I love fashion, especially garments with animals on them. I wear so many of them, that my boss asked me about the biodiversity of my closet. I was genuinely curious so I counted all the plants, animals, and any other life forms that I could spot and calculated the Shannon Weiner Index, a real index…
Category: Animal Fashion
What’s the Biodiversity Within Your Closet?
Conservationists and other nature lovers frequently advocate to save or increase biodiversity, but what exactly is biodiversity? One conjures up images of rainforests, coral reefs or animal clipart arranged artistically. These hint at the concept of biodiversity, which on the surface, seems simple, but gets more complicated once you try to measure it (even for…
Dear Town & Country: Endangered Species Fashion is More than a Travel Burden
When reading fashion magazines (a guilty pleasure of mine), I do so knowingly I will experience a baseline level of offense. Fur and snakeskin as acceptable garments, feelings of poverty when I’m told $500 for a dress is a steal, and the omnipresent advice to lose weight are givens. But this past week, something really…
Pollinators: Fashion forward, but in Decline
Spring is in the air! Flowers are blooming in real life and in prints of your favorite designers. With flowers come the buzzing of bees, flies, and butterflies – important pollinators. When visiting flowers to forage on nectar and pollen, pollinators move pollen that gets stuck to their bodies from the anthers (male part of the plant) of one flower…
Stop Monkeying Around! Getting Primates Right in Fashion
Vogue recently covered primate fashion for the Chinese year of the monkey. In this post, I’ll cover, monkeys in fashion, but more importantly, point out that most “monkeys” are actually apes. Primates are hard to wear, so let’s see how these designers (and you) can pull it off. Year of the Ape? Many of the monkey in Vogue’s piece are actually…
Zebra Stripes: Fashionable and Evolutionarily Functional
In fashion there are black and white stripes, then there are zebra stripes! Immediately recognizable by their organic and wavy form, zebra stripes are a bold choice that can be paired with other prints or as a standalone statement piece. But, whose stripes are you really wearing? There are three zebra species: Plains (Equus quagga),…
Evolution of Fashion: Cat Spots
With the recent posts about the beautiful spotted patterns that make up fashion prints inspired by leopards, jaguars, and cheetahs, it would be easy to think that all of the cats (Felidae) have coat patterns. However, as soon as you think of lions and pumas, you realize that some cats are not spotted but have…
Misidentified Spots: You’re Really Wearing Jaguar Print
Previous fashion files talked feline prints leopard and cheetah, both commonly heard and used in fashion chat. But what about jaguar print? This phrase doesn’t quite roll of the tongue, but actually a lot (maybe even most) of the prints we wear give leopards credit, but are really inspired by jaguars. Jaguars (Panthera onca) are…
Spotting Cheetah Prints on the Savannah and the Runway
Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) are known for three things: their speed, their spots, and (unfortunately) that they are endangered. The cheetah has a distinctive light tan coat (although the underbelly is lighter) with solid black spots. It is the solid black spots that distinguish the cheetah from most other cat coats where rosettes are more prevalent. …
Whose Spots are You Wearing? Species Identifications of Animal Prints
I have a pet peeve. About a year ago, I was scrolling through Pinterest and came across a Diane Von Furstenburg pin of a print used in her collection. The print resembled a clouded leopard, but when I clicked on the photo, it took me to a snow leopard photo, with natural history and conservation…
WildlifeSNPits 