More than 100,000 euros for animals, raised in a single evening: the vegan Munich fashion label GIULIA & ROMEO hosted a charity dinner for PETA on Friday, 9 October 2026, on Munich’s Praterinsel. The guest of honour was PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk, who flew in from the United States. Guests included actor Hannes Jaenicke, Green MP Zoe Mayer, Joar Berge and Patricia Riekel.
Key facts
- What: charity dinner with auction in aid of PETA
- When and where: 9 October 2026, Praterinsel, Munich
- Host: Daniela Brunner, founder of GIULIA & ROMEO
- Guest of honour: PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk
- Result: more than 100,000 euros in donations, according to the organisers
Contents7 chapters
An evening that far exceeded its goal.
The plan was to raise a few thousand euros for PETA. The evening ended with a six-figure sum, thanks to an auction led by a professional auctioneer. Lots included a safari for two in Kenya, a stay at a vegan retreat in Bali and the monumental steel sculpture “LOVE HATE” by artist Mia Florentine Weiss.
The host was Daniela Brunner, founder of GIULIA & ROMEO, a label for luxury fashion without leather, fur, wool, silk or down. Brunner has campaigned for animal rights for years, and PETA has twice honoured the label with its Vegan Fashion Award.
“I am deeply moved and grateful that we reached our fundraising goal for Ingrid Newkirk and her wonderful animal protection organisation PETA,” Brunner said after the event. She called it an extraordinary evening “full of love for those who have no voice”.
Who was there.
Ingrid Newkirk co-founded PETA in the United States in 1980 and built it into the best-known animal rights organisation in the world. From Germany, she was joined by Harald Ullmann, who helped build PETA Germany.
- Hannes Jaenicke, actor and environmental campaigner
- Dr. Zoe Mayer, Green member of the German Bundestag who works on animal protection
- Patricia Riekel, journalist, former editor-in-chief of “Bunte” and Munich city councillor
- Joar Berge, known on Instagram as “Moustache Farmer”, who shares life with the animals at his sanctuary
- Sabine Peschke of the animal protection association NaTiNo e.V.
Also among the guests: TV presenter Karen Webb, artist Mia Florentine Weiss, PR entrepreneur Alexandra von Rehlingen, Franziska Gräfin Fugger von Babenhausen with her husband, artist Mauro Bergonzoli, Judith Epstein, Katharina Freifrau von Perfall, photographer Caroline Gräfin von Saurma, entrepreneurs Pia Hahn and Thomas Haffa, Tina Aigner, Count Ulrich and Countess Katrin Goëss-Enzenberg and actress Simone Bascoul-Steinbauer.
The food came from Sebastian Copien, one of Germany’s best-known vegan chefs. He served Bavarian classics in plant-based form, including Kartoffelkas, a potato spread, and small “bacon” dumplings without bacon. Dessert was a millefeuille in the style of a Viennese coffee house.
Ingrid Newkirk: “If you stand up for animals, you have to think about clothing too”.
In her speech, Newkirk connected fashion with her organisation’s achievements. “If you stand up for animals, you have to think about clothing too,” she said. “The kind of clothing you find in the GIULIA & ROMEO store is a statement for exactly that. For the animals.”
Today there is a substitute for almost every animal material, Newkirk said: “Faux snakeskin, faux crocodile leather, vegan leather made from cork, apples and cacti, and even feathers made from flowers.”
She also recalled PETA’s legal work. The organisation’s lawsuits stopped animal keepers who became known worldwide through Netflix documentaries, including the man from “Tiger King”. “Today they are in prison, not the animals they used to lock up,” Newkirk said. PETA has rescued hundreds of bears, chimpanzees, dogs, big cats, parrots, monkeys and elephants, she added.
About the host, Newkirk said: “With her fashion brand, she is an excellent example of how you can care for animals and do something practical. Everything she shows the world is vegan. That proves there is absolutely no reason to use an animal that suffers and dies for it.”
Earlier that day: Newkirk is “skinned alive” outside COACH.
Before speaking at the dinner, Ingrid Newkirk spent midday on the street as an activist. Outside the Munich store of fashion brand COACH, the 77-year-old had herself symbolically “skinned alive”. A large bloody wound was painted on her back, with a piece of fake skin hanging down. She held a sign shaped like a leather tag reading “Coach: Leather is someone’s skin”.
PETA accuses the company of marketing leather products as sustainable and calls on it to switch to animal-free materials. “COACH sells animal skin as luxury, but the skin belongs to the animals, not to us,” Newkirk said, according to PETA. “Why should a sentient being suffer and die for a handbag or a pair of shoes when wonderful animal-free alternatives have long existed?”
A protest against leather at midday, a dinner hosted by a label that uses no animal skin at all in the evening: it would be hard to make her point more clearly in a single day.
Daniela Brunner on our podcast.
Why she does not want to make money from luxury fashion, how she rescued calves from fattening farms and what she thinks about leather, down and silk: Daniela Brunner talked about all of it on our podcast “Plantbased” this summer. The episode is in German.
Animal ethics perspective.
When it comes to food, many people now think about animals. When it comes to fashion, hardly anyone does. Yet a wardrobe often contains more animals than a dinner plate: leather from cattle and calves, wool from sheep, down from geese and ducks, silk from caterpillars boiled in their cocoons, and for the most expensive handbags the skin of crocodiles and snakes. These animals suffer and die for materials that can be replaced.
Newkirk’s sentence touches a point that many vegans discover late. Living vegan does not end at the fridge. An evening like this also shows that animal protection and a festive setting go together. People who usually bid at galas for art or children’s charities bid for animals here. In total, more than 102,000 euros were raised for PETA that night.
The evening in pictures.
Tap to enlarge, names are shown there.
Sources ●
Our own impressions of the evening, information from the organisers and a press release by the agency SVR PR. On the COACH protest: press release by PETA Germany, 9 October 2026, photo: © PETA Deutschland e.V. Quotes translated from German. Photos: Gisela Schober, royalty-free press material.
Want our reporting to show up first in Google's Top Stories? Add This Is Vegan as a preferred source on Google.