Other companies now in the Peta cross-hairs include the British designer clothes company Burberry, as well as Donna Karan International in New York.Making her pledge to ditch all things fur, Ms Hilton said she had also been lobbied by the estranged wife of Sir Paul McCartney, Heather Mills, well-known as an animal rights campaigner.”I met up with Heather and she showed me videos of how badly the animals are treated It is just disgusting. They may have been influenced by the management of another clothing chain, J Crew Group, which stopped selling fur last year after Peta threatened to organise a boycott against it and began picketing its shops across the US.Celebrating the turn-around by Polo Ralph Lauren, Dan Matthews, a vice- president of Peta, called it “one of the biggest victories in the fur campaign”.Ingrid Newkirk, the group’s president, added: “Ralph Lauren clothes have always been elegant but now you can feel comfortable inside and out, knowing that the company has made this compassionate decision.” Polo Ralph Lauren also said that it would give away any left-over items including fur to charities which distribute clothes to the poor.It did not give any indication of the likely financial cost of the move. Paris Hilton, the hotel heiress, found herself sprayed with flour at the London Fashion Week in February after showing up in real fur. Two weeks ago she pledged to give away all her furs.While Polo Ralph Lauren has never been a major purveyor of fur, its product line includes items with fur details, for example on the hoods of winter jackets. “We are publicly announcing this decision because the use of fur has been under review internally and we feel that the time is right to take this action,” the company said in a statement.Executives had been in discussion with Peta before making the decision. Its long-time favourite target is Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, on the ground that her magazine continues to encourage fur fashion in its editorials and advertising spreads.The group is also famous for disrupting fashion shows around the world, pelting fur-wearing personalities with eggs and flour and storming fashion houses in New York and London.

With the tag-line, “I’d rather go naked than wear fur”, Peta has for years aggressively pursued designers continuing to use animal pelts, as well as celebrity figures caught wearing them in public. The decision to forgo fur by the New York-based fashion house is a notable coup for animal rights groups, particularly People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta).
It is the first instance of a major high-end fashion chain taking the step since Calvin Klein took a similar vow in the mid-1990s. One of the writers of the hit film, Chris Miller, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1964 and was a member of Alpha Delta, which was the basis for the story.Fraternity members are depicted dropping fizzy candies into the college swimming pool, having corpses from the medical school delivered to an old boys’ dinner, decorating the trees with underwear and causing the lavatories to explode.Fraternities across the United States are periodically excoriated for their debauchery, their elitism and the cruelty of their induction practices, known as hazing.Alpha Delta’s website made no mention of the police raid yesterday, sticking instead to a longstanding statement that it values “the principles of leadership, scholarship, service and philanthropy, diversity, accountability and brotherhood”.Scholarship may be a stretch – the only truly eminent alumnus of the fraternity was Salmon P Chase, an early chief justice on the Supreme Court. Otherwise, its most famous old boy is probably Mr Miller.The fraternity website’s one allusion to its wild reputation came in a story about its mythical origins as a houseboat. “Alpha Delta may not look much like a boat any more,” the site commented, “but it’s still been known to rock every so often.”. The footsoldiers in the war against fur in fashion chalked up an important victory when the American clothing giant Polo Ralph Lauren said that it would stop using animal pelts across all of its products, beginning from the Christmas shopping season later this year.

All documents relating to it – including affidavits and warrants – are being kept under seal.That suggests the offences being investigated are serious and highly sensitive.Alpha Delta became synonymous with spoilt, upper-class students getting drunk, staging pranks and throwing toga parties, thanks toAnimal House, the film released in 1978 starring John Belushi. More than a dozen police officers spent five hours searching the Alpha Delta house at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. They hauled away two duffel bags and 10 crates full of evidence, including a computer tower, a videotape and two sledgehammers.
They also arrested one 19-year-old student for drug possession – marijuana, according to local press reports – but said the focus of the investigation was on something other than drugs.The university authorities at Dartmouth issued a statement saying that they were co-operating fully with the investigation. The fraternity house that inspired the filmAnimal House has been raided by police following a 21-month investigation so secret that the authorities will not say exactly what it is about.

In 2003 the family agreed to a so-called private treaty with Sotheby’s to sell the papers. The anticipated sale price at the time was $20m but the auction house failed to find a buyer Sotheby’s remains convinced of the value of the documents. Its vice-chairman, David Redden, said: “This collection is without question the most important American archive of the 20th century in private hands.”Thirty-eight years after his death, Martin Luther King remains a heroic figure of inestimable importance, not only to Americans but to people around the world.”. She had long sought to sell the papers to a museum, library or university rather than to a private individual.Whoever buys the papers will decide their future accessibility to historians and scholars. As well as signing licensing deals to sell copies of his speeches and even to use part of them for a telephone commercial, the estate has also aggressively challenged anyone seeking to use any of his work without a licence.