. It's hard to imagine a reason why anyone would object to vegan products, unless they were total jerks. Indeed, as I type this little article, Stella McCartney is on a crusade to replace the bearskin hats worn by the Queen's Guard with 'vegan hats'.

The only problem with vegan hats is that they have to be made of something, and it's usually not lettuce. So 'vegan' products tend to be made out of plastic, (at least, that is Stella McCartney's suggestion for replacing the Queen's Bearskin hats), which, as you may or may not know, is a petroleum based product. Polymers don't naturally grow in fields or on trees, they're cracked out of crude oil, which is drilled out of our natural pristine lands, and oil is something of a black mark on veganism, especially if you consider that much of the oil currently slopping about in the Gulf of Mexico, killing pods of dolphins, rare sea turtles and millions of fish was not only bound to fuel the terrible war machine, but also to make your mom's favorite Tupperware sets and yeah, precious vegan hats too.

So then, we have a conflict of interest here. On the one hand, killing poor innocent animals to eat them and wear their skins seems macabre to vegans, on the other, in order to live a modern life without using animal products, vegans can sometimes become dependent on products that are ultimately much more destructive to the environment and the animals they care so much about.

If one is gong to be vegan ethically, one really needs to stop purchasing plastic products entirely. Unless of course, one is against shooting a cow in the head for some meat, but for sea turtles getting caught in booms and being burned alive because one of the many, many poorly maintained oil wells around the world has had another oopsie.

What's a better solution? Paper hats of course. They're recyclable and 100% more stylish than any fuzzy wuzzy bearskin.(Assuming you don't mind deforesting the world to keep your head warm.)