Fur is seeing a resurgence, despite years of protest. What could be causing the “fur-a-palooza.”
A few weeks before the Manhattan Vintage Show opened this month, its owner, Amy Abrams, was predicting a “fur-a-palooza,” with vendors fielding an uptick in demand for fur. “It’s happening now,” she said.
The racks
One shopper, Lulu Dinh of Jersey City, New Jersey, bought her chinchilla coat years ago from 1st Dibs. With a collection of about 10 furs acquired over the years, she wasn’t in the market for anything new. “I already have the best,” she said.
The Manhattan Vintage fur-a-palooza was not an isolated incident. As temperatures in New York plunged into the teens and 20s in January, women and men all over town were busting their furs out of storage in what felt like an abrupt reversal in social attitudes.
After decades of co-ordinated campaigning involving protests and even personal attacks outside stores and fashion shows, at workplaces and people’s homes, the anti-fur movement, led by organisations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), seemed to have shifted the tide in their favour. Many brands, and customers, decided that being fur-free was a better look.
It happened slowly – Calvin Klein banned fur in 1994; Ralph Lauren in 2006 – and then all at once. After Gucci announced in 2017 that it would eliminate real fur in its collections, the big luxury fashion houses followed: Michael Kors, Burberry, Prada, Versace, Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs and more. Since introducing her label in 2001, Stella McCartney has been a fiercely vocal animal and cruelty-free advocate. Fendi, which was founded in 1925 as a fur and leather shop in Rome, and is owned by LVMH, remains one of the last luxury holdouts.
By 2021, Kering, Gucci’s parent company – which also owns Balenciaga, Saint Laurent and McQueen – had issued a groupwide ban on fur. So did Hudson’s Bay, the Toronto retail company that owns Saks Fifth Avenue and started as a fur-trading business in 1670. Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Neiman Marcus stopped selling new furs. In 2023, California put into effect a law banning the sale of new fur products.
The fur industry had been shrinking for years. According to the Fur Free Alliance, global fur production dropped by 85% in the past decade. Roughly 20 million animals were killed as part of the fur trade in 2023 versus 140 million in 2014. The number of fur farms in the European Union fell to 1088 in 2023 from 4350 in 2018. (A major exception is shearling. Many “fur-free” fashion houses and retailers continue to use and sell sheepskin and cowhide, considered byproducts of the food chain. Then, of course, there’s plain old leather, which never seemed to draw as much ire and therefore never really went away.)
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For years, in much of the United States and Europe, wearing real fur has felt taboo. Except suddenly, some people don’t seem to care – especially if the wearer can assert the mantle of “vintage,” as no animals were freshly killed and upcycling old clothes is more virtuous than buying new.
Even if vintage doesn’t always mean affordable. The 1st Dibs site reported a 14% increase in fur sales in 2024 over 2023. Notable purchases included a 1997 Gucci fox fur chubby that sold last year for US$30,257 ($54,075).
Rihanna was photographed wearing a vintage John Galliano mink in New York in December. Last month, Kendall Jenner, Kylie Jenner and Hailey Bieber were spotted in Aspen, Colorado, in a variety of fur coats. Kendall Jenner wore a vintage Balenciaga fox fur from 2011, but it was difficult to distinguish the other furs – real or faux? – without confirmation. The Jenners’ representatives and Bieber’s stylist did not respond to requests for clarification.
Whitney Robinson, 42, a hospitality entrepreneur and editor in New York, also spent his December holiday in Aspen in a full-length coyote coat he described as “part Joe Namath, part Salvador Dalí.” He bought the coat two years ago from Crowley Vintage in Brooklyn.
“The reaction depends on where you are,” Robinson said. “In St Moritz, fur is everywhere – maybe it’s a Milanese thing – so no one bats an eye. Aspen was the same this year. Everyone loved it. A guy in his 20s at the Vail airport gave me a thumbs-up and said he loved my kit.”
The full-length Yves Saint Laurent mink that Mary Connelly, 34, a lawyer who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, wore to the Metropolitan Museum of Art one afternoon last month belonged to her mother. She bought it in Chicago in the 1970s when she was a flight attendant.
“This was her big purchase,” Connelly said. “She was on a payment plan. It has her name embroidered in it.” She noted that it was her mother’s idea to pass it down. “She said: ‘I’m seeing a lot of girls wearing vintage furs. Do you want mine?’”
Carly Mark, designer of the fashion line and art project Puppets and Puppets, recently moved from New York to Paris. “Everyone is wearing fur here, too,” she said.
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Advertise with NZME.After years of using faux fur, Mark starting working with recut, upcycled fur in her runway collections last year.
“What I learned from that process is that I really like fur,” she said, speaking specifically about vintage. “It’s beautiful, and it already exists.” That said, she received a significant anti-fur backlash online after her fall 2024 Puppets and Puppets show.
“I think people are really misunderstanding vintage fur versus faux fur,” Mark said. Vintage, in her eyes, is the superior sustainable option. She cited plastics and microplastics in faux fur fibres, often made from petroleum-based materials, as “worse for the environment in the big picture.”
Marie Laffort, a fashion stylist and owner of the Ancien shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is “confused by the whole debate,” she said. Laffort sold her collection of vintage furs 10 years ago. “Now it seems no one is bothered,” she said.
“In with the old” seems to be the philosophy fueling the fur resurgence. Heirlooms, vintage furs or furs that are at least a handful of years old are good to go.
Fur has been part of popular TikTok aesthetics, such as “Mob Wife,” with its decadent amalgam of fur coats, leather and leopard prints, and adjacent to “Old Money” and “Rich Girls,” which are rife with wealth signifiers.
Is it a coincidence that the conspicuousness of fur dovetails with the new political order and its nostalgia for Reagan-era culture? Perhaps no one loved a fur coat more than Ivana Trump.
“Vintage fur may be one of the few things still finding fans across the ideological spectrum,” Anthony Barzilay Freund, editorial director of 1st Dibs, said. “For conservatives, the coats can be worn unapologetically as they stride into what they envision to be a post-PC world. For liberals, they’re an enduring symbol of their commitment to retro-chic recycling.”
The popularity of the fur look has not gone unnoticed by animal rights groups. PETA is pleased with the proliferation of faux fur but considers those choosing vintage fur to be misguided if well-intentioned.
“These are people who would usually never dream of buying new fur because they don’t want to support a violent, cruel industry,” said Ashley Byrne, PETA’s director of outreach communications. “It’s still endorsing the idea that it’s acceptable to crush animals’ bones in traps or electrocute them or gas them.”
Animal rights groups see vintage fur as a dangerous trend.
“If someone sees a person wearing used fur and they don’t know it’s used, they could very well go buy new fur,” said PJ Smith, director of fashion policy for the Humane Society of the United States.
Mark Oaten is the CEO of the International Fur Federation, a fur trade organisation, and as such, his allegiances lie squarely with real fur. He’s based in Britain, home to perhaps the most advanced animal rights movement in the world. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in 1824, is the oldest animal welfare organisation in the world. England and Wales were the first countries to ban fur farming in 2000. Fur has been verboten there for decades, yet Oaten has witnessed a new embrace of vintage fur among people in their 30s and 40s.
“I think that when animal rights groups tip into lecturing people and trying to ban things that mainstream people want, that has become the problem,” he said. Oaten suspects that a backlash against the activism is benefiting fur sales. If not scientific in terms of data, the feeling is certainly in the air.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jessica Iredale
Photographs by: Dolly Faibyshev
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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