Steven Kolb Quits the CFDA After Silencing Wool Protesters

Steven Kolb resigned Friday as chief of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, five days after video showed him covering PETA protesters’ mouths at a COS show. He is 64. The council named no successor.

The clip is from Sunday afternoon at WSA on 175 Water Street in lower Manhattan, where COS, the H&M Group brand, was showing during New York Fashion Week. Kolb had run the CFDA for 20 years. This was also the first official New York Fashion Week in which animal fur was barred from the schedule, under a rule he announced himself last December.

The Fur Ban Started at the Show That Ended His Job

On December 3, 2025, the CFDA said that beginning with the September 2026 week it would no longer permit animal fur in collections on the official New York Fashion Week schedule, and would stop promoting it on the Fashion Calendar, social channels, and website. Farmed or trapped pelts, including mink, fox, rabbit, karakul lamb, chinchilla, coyote, and raccoon dog, were out. Kolb sold the move as a consumer shift as much as a moral one.

There is already little to no fur shown at NYFW, but by taking this position, the CFDA hopes to inspire American designers to think more deeply about the fashion industry’s impact on animals. Consumers are moving away from products associated with animal cruelty, and we want to position American fashion as a leader on those fronts, while also driving material innovation.

Steven Kolb, then CFDA CEO and president, CFDA fur announcement

Diane von Furstenberg, who chaired the council for 13 years and hired him, later said he had fought the board so the catwalk would be fur-free. The policy aligned New York with London Fashion Week, which stopped promoting fur in 2023, and with weeks in Copenhagen, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Helsinki, and Melbourne. In May the CFDA hosted a session on animal-free bio-materials after the fur rule with Collective Fashion Justice and Humane World for Animals.

Wool was never in that ban. PETA did not come to COS to argue about mink. Activists came to shout about sheep, on the very week Kolb’s fur rule finally applied.

FUR IS OUT, WOOL IS NOT

That split is what Sunday exposed. The industry had already given up the material it could spare. The material it still sells is the one that put the trade group’s chief on the floor with his hand over a protester’s mouth.

Hands Over Mouths on a Lower Manhattan Runway

At least five PETA activists disrupted the COS presentation. Several made it onto the runway with signs about sheep beaten and bloodied for wool. Security walked most of them out. In one corner, Kolb did not wait for security.

Video from the room shows him rising from a seat by a wall of windows, shoving Mason Melito, a PETA senior campaigner, and putting a hand over Melito’s mouth. Melito had been filming. Kolb had one of the placards in his hand. The same footage shows him pulling Andrija Barak, a second PETA staffer, to the ground, covering her mouth as she shouted about sheep, and using a leg to hold her while models kept walking. Daniel Herrmann, COS’s managing director, sitting beside Kolb, grabbed Barak’s arm.

Melito, reached that evening, said he had not been physically harmed. He also said he had not known who Kolb was until after he was thrown out.

Definitely a bit shocking, you know, to have someone put their face or hand in my face. But again, it’s really nothing compared to what the sheep go through at all.

Mason Melito, PETA senior campaigner, after the COS show

He argued that the force used on the group “just mirrors the violence in the wool industry, an industry where animals’ voices are silenced behind closed doors.” An Instagram video from the show has been viewed more than 500,000 times. The loudest comments asked for Kolb to go. Designer Dennis Basso, who has been a PETA target himself, said Kolb may have overreacted but thought he was protecting a designer. That reading did not survive the pictures of a man’s hand on a woman’s mouth in the front row.

Kolb posted on Instagram Stories on Sunday that he had “reacted inappropriately,” that it was not his place, and that security should have handled it. On Monday he went further, writing that he had “inappropriately restrained” two protesters, that his actions were wrong, and that he was deeply sorry. “There is no justification for physically restraining another person,” he wrote. He said he did not recognize the person in the videos, was taking a voluntary leave, would see a professional, and had accepted PETA’s invitation to meet and apologize in person.

The CFDA board, chaired by Thom Browne, put him on leave that same Monday pending a full review, even as he called the leave voluntary. Board members discussed bringing in outside counsel. Von Furstenberg, speaking that morning, called him the “sweetest person in the world, vegetarian and anti-fur,” then added, “Of course, he was wrong.” She also said he was devastated.

FIVE DAYS FROM THE RUNWAY TO A RESIGNATION

1. September 13, 2026: Kolb restrains Melito and Barak at the COS show; PETA calls it assault; he apologizes on Instagram and says security should have stepped in.
2. September 14, 2026: The CFDA board places him on leave pending review; he posts a longer apology, takes what he calls voluntary leave, and accepts a PETA meeting.
3. September 16, 2026: COS says it is looking into what happened in its venue; H&M Group accepts a PETA meeting on wool.
4. September 18, 2026: Kolb resigns as CEO and president; the board thanks him and names no one to replace him.

PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk did not treat Sunday as a misunderstanding about seating. She treated it as the industry’s method.

Why PETA Crashed a COS Show Over Wool

The protest was not a random crash of Fashion Week. It sat on a months-long PETA campaign against H&M Group’s wool, after PETA Asia released footage on April 27 from a NATIVA-certified wool operation in South Africa that sells through a broker supplying H&M with wool labeled responsible. The farm also carried a Responsible Wool Standard mark. Tracy Reiman, PETA’s president, said every wool inquiry the group has run has found the same violence “no matter what humane-washing label is slapped on their wool.”

WHAT PETA SAYS THE SOUTH AFRICA FARM SHOWED

• Kicks and blows: Workers kicking sheep in the head and body, hitting faces with shearing gear, and beating animals with a piece of wood.
• Lambs dragged: Lambs picked up and pulled by their front legs.
• A ram’s neck: One worker dropping a knee onto a ram’s neck so the animal’s head hit the floor.
• Bloody shearing: Fast, careless cuts that left gaping wounds.
• Dead and injured young: A dead lamb on the farm, and a lamb with a maggot-filled wound the farmer blamed on a jackal.

PETA says it has now put out 17 wool exposés covering more than 150 operations in seven countries on four continents. In August it mailed a bloodied replica sheep named Lily to Daniel Ervér, H&M Group’s president and CEO, and promised storefront actions. On Sunday it took that fight onto a COS runway. Newkirk, in the group’s same-day release, said top people in fashion “use violence to silence people who expose how sheep are beaten, bloodied, and violently killed for scarves and sweaters,” and the group went on record calling on H&M and COS to ban wool.

He spoke out for sheep who are restrained, roughly shorn, and sent to slaughter for wool—then experienced violent restraint himself.

The NYFW incident went viral, but sheep are still suffering for wool. @stevenkolb, CEO and President of the @CFDA, has the power to help change… pic.twitter.com/Btt3dVrioC

— PETA (@peta) September 14, 2026

COS said it respects the right to protest and that everyone should be treated with care, and added that animal welfare matters and that no animal should be harmed to make fashion. H&M Group said it has talked with PETA for years, accepted the new meeting, and knows the group’s wool concerns. Neither company announced a wool ban. Melito wrote later that no certification label can make wool humane, which is the next argument the fur-free week was never built to settle.

Twenty Years as Fashion’s Hired Outsider

Kolb was not a designer. Diane von Furstenberg and Stan Herman hired him in 2006 as executive director after a search that had leaned on fashion publicists; he had a master’s in public administration from New York University and years in nonprofit work, including 16 years at DIFFA, the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS, plus a stretch at MTV’s Staying Alive foundation. Von Furstenberg closed the interview by asking his sign. He said Libra. He became CEO in 2011. He has said he was brought in to run the council as a business, not as a club.

The four chairs he thanked on Friday were Herman, von Furstenberg, Tom Ford, and Thom Browne, whose name he misspelled in the note. Under that run the CFDA took over the Fashion Calendar from Ruth Finley, pushed model health and later safety rules, grew the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund and the incubator that became Network, and spent years in Washington chasing copyright protection for clothes. Von Furstenberg has said that when he arrived he knew nothing about fashion, and that they still went to Paris and to Congress together.

He spent those years as the industry’s diplomat, the man who sat in the front row so the week would look orderly. On Sunday he behaved like a bouncer. Even accounts that mock PETA treated a hand over a woman’s mouth, while a packed front row watched, as the mistake the camera would not forgive. A slice of Seventh Avenue first called the outburst out of character and hoped he would survive it. The tape made that hope look like loyalty, not judgment.

Thom Browne’s Board Named No Successor

Browne chairs the board. Vice chairs include Prabal Gurung and Aurora James. Designers on the board include Tory Burch, Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, von Furstenberg, and Bethann Hardison; Vera Wang has been named among them as well. Those are the people who put Kolb on leave on Monday and accepted his resignation on Friday without installing an interim chief in public.

Kolb’s Friday note, also posted to Substack, tried to make the exit sound like a chapter break rather than a firing. “After 20 years leading the CFDA, I have made the difficult decision to step down as CEO and president,” he wrote. “I am enormously proud of what we have built together and believe this is the right moment for both me and the organization to begin a new chapter.” He listed stronger finances, more programs, scholarships, sustainability work, and a wider New York Fashion Week. He said leaving after 20 years was deeply emotional.

The board’s reply called him a dedicated leader and tireless champion “throughout his more than two decades at the CFDA, including 15 years as CEO,” respected the decision, and said he leaves the council well positioned. It did not say anyone had asked him to stay. It did not name a search. For an organization that sells American fashion as a global business, a blank CEO chair in the middle of the week is the unplanned show.

He’s the sweetest person in the world, vegetarian and anti-fur. Of course, he was wrong.

Diane von Furstenberg, former CFDA chairwoman, the morning after the COS show

The Wool Fight Did Not End With His Job

PETA’s Friday statement did not linger on Kolb’s feelings. “This unfortunate incident which has cost Mr. Kolb his job, would never have taken place if the CEO of H&M had, as PETA requested so many times, taken action to avoid extreme violence to animals exploited for clothing,” the group said. It added that it will still meet Kolb, and that it wants others in the industry in the room. The meeting he accepted as an apology tour is, for PETA, still a wool meeting.

The night before that resignation note, PETA supporters walked an H&M London Fashion Week runway with signs telling the parent company that wool is bloody and to drop it. New York took the CFDA chief. London went back to H&M. COS can investigate its own front row. H&M can keep the appointment. Sheep wool is still in the collection. Kolb is not.

He built the week that finally locked fur out of the official calendar, then put his hands on the people who showed up to say wool was next. The council thanked him for 20 years and left the chair empty. PETA still has the date it wanted with H&M.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Founded the Council of Fashion Designers of America?

Publicist Eleanor Lambert founded the CFDA in 1962 as a trade group for American designers, with early names that included Bill Blass, Norman Norell, Rudi Gernreich, and Pauline Trigère. The chair has always been a designer; the chief executive role Kolb held is the hired manager’s job, which is why a nonprofit fundraiser with no fashion resume could keep it for 15 years.

Does the New York Fashion Week Fur Ban Allow Any Animal Fur?

Yes, one carve-out. The CFDA still allows animal fur obtained by Indigenous communities through traditional subsistence hunting, and it still lets each designer make business choices off the official schedule. The ban that began with the September 2026 week applies to farmed or trapped fur on official calendar shows, CFDA channels, and the Fashion Calendar, not to every garment sold in New York.

What Do NATIVA and the Responsible Wool Standard Mean in This Fight?

NATIVA is a wool certification sold as high welfare and responsible sourcing; the South Africa farm in PETA Asia’s April investigation held that mark and a Responsible Wool Standard certificate at the same time. PETA’s argument is that those stamps were on a shed where workers kicked sheep and cut them bloody, so a hangtag cannot answer the protest. H&M Group has said it uses independent standards, including the Responsible Wool Standard or certified recycled wool, and that it takes breaches of those standards seriously.

What Did Steven Kolb Do Before He Ran the CFDA?

He spent 16 years at DIFFA, the design-industry AIDS foundation, worked with the American Cancer Society, and ran MTV’s Staying Alive foundation before recruiter Karen Harvey put him in front of Diane von Furstenberg and Stan Herman in 2006. He has a bachelor’s degree from Glassboro State College and a master’s in public administration from New York University, which is the resume the board picked when fashion publicists were not getting the job.