Has Fur Made a Return on the Runway?

In dire times, we’re in greatest need of a good, old-fashioned fantasy.

When the relentless onslaught of everyday existence has bled the very lifeblood out of our souls, we abandon our quest for realness. When the burdens that were never ours to bear have thoroughly burned us out, we seek to distract ourselves with distractions.

So we seek solace within the chemical musk of vintage print, with its glossy-slick spreads and lavish editorial budgets. We escape into our minuscule screens that house the big Hamptons houses and brazenly botoxed lives of the Real Housewives. We defer our disbeliefs and dress our way to our best lives, even if it is, at the end of the day, entirely in our heads.

Because fashion has always been that escape.

With the right purse, you can be the wife of an oligarch stepping out of a gleaming limo, even if inside said purse is a rotisserie chicken from Costco. A razor-sharp pencil skirt can transform something as mundane as a trip to the DMV into a glamazonian affair à la Vicky Becks. Or a sweeping fur coat atop your sweatpants could make a sweaty sesh at the gym feel slightly more purposeful, as 22-year-old New Yorker Sophia Rofe is so inclined.

In fact, fur has always been part of that fashion fantasy, an escapist’s utopia to an exotic cosmos. So, is it altogether surprising that suddenly it’s back?

Before the Re(fur)rection

Paris-based furrier Yves Salomon, who has for decades supplied the biggest heritage houses with furs, is of the opinion, “A fur coat, first of all, is glamorous. It makes men and women more open, more beautiful somehow.”

But men and women have been wearing fur for over 180,000 years, long before it became the vision of vanity it is today. High priests in ancient Egypt were said to have worn leopard skins, the Vikings draped themselves in beaver pelts, and 1327 King Edward III declared stoat skin the fashion of royalty.

John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading monopoly in the 17^th century fashioned New York into the city we know today (and almost caused beavers to go extinct).

From the 19th century onwards, it had become de rigueur for Hollywood royalty. Elizabeth Taylor’s Oscar-winning role in Butterfield 8 had a plotline involving stolen mink. Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and James Dean all wore the material, and it was regularly extolled as a marker of wealth among couture houses like Christian Dior and Givenchy.

However, the ethics of the fur trade were in question from the ’80s. Calvin Klein banned it in 1994, Ralph Lauren in 2006, and Gucci in 2017, followed by Michael Kors, Burberry, Prada, Versace, Tom Ford, and Marc Jacobs. Finally, a blanket ban was imposed by Kering in 2022.

And just when we all thought fur was gone for good, it was so back.

Faux Fur or Faux Pas?

First came TikTok’s mob wives in towering stilettos, lewd leopards, and mammoth minks in their gleefully gawdy glory. And in true mob-wife fashion, Oscar-winning Anora’s Brooklynite Ani (Mikey Madison) demands a swathing sable coat to match her newfound rags-to-riches wealth.

Then, in April last year, Sex and the City was officially made available on Netflix, and immediately, a bummed-out Carrie Bradshaw smoking in unwashed hair, aviators, and a fur coat popped up all across Pinterest mood boards. In June, Rihanna showed up in Manhattan in joggers, stilettos, and statement fur, replete with a vintage Vuitton arm candy.

And in December came ‘boom boom’, an equally fuzzy fashion in shameless celebration of greed, glut, and negation of wokeness – a cultural response to the new Trump political order, as normcore-forecaster Sean Monahan claims.

Suddenly, fur was everywhere. In the headlines (The New York Times reported that fur “was once again part of the fashion arsenal”), on TikTok (searches for “vintage fur coats” went up by 243% over the last year – and by 688% on Google!), on celebs (the very celebs who’d once posed in PETA campaigns decrying “I’d rather go naked than wear fur”), and on the runways.

Of course, it would be on Fendi’s Milan centenary show; the brand, after all, began as a fur workshop (with irl Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker, seated front row) – and LVMH remains one of the solitary outposts of real fur today. But it was also at Tory Burch in New York.

At Simone Rocha in London, models were clad in faux-fur bras; in Paris, faux foxtails hung off of Chloé’s newly-revived Paddington. Miuccia Prada’s chubby mid-century coats came in faux fur and “shearling, shearling, shearling!” and Kering’s Saint Laurent and Balenciaga featured feathered details emulating Aspen’s après ski aesthetic.

But is faux fur the way to go?

The development of 100% plant-based alternatives like Ecopel and Savian (the latter used by Stella McCartney during COP28 and Ganni at Copenhagen Fashion Week) provides promise, yet the majority remains polyester-derived. “As a skeptic, I feel like brands are using more faux fur because they can charge a ton for it,” comments Mandy Lee of @OldLoserInBrooklyn.

Others, like designer Bryn Taubensee of Vaquera, finds real and faux fur equally “disgusting. It’s in your nose, in your bed at home, you’re hooking up with someone and you’re pulling faux fur out of their mouth. It’s a lot.” 

So, for now, it seems that it’s vintage fur that’s taking the cake.

So, Fur is Back Fur Real?

“Getting my vintage fox fur out for the season, y’all can keep the Target one,” snarked one TikTok creator. Gen-Zers are rummaging through grandma’s closets or populating outlets like Madison Avenue Furs, and even designers like Gabriela Hearst claim that “repurposed vintage mink was unstitched and then painstakingly reassembled by hand in a family-run atelier.”

Because ultimately, it’s not actual fur that’s the goal, but simply the optics of it. “Are we talking about the fur look or are we talking about fur? Those are two very different things to me,” claims PJ Smith, fashion policy director for the Humane Society of the United States. “The goal of the fur movement wasn’t to remove the fur look from fashion. It was just about reducing animal suffering and cruelty inherent to the fur trade.” 

Perhaps in these trying times, fur (vintage or faux) is an escape.

Designers might just be trying to recreate the essence of a late-era Tom Ford Gucci woman in voluminous swathes of bold-shouldered fur nipped at the waist with an Obi belt. “Sex slithered down a spotlit runway until one last model stood at its foot in a white jersey evening gown, the garment’s liquid folds undulating over the curves of her body,” Robin Givhan once wrote for The Washington Post. And that really is the ultimate fashion fantasy.

Yet, the optics of fur are also its problem.

The very act of wearing it (and yours truly, being a cog in this machine, writing about it) feels like promotion – especially when it’s done by people with influence (and not just influencers “Instagram-dressing” in Adidas Sambas, furs, and balaclavas.) Whether it’s vintage, faux, or shearling, you’re wearing, it’s the fur that we see at the end of the day. And that raises more uncomfortable questions about luxury’s use of exotic skins in general.

So, clearly, the ethics of wearing fur today are no better than they were before, even as the industry as a whole has made strides towards progress. But what’s also clear is that the fur look has endured – fur better or worse.