South Korea’s capital city, Seoul, has allowed Italian fashion house Fendi to display fur items in a fashion show on the city’s newly built floating island on June 2. The show is part of Seoul’s grand plan to promote its man-made floating island on the Han river as the city’s new landmark.

Animal rights and civil rights groups have strongly protested against staging fur items since early this month. Seoul city government who initially blocked fur items from the show, finally decided to back off. Last Monday, Fendi announced that Seoul has allowed them to feature fur.

Until last week, only several civic groups have accused Fendi of animal cruelty. But as Seoul stepped back from its tough stance, more citizens have joined the anti-fur movement and social sentiment against fur has grown ever-stronger. Spearheaded by animal rights groups, people have started boycotting Fendi products [ko] and few even vowed to disrupt the event.

Seoul’s man-made 2.5 acre island, the ‘Floating Island’ has now been nicknamed; the ‘Tax Floating island’[ko], to suggest a tremendous amount of money injected in building luxurious facilities and the ‘Blood Floating island’ [ko] to indicate the animal blood shed while making fur products. South Korea’s citizen/blogger news, Wiki Tree [ko] said that the island’s facilities which should serve as new cultural space for citizen, is in fact a “playground for the super-rich”.