COLUMNISTS The other day I was having breakfast with Ivana Omazic, the very chic Croatian designer of Celine (no one is a better advertisement for the power of a perfectly cut black pencil skirt, black blouse and cardigan), and she was telling me about the kind of national differences you have to consider in fashion. “With America, you always have to think about the fact they have the thinnest feet,” she said. “Asians have the widest. In Hong Kong, everything needs to be relatively light, as it never gets too cold. In Korea, it’s all fur, fur, fur.”
This made me pause. I can accept the idea that Koreans, like Russians and other Slavs, have a more intimate relationship with fur than the rest of us given their climate issues, but it increasingly seems to me that the rest of us are catching up. I looked furtively around Claridges, where we were drinking grapefruit juice (well, I was; Ivana was having a double espresso as per her morning beauty ritual). Right in the heart of the most anti-fur country left on earth, I counted at least six mink/rabbit/fox coats or accessories: a good third of the room.
It didn’t really surprise me. According to Fendi, its fastest-growing fur market in Europe is . . . England (and according to the sales people in the Fendi shop, it’s the natives, not the tourists, doing the fur buying). But that’s just the biggest among equals, really. Only the week before, Frank Zilberkweit, the owner of Hockley, the last home-grown British fur house left, had been happily telling me how his oil slick of a sheared black rabbit trench coat kept selling out, and not just in England but in Japan and America too.
“The younger generation doesn’t seem have a problem with it,” he said, with the pleased air of someone who has weathered other generations who did have a problem – and who has been part of the movement towards putting “Origin Assured” tags in his furs to testify to the ethical gestation of the pelt. “They are even swinging back toward fur that looks like fur.” As he said “fur that looks like fur” he reached out and stroked a bristling salt-and-pepper coat that did indeed have a bulky hairiness that resembled something a movie star of yore might have worn.
Now, personally, I still haven’t become a convert to furs that look like a wild-animal-fur piece, but I have become attracted to furs that look like some fantastically-warm- and-cuddly-but-light-fabric piece, especially when it’s the pelt of a food source. (C’mon, send the hate mail, I can take it.) This happened a few years ago – maybe when I hit about 35.
Before that, I had never really been interested in fur. Not because I had a major animal rights thing going, though I am a supporter of the Washington Convention – ie, the Endangered Species Act – but mostly because I just didn’t like what I saw of fur in fashion. The coats of my growing-up seemed too all-encompassing, too obliterating of the person underneath. That, or just too nakedly arriviste. But then something changed.
It started with Fendi: the way it dyed and shaved fur so it looked textural but not febrile; absurdly luxurious and creative at the same time. Now, it’s possible to argue that if it takes making fur not look like fur for someone to like it, then that person clearly has a problem with fur and should opt out – should go for a wool/cashmere mix or something. But the warmth and lightness of fur is impossible to replicate. Combine that appeal with the technological advances that have occurred in production over the years and you get an irresistible mix.
Thus, when now-famous Saga Furs embarked on a designer outreach every other name in the brand universe hopped right on the Fendi bandwagon before you could say “sheared mink”. Stella McCartney aside, I haven’t seen more than a handful of autumn/winter collections in the past five years that weren’t replete with fur. (The irony is that the anti-fur people still seem confused by the fashion calendar and thus continually launch their protesters at the cameras during the spring/summer shows – the ones that take place during September and October – where, not surprisingly, there is no fur. An absence that slightly undermines the effectiveness of the message.)
Still, it wasn’t just the fashion world that changed; I changed too. I somehow seemed to grow into the idea of fur. My mother might hold I didn’t like it before because she had presented it as marker of adulthood – when you turned 30 you got a fur jacket, because everyone should have one, and so on – and therefore I rejected it as I rebelled against her, but I don’t think that’s true (I hope that’s not true; how pathetic would that be?). I do think there’s something to be said for the power of experience, though: of visual experience, of peer groups.
If there’s one lesson becoming a mother myself taught me, it’s how little effect the way you dress has on your children. I mean, I own no garment that is pink and sparkly, yet I have two girls, both of whom went through protracted stages of wearing only pink sparkly stuff. They sure as hell weren’t emulating me, but the little girl next door – well, that’s another story.
So it seems to me that just by living – entering parties behind mink-jacketed, glass-ceiling- smashing chief executives; spearing sushi with fox-gileted artists; hanging out in the playground with shearling-clad life-juggling mothers – fur has gradually seeped into my consciousness and from there to my wardrobe. Maturity, globalisation or the herd instinct? You tell me.
