Fashion feels fur’s warm embrace

For the first time in more than two decades,more designers are using fur than not. Almost two-thirds of those in New York are,based on a review of more than 130 collections that were shown on Style.com last month,which is a surprising development during a recession.

Fur became a trend because of a marketing campaign. Over the last 10 years,furriers have aggressively courted designers,especially young ones,to embrace fur by giving them free samples and approaching them through trade groups—sometimes when they are still in college. Last summer,for example,the designers Alexander Wang and Haider Ackermann,plus Alexa Adams and Flora Gill of Ohne Titel were flown to Copenhagen for weeklong visits to the design studios of Saga Furs,a marketing company that represents 3,000 fur breeders in Finland and Norway. Saga Furs regularly sponsors such design junkets. Wang and the Ohne Titel designers ended up including fur in their fall collections. Ackermann,in Paris,included fur scarves and a wool jacket with ribbons of fur at its collar.

“We were seeing all of these new possibilities in which you can use fur in a very light way,” Adams said. Several young designers echoed that sentiment,saying they were less interested in fur as a luxury statement or an act of defiance than as a novel design. In Denmark,Adams said,she learned of a technique of sewing extremely thin,evenly spaced strips of fox onto a layer of silk,creating the look of a fox coat with a third of the weight and expense.

The success of fur cooperatives has infuriated anti-fur activists like Dan Mathews,the senior vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,who described the fur marketing as “a smoke and mirrors campaign,where they give designers money and free fur to accessorise the runway,even though that stuff never ends up in shops.”

Several of those designers are too young to remember the vicious battles over fur in the 1980s and ‘90s,when a PETA member tossed a dead raccoon onto the plate of Anna Wintour while she was dining at the Four Seasons; another tossed a tofu cream pie in de la Renta’s face.

“You see so much leather and shearling being used this season,and no one is complaining about that,” Adams said.

The sales of fur in the US,and its appearance on the runways,fell in the 1980s as a result of the aggressive protests. But attitudes began to change,and fur began to make a slow comeback,from sales under $1 billion in the US in the early ‘90s to $1.8 billion in 2006. Naomi Campbell,who once posed for PETA,now has a fur coat named after her at Dennis Basso. But many of those gains were erased in the last three years,following an unusually warm winter in 2007,and then the recession. There was little fur on the runways in 2009,as designers sought to rein in prices. Now,as fur is becoming trendy,skin prices at auction have shot up in response to increased demand; the price of a male mink pelt approaches $100 in Finland,up 40 per cent over last year. A silver fox pelt is now $200,up 20 per cent.

That raises questions about how good this trend will be for the designers.