A funny thing happened even before the polar ice cap dropped on our doorstep earlier this month:
After more than a decade of giving fur the cold shoulder, young fashionistas cozied up to it.
In five years, the average age of fur buyers has dropped to 35 from 45, according to the Fur Information Council of America, a trade group. About 20 percent of buyers are under age 34.
Fallen from favor are the big-haired, broad-shouldered beaver coats of the 1980s. Faded from the public consciousness are the guerrilla paint attacks and PETA’s “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” ads, which commanded attention in the early ’90s.
Replacing them are everything from discreet shearlings to chubby jackets in “Monsters, Inc.” colors. A host of former spokesmodels for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer) have turned on their heels and strutted in more than one skin since.
In almost every way, fur is less confrontational than it was 15 to 20 years ago. But at $1.7 billion in 2002, fur sales have climbed almost to the same record levels of the “Wall Street”/”Dynasty” era.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with warmth,” said Chicagoan Kelly O’Brien, 26, who owns a long Persian lamb coat with vents up the sides. “It’s all about fashion.”
As for the ethics?
“No one is [saying], `What about animal rights?’ I’ve never really thought about it. That whole thing happened when we were younger, when my mom had a fur and she stopped wearing it,” said O’Brien, regional producer for the Gen Art organization, which promotes young artists, designers and musicians.
Longtime activist Tom Regan, author of the new book “Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., $22.95), rues that but doesn’t dispute it.
Regan, a retired North Carolina State University philosophy professor, says the formerly potent Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade has disbanded. Trans-Species Unlimited, which sponsored the day-after-Thanksgiving “Fur Free Friday” protests beginning in 1985 in New York, “ran with that for 10 or 15 years,” he said. “They just kind of got worn out.”
Other groups, such as PETA, maintain anti-fur campaigns, he said, but “those particular organizations whose primary focus was fur have just disappeared,” Regan said. “And no one has stepped in to take up the slack.”
Efforts that get media attention are the most controversial, including PETA’s “Your mommy kills animals” leaflets, handed to children of fur-wearing mothers outside “Nutcracker” performances last month in Denver and other cities.
“It’s designed to be a spoof of a teenager’s comic book that villainizes the violence of the fur industry by explaining, basically, that any woman who chooses to wear fur in the year 2004 is complicit in anal electrocution and all the hideous ways animals are killed to make a coat,” PETA national campaign coordinator Lisa Franzetta said. “We’re not giving it to younger children.”
Regan, a vegan who doesn’t wear leather or wool, dislikes some animal rights tactics. But he believes some progress has been made. The number of mink ranches has declined from 1,000 in the ’80s to about 300, he said.
“You’ll find a significant decrease in the body count,” he said.
Still, with the exception of a few anti-fur celebs such as singer Pink and reality-TV star Paris Hilton, furs such as rabbit, fox and mink are hot in Hollywood and on the runways.
P. Diddy and Vin Diesel, who wore fur in the movie “XXX,” are even opening urban men’s minds to fur, said Keith Kaplan, executive director of the Fur Information Council. As of this year’s research, he said, men remain only 5 percent of the fur market.
Meanwhile, Kaplan cites a 400 percent increase in the number of stores carrying fur during the last five years. More than 400 designers work in fur today versus 42 a little more than a decade ago.
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First, fake was hot; now the real thing
This is the real thing, he and others stress.
“We saw a lot of fake fur last year, and that transitioned into real fur this year,” said Marshal Cohen, retail analyst with the consulting firm NPD Group. “We had a very early winter, and a lot of cold-weather product did very well.”
For some, fur satisfies a broader cultural yen to “shop less and buy better,” he added.
The Fur Information Council taps into that impulse and, maybe surprisingly, an environmentalist one too. Kaplan said faux fur uses non-renewable resources and petrochemicals, and contributes non-biodegradable materials to landfills.
“People have been so misled by the assumption that faux fur is a preferable alternative,” Kaplan said. “The reality is, across all considerations of the environment, faux fur is really the wrong answer.”
Kaplan said fur is a renewable resource that can last “40, 50, 60 years if it’s cleaned regularly and stored properly. The beauty of fur is that, unlike cloth, it can be repaired and remodeled.”
Cohen cites a spate of furs being passed down to the younger generation, just when the passion for vintage fashion is at a peak.
“My grandmother used to wear this out and about in the ’40s,” said Chicagoan Merritt Ames, 26, whose mother just gave her a fur wrap that had belonged to her grandmother.
“Every time I wear it I get a ton of compliments and people asking where I got it,” Ames said. “It’s special. I’d love to give it to my daughter.”
For new fur, Kaplan said the fur industry has worked with the American Veterinary Medical Association to develop “the best methods of feeding and housing and managing disease and even euthanizing the animals.
“Real simply, if an animal feels stress, the first place it shows it is in its coat, just as we show it in our hair,” Kaplan said. “It only serves the farmer to be absolutely on top of animal welfare, to produce the kind of product the consumer’s going to want to buy.”
Liza Cruzat Brooks, who has been modeling for 20 years and lives in the South Loop, bought her first fur right before the holidays. She plans to wear the jacket, from Bucktown boutique Helen Yi, with everything from evening gowns to weekend jeans.
“I never figured out if I believed in [fur].” But, she said, “I don’t even think of it as fur. The fashions are so trendy–the little boas, scarves.”
Those smaller pieces, which can be found even at Kmart, and less expensive rabbit jackets, make fur accessible to the young.
“My mom has mink jackets, but I can’t afford that,” Lake View resident Lisa Gillespie, 24, said on her way to a job interview downtown in early January. She has a black faux shearling coat, but real mink earmuffs.
Real shearling, most often lamb with the suedelike skin on the outside and the plush fur on the inside, remains popular among those who prize understatement or a more casual look.
“We have a lot of newscasters as clients, and they like shearling because they don’t want to show a lot of fur,” said Thomas Mitrovic of Elan Furs on Michigan Avenue. “Some say it’s warmer, too, because the fur is closer to the body.”
And because the fur is classified as the byproduct of lamb’s use as meat, many find shearling more socially acceptable than other furs.
When Missy Hebson, 32, and her partner Kelly Golden opened the Winnetka boutique Neapolitan in November, they hesitated to order fur pieces partly because winter already was under way.
“And I’ve always been a little scared of fur,” Hebson said, remembering how she once stood in line to buy a Prada fur collar, only to get cold feet and leave.
But Neapolitan sold out of its first small order of fur jackets and cuffs, and replenished three times.
A reversible fox bolero jacket that Michelle Schragel bought there two weeks ago evokes none of the shudders of her first foray into fur about 20 years ago.
“It was a horrible sheared beaver with huge shoulder pads,” said Schragel, 39, of Kenilworth. “I lived in New York and that’s the first thing everyone did when they got their first single-girl job and could afford a coat.
“This is not so overstated,” she said of her new jacket, which has silk on the other side. “It’s more of a fun piece than your mother’s fur coat.”
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Fur care: Vacation in a vault
Urban men and young women are forging into fur for the first time. But will it last–the fur, that is–if treated like coats cut from cloth?
“Any fur, if you really want longevity–and I have 40-year-old mink garments that we restyle–if you want that to last, then you need to care for it,” said Kathy Rezny, co-owner of York Furrier in Elmhurst and president of the Associated Fur Industries of Chicagoland, a group of fur businesses.
Protecting your investment mandates summer storage in vaults kept at 50 degrees or below, and 50 percent humidity, Rezny said.
“Home conditions do not match that,” she said.
York Furrier, which has one of the largest single-store inventories of furs in the country, stores about 10,000 coats a year for owners, Rezny said, mainly women in their 30s or older.
Many of the new, young buyers are unaware of the needs of fur, including shearlings, fur-lined denim, reversible jackets and new garments in which tufts of beaver or other fur are knitted in, for a chenille-like effect.
“The ones who are really good about [storage] are in their late 50s on up,” Rezny said. “We really do need to tell young people, because [their garments] will service them for a long time to come.”
So, here goes.
May through mid-October is the rule of thumb for fur storage, she said, which often begins with a cleaning and glazing, to restore luster and suppleness and protect the pelt from stains.
Fur storage may cost as little as $40 for a whole season or even an entire year, sometimes with in/out privileges and pickup/delivery at no extra charge, Rezny said.
Fur cleaning may cost from $30 to $80 depending on the type of garment. “We discourage dry cleaning because that’s a completely different process.” For leathers, suedes and shearlings, York applies Ultraguard to seal the garment from rain, snow and spilled Cokes.
Summer is also the time for repairs and any restyling. “We’ll check hooks and rings, pocket corners, linings, put in new collar stays,” she said. “Then maybe we want to restyle it. I have a coat that’s 14 years old. I’ve restyled it about five times.”
Rezny is seeing remodeling now as women are inheriting furs. Length, how the coat closes, sleeves all can be changed.
“Maybe they’ll make a bolero jacket out of something that was a swing coat,” she said, “something they can throw on with jeans and boots and look great running around.”
Then, in five years, who knows what trends will dictate?
For more information on fur care, check the Fur Information Council of America site, fur.org; www.furchicago.com; or www.yorkfur.com (630-832-2200).
— W.N.
