Sacrificed fur fashion

On an otherwise unremarkable grey autumn day in London recently, protesters took to the streets armed with banners and loudspeakers. Escorted by police, the crowd marched to several high-end clothing stores, stopping outside Harrods, Giorgio Armani, Fendi, Joseph and Gucci.

If it had not been for the banners and the chants and the drumbeats, one might have thought they were on a guided tourist walk of the capital's best retail locations. But these were no ordinary shoppers. These were members of the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, who were out to target the specific shops that continue to sell clothes made from fur.

Their sentiments were perhaps best expressed by a woman who carried a handwritten sign that read simply: "The Devil Wears Fur".

Over the past six months, the catwalks of New York, London and Milan fashion weeks have been filled with animal skins of all description. Fur coats made an appearance at last week in New York at Isaac Mizrahi, last season Karl Lagerfeld covered motorbike helmets with mink and chinchilla while Dolce & Gabbana added bright pink fur sleeves to jackets.

In November, French Vogue included a 12-page story entitled "Fur Play" featuring Brazilian supermodel Raquel Zimmermann in a flurry of fur and tribal-themed leopard print, and where once celebrities were wary of walking out in a fur-trimmed jacket for fear of being drenched in red paint by animal rights activists, now there seems to be no such stigma.

Keira Knightley recently attended an awards ceremony in a black karakul lambskin coat, and Jennifer Lopez has worn an array of mink and chinchilla at red carpet events over the years. Madonna, Eva Longoria, Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss and Lindsay Lohan have all worn fur in public.

"Fur has never been more popular," says a spokesman for Origin Assured, an initiative developed by the International Fur Trade Federation that states that it sources "ethical" fur.

"From 1998 to 2008 there has been year-on-year growth in global sales for fur. People now are more comfortable showing their love of fur.

"The younger generation seems to be saying: 'We'll make up our own minds', and part of that has its core in the rise of hip-hop culture. It's also to do with the fact that young designers are featuring fur in their collections."

The shifting tide of public opinion is reflected in the figures. In 2007, fur sales worldwide totalled 10 billion ($22 billion), up 11 per cent on the previous year, with nine years of continuous growth. Last year, the fur trade contributed 13 billion to the global economy.

In the 15 years since Peta's original "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" ad campaign, we seem to have gone from equating fur with inexcusable animal cruelty to one that views it merely as an occasional fashion statement.

One need only look at the five supermodels featured in that first campaign. From a line-up that included Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer and Elle Macpherson, only Turlington has stayed true to her word. All the others have, at one time or another, chosen to promote or wear real fur in the intervening years.

Fur used to be the mark of a social pariah. Yet now we barely blink an eyelid when Kate Moss is photographed popping to the shops in a pair of sealskin boots. What has driven this change in attitude? How has fur become fashionable? And most importantly, do we care about whether the wearing of fur is ethically defensible, or has it simply become another trend, like shoulder pads or bodycon dresses, whose desirability is determined only by how quickly it dates?

In a historic building in central Copenhagen, the lobby is filled with the murmur of cocktail chatter and the clink of glasses. The guests are up-and-coming fashion designers from around the world, flown in for an all-expenses-paid trip arranged by representatives from one of the world's largest fur companies, Kopenhagen Fur.

As part of their programme, the designers are shown merchandise on offer - mink, fox, chinchilla, seal, sable, rabbit and karakul. They are assured that the animals are treated well, with fresh food, regular vaccination programmes and housing in open sheds. In return for their attendance, they are then offered free samples of top-quality fur to use in their collections.

Over the past few years the powerful international suppliers who dominate the luxury market have been spearheading a quiet campaign to break the fur taboo. From the designer's perspective, the offer of free top-quality material in a tough economic climate is often too good to turn down.

"We don't force anybody to use fur; we don't pay anybody," insists Michael Holm, design and production manager for Kopenhagen Fur. "If people are interested, we like to work with them. If people don't like fur, fine. That's their opinion."

For Todd Lynn, a Canadian-born designer who has used fur in his collections, the most important thing is the company's farming standards. He refuses to buy fur from China, where farming is unregulated and where no law protects the millions of animals that are routinely skinned alive.

"I'm not a heartless person, but fur is something my clients want. You make the choice. We don't do a lot of it ... it's just part of the collection, the way leather is."

But leather is a by-product, whereas animals are killed solely for their fur. Can it ever be truly "ethical"?

"I don't have a problem with people following their principles," says Lynn, "but people are really misinformed about the products they wear. Nobody argues with the pesticides used on cotton plants that will kill wildlife. To think that silk or cotton doesn't do damage to the environment is a lie."

The fur apologists insist that real fur is natural, renewable, biodegradable and energy-efficient compared to the synthetic versions. The truth of this is somewhat difficult to establish. According to the British Fur Trade Association, it takes a gallon of oil to make three fake-fur coats.

Animal rights groups tend to hit back with a study by researchers at the University of Michigan that claims the energy needed to produce a real fur coat from farm-raised animal skins is 20 times that required for a fake one. But when I look for this study online, it turns out to be from 1979 and there is a limited amount of more recent academic research.

In any case, many of the designers I speak to say their use of fur is a simple question of providing what the client wants: demand for the material in the high-end, luxury market has never gone away.

Karl Lagerfeld, perennial bete noire of the anti-fur lobby, is unapologetic about using it: "In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags, the discussion of fur is childish," he said in a radio interview last year.

Of course, part of the attraction for Lagerfeld is that fur remains a remarkable material to work with.

"It reacts in a different way," says Geoffrey Finch, director of cult womenswear label Antipodium, who is including a kangaroo-skin gilet in his next collection.

"There is something luxurious about it. I love the texture and I love the colour."

And though the Peta anti-fur campaigns were extremely high-profile in the early 1990s, there now seems to be a growing concern for bigger global issues like climate change or child poverty. Fur has begun to look like a bit of a side issue.

"Certainly other environmental and ecological issues seem to be more prevalent in people's minds," agrees Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue.

"There aren't the same reservations about wearing vintage fur as there are about new. But there is also quite a fuzzy-wuzzy attitude to the wearing of fur in general. If you go to a market like Portobello, there is rail upon rail of old fur coats and jackets with fur trim which people seem to be perfectly happy to buy. If you asked some of them whether they were happy with the fur industry, many of them would probably say no, but they don't have the budget to go out and buy a new mink or chinchilla, so it's not a choice they are really making.

"I wear the odd piece of fur; I don't have strong personal feelings against it, but I would feel uncomfortable swathed in a mink coat. It would seem unnecessary, ostentatious and somewhat unfeeling, though I can't explain it more than that."

Shulman says that, "broadly speaking", British Vogue does not feature fur, other than fur advertising, which is not in her remit.

"However, there is an element of common sense to my policy on this which dictates that since we are there to report on fashion trends, if those trends include fur we will, for instance, show catwalk images that include fur. We do carry some skins like sheepskin, and occasionally a fur trim creeps in."

Across the Atlantic it is a slightly different story. Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, has consistently run pro-fur editorials and had fur-themed photo shoots.

When anti-fur protesters surrounded the Conde Nast offices during the company's Christmas party several years ago, Wintour retaliated in inimitable style by sending them down a plate of roast beef.

In the past decade, Wintour has had a dead raccoon dumped on her plate at the Four Seasons and her front steps splattered with red paint. She remains unrepentant.

"Fur is still part of fashion," Wintour said recently, "so Vogue will continue to report on it."

Ingrid Newkirk, the president and co-founder of Peta, has spent much of the past decade attempting to change Wintour's mind on the issue of fur - the dead raccoon was very much her idea.

Newkirk does not look like an extremist. At 60 she is slim, blond and neatly dressed, the sort of woman one can more easily imagine running a florist's shop than being the mastermind behind the world's largest animal rights organisation.

She founded Peta almost 30 years ago. Since then, it has become one of the most headline-grabbingly effective campaigning groups of modern times and is supported by a string of celebrities including Pamela Anderson, Chrissie Hynde and Eva Mendes.

The group's basic premise is that animals have as much right to be here as humans, and that our treatment of them- killing them for food or clothing simply because we are able to - is the abiding moral outrage of our times.

For Newkirk, "ethical fur" is an oxymoron.

"It's a bunch of poppycock," she says calmly, sipping on a soya-milk coffee.

"You can easily find fashionable, glamorous alternatives to anything you have to steal from animals or kill animals to get."

Is she worried about the resurgence of fur on the catwalk? "These designers who are given junkets to Scandinavia and are given free material - I hate to call fur a 'material' - I suppose they must be desperate. If you're truly creative, you don't design with something someone hands you."

She points instead to the work done by Stella McCartney, who refuses to use leather or fur in her designs, in developing viable alternatives:

"Stella has got wonderful materials infused with nettle fibres. You can wear a warm thing that doesn't weigh 20lb [9kg] and make you smell like a bear."

But for Newkirk, the most powerful argument against wearing fur is the suffering of the animals raised to provide it. She points out that at some fur farms, up to four foxes can be kept in cages measuring 75cm square.

For minks, the cage can be as small as 38cm. When wild animals are trapped for fur, they are usually strangled or beaten to death. On farms, they can be gassed, electrocuted, poisoned with strychnine or have their necks broken.

One of Peta's recent videos shows a Chinese fur farm where the rabbits are shot in the head with handheld electrical devices before being decapitated.

"If you stop seeing animals as handbags, hamburgers or amusements, if you see them as fellow animals and you know that they feel joy and pain and all the same things we feel, how can you kill them for fur?" asks Newkirk.

Although she denies it, there is no doubt in my mind that Newkirk holds an extreme view. This is, after all, the woman who opted for a voluntary sterilisation at 22 because "the world has enough babies" and who has stipulated in her will that her feet be turned into umbrella stands "as a reminder of the depravity of killing innocent animals".

Over the years she has attracted respect and revulsion in equal measure for her initiatives and her refusal to bend to public opinion.

But perhaps we need someone like Newkirk to remind us of the choice to be made; someone who, each time we pick up a fur-trimmed jacket, to make us think a little bit about what we are doing.

We might decide to ignore her, saying there are bigger things to worry about. But at least we have been asked the question. However ethical a fur coat might or might not be, an animal has still had to die for it to end up on the hanger.

That is worth thinking about, no matter how fashionable it might seem.

The local take on fur

Liz Mitchell

New Zealand possum fur and sheepskin I feel fine about as possum is a destructive pest and sheepskin is a product of our meat/wool industries. Vintage pieces/recycling/remodelling goods and garments already in existence I'm fine with also. I'm not keen on other fur products though.

I have worn possum fur and I have a vintage astrakhan coat and fur stoles from my grandmother's collection.

I have used possum in my design over the years. It is plush, luxurious, it dyes beautifully and is very warm for cold climates which is so appropriate.

Denise L'Estrange-Corbet, World

Using fur in fashion in an absolute no-no for me. I have never worn fur. I am quite happy in my own skin, and do not want to wear the skin of another living being, which has been killed, and maybe skinned alive, to make me feel good, in the increasingly vain world we live in.

I have not eaten the flesh of any living fish or animal for 37 years. I have no intention of wearing another skin on top of mine. It would be akin to wearing a coat made of human flesh, I don't see the difference.

I personally would not use fur in any of my designs, but I work in a partnership with Francis, and his ideas and views have to be taken into consideration also. He has in the past, many years ago, used possum, which I voiced my opinions on. Some I win, and some I lose, but as a company we have made the decision that fur will never be used in any World collection.

I don't have a problem with people wearing old fur, animals that were killed years ago, as there is nothing you can do about it. What is done is done, there is no turning the clock back, and I don't mind their beauty being shown off, as they were beautiful once, and it seems that shoving them in the back of a dusty wardrobe with the moths is doing them a disservice, but for people to want to wear fur from animals killed recently is abhorrent, and they should hang their heads in shame.

Adrian Hailwood

There is a place for fur in fashion but the ethics of what, how and were the fur comes from is important. I'm an omnivore and enjoy a good rabbit stew, so the by-products from the meat industry are totally acceptable for use, rabbit, sheep, deer, etc. It's when you get into farmed mink and chinchilla and their bodies are discarded that I object to it.

I've never worn fur, but when I was 5 I wanted the fur coats and hand muffs that Agnetha and Frieda had on trudging through the snow in one of their Abba videos, and I wanted Mum to make me their matching yak boots. And I had a brown fun fur - scratchy as - two-sizes-too-small hoodie that made me look like Fozzie bear.

In my own designs I have used animal-friendly faux fur and wild rabbit and I will continue to.

And, can I just add, non-leather shoes stink!

Kate Sylvester

I find the ethics of fur way too muddy, bloody, tricky and tangled. In New Zealand we only wear fur for effect and fun so I am happy using the fake stuff. And I LOVE fake fur.

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