Furs have long been treated like fashion’s troublesome stepsister, shunted to the industry’s back rooms to be trotted out when convenient, as when lucrative licenses are at stake, or at some future date when fur may again represent the zenith of high living.
But the collective presentation furriers mounted for the first time recently highlighted an emerging rift between designers and furriers who are looking forward to a fur renaissance and those who believe fur’s future lies in what was done in the past.
Strictly from a fashion perspective, in many quarters fur coats have become uncool. The challenge to the industry, as D’Arcy Moses, a young designer from Canada, said, is to come up with “a cool fur coat.”
A fresh point of view muscled forward in the innovations of nine designers who had never worked in the medium before. The newcomers introduced a way of looking at fur that seemed to revel in an ignorance of limitations traditional fur designers have placed on themselves. They treated fur as just another luxury fabric with texture and depth.
Utilizing her sportswear approach, Yeohlee Teng successfully brought her laserlike minimalist vision to furs for the first time in a collection for Alixandre Furs. Like several designers, she used mink so finely shorn it resembled a high-quality velvet.
Length in furs was a moot point; they were all over the lot, as in the Ben Kahn line. His and Teng’s were the best collections.
Ben Kahn is designed by two new talents, Nicolas Petrou and Michael Lund. The company also introduced a signature series in which ready-to-wear designers Nicole Miller, Josie Natori, Gemma Kahng, Mary Jane Marcasiano and Rodney Telford each created one or two stylish coats.
Moses, 27, who added furs to his repertory three years ago, represents a bridge between the old guard of fur designers and the future. “It’s time for a new generation to step in and take their place and bring change to furs,” he said. “Our generation doesn’t want to look at fur as something that’s a luxury, that’s flashy and showy. I want to design something that’s cool, that costs $200 or $300.”
For the moment Moses’ furs, like those of new and experienced designers, cost upward of $2,000.
