London
Vegetarian Hannah Betts, who is happy to wrap herself in a pelt, explains why it’s becoming a golden age of animal fashion. At an awards ceremony last week, Billie Piper turned heads in a lavish fur jacket.
“Was she, or wasn’t she?” a watching public demanded. “Real or faux?”
And, yet, the argument seemed less red in tooth and claw than it would have been 10, and certainly 20 years ago, when it was a prerequisite for supermodels to declare that they would rather go naked than sport pelts, and I was once spat on while clad in what was very obviously teddy bear.
To be sure, a vociferous minority continues to be alarmed regarding standards. Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has a Christmas campaign on the horrors of Chinese angora, for which rabbits appear to be grotesquely stretched, have their hair yanked out while alive, left for their hair to re-grow and then to have it plucked again.
It is also claiming the scalp of Harvey Nichols’s new fashion director, Paula Reed, who resigned last month amid a social networking storm against her decision to overturn the store’s decade-long fur boycott. And yet, in the main, where skin once provoked shudders, now most merely shrug. Winter 2013 runways were plush with pelt.
From haute to high street
More than 400 designers are using fur across London, Paris, New York and Milan fashion weeks. Joseph Altuzarra, the American designer, memorably sent a model down his catwalk in a vast, black-and-white intarsia fox, prompting Elle’s Anne Slowey to tweet “Cruella de Vil eat your heart out”.
Moreover, new techniques mean skin is increasingly being used in spring/summer collections in addition to the traditional winter months. Where once fur was confined to a few picketed outlets, so now it can be found from haute to high street, from a £90,000 Prada coat to £69.99 Zara “lapin”.
Fur is no longer a controversial anachronism, but a flourishing global enterprise. “This is almost the golden age in fur,” Charles Ross of Saga Furs has remarked. “Our skin prices are going up 20 to 30 per cent every year.”
The world trade is now worth $15.6 billion, with pelts reaching record prices at auction. And the demand is not merely issuing from Asia, where sales have tripled in under a decade.
Last month, results were published of a survey of 6,000 adults across six European countries, including the UK. Thirty-nine per cent of European consumers said that they liked seeing fur in fashion and furnishings — more than double the number in 2010; 35 per cent had at least one fur item at home and 36 per cent either wear fur, or would like to do so.
Celebrity customers
Of course, the blingier, more fashion-fixated contingent never renounced skin: Beyonce, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Jennifer Lopez, Kate Moss and, of course, the routinely Peta-denounced American Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
However, there are signs that a new, younger generation of high-profile women are also succumbing to fur’s charms, be it the Olsen twins, Middleton sisters, Olivia Palermo or Rita Ora. There are myriad reasons.
Fur is a cornerstone of the economy in many European countries, such as Greece and Denmark. Within the EU, the value of farmed fur products amounts to approximately £1.2 billion, generating at least 60,000 full-time jobs.
The industry is no less beneficial for animals; culling can regulate and thus secure populations in the wild — as deer culling does in Britain. Members of the fur trade have been supporters of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species since its inception. Still many of us will still want to wrap ourselves in the luxury and comfort of fur.
— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2013
