Christopher Kane Inspiration

From style.com:

It takes a unique mind to watch Planet of the Apes and use it to start a fashion collection, but that's where Christopher Kane jumped off for Spring. He liked the apes' leather tunics. "It was that, and then The Flintstones, Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., and then Dian Fossey and her gorillas," ....he worked in bright animal-spot "Flintstone" cashmeres (made at Johnstons in Kane's native Scotland), photo-prints of Digit the gorilla, and finally, some suggestive marabou trimming on chiffon...

Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932, San Francisco, California – December 26, 1985, Virunga Mountains, Rwanda) was an American zoologist who completed an extended study of eight gorilla groups.

In 1967, she founded the Karisoke Research Centre, a remote rainforest camp nestled in the Virunga Mountains in Ruhengeri province, Rwanda. When her photograph, taken by Bob Campbell, appeared on the cover of National Geographic Magazine in January 1970, Fossey became an international celebrity, bringing massive publicity to her cause of saving the mountain gorilla from extinction, as well as convincing the general public that gorillas are not as bad as they are sometimes depicted in movies and books. Photographs showing the gorilla "Peanuts" touching Fossey's hand depicted the first recorded peaceful contact between a human being and a wild gorilla. Her extraordinary rapport with animals and her background as an occupational therapist brushed away the Hollywood "King Kong" myth of an aggressive, savage beast.

Dian Fossey established a gorilla graveyard at Karisoke for apes killed by poachers. Despite her efforts and those of the government patrols, carcasses turned up from time to time, and the graveyard grew--each plot marked by a stubby pole topped with a board on which Fossey painted the name she had given the animal.

On Jan. 1, 1978, an assistant found the corpse of Fossey's beloved Digit, by then a young silverback 10 years old. His head, heart and hands and feet had been removed. A dead dog found at the site—apparently killed by Digit before he was himself speared to death—was identified as belonging to Munyarukiko, the infamous poacher.

The seminal event prompted Fossey to change the focus of her work. She essentially abandoned academic research in favor of gorilla advocacy--what she came to call "active conservation." She founded the Digit Fund to pay for her work.

Fossey offered a cash bounty on Digit's killers and threatened the government with an anti-tourism poster featuring photos of the ape's mutilated corpse above the slogan, "Come Visit Me in Rwanda." She ordered her student researchers to begin carrying guns.

Not long after the killing, her African employees captured a local tribesman who admitted that Munyarukiko's clan was responsible--although Fossey acknowledged that she and her men had hogtied the man and "examined him very, very, very thoroughly." The tribesman said Munyarukiko had been paid the equivalent of $20 for Digit's body parts.

Dian Fossey is interred at a site in Rwanda that she herself had constructed for her dead gorilla friends. She was buried in the gorilla graveyard next to Digit, and near many gorillas killed by poachers.

Portions of her life story were later adapted as the film Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey, starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey.