I ’ll admit it, Carrie Bradshaw in aviators and a fur coat, smoking and drinking beer while watching baseball, spoke to me. It was season two of Sex and the City , 1999. She was bruised from a recently ended relationship but on the brink of dating “the new Yankee” and I was a teenager, probably home from playing racketball and on the brink of Quorn sausages for dinner.
While it wasn’t the whole equation, the fur coat was certainly part of it. The way she could shrink into it and appear nonchalantly, breezily beautiful despite unwashed hair and an aching heart. I’m not proud, but I was young, and this to me then looked like something I wanted a piece of.
Cut to now and, several years of anti-fur campaigning later, you might have thought that the outlook would be different, that fur would be an archaism at best and an ethical abomination at worst; the embodiment of a bygone era when we were still using the planet and its creatures like they weren’t going anywhere. There had been concrete progress: many of the big-name fashion houses over the years banned it. In 2019, Kim Kardashian announced that she had “remade” all of her favourite fur coats in fake fur and then Queen Elizabeth renounced fur in “any new outfits”.
On it went: in 2021, Kering, the luxury conglomerate that owns many luxury brands, banned the use of fur, as the British Fashion Council had earlier done at London fashion week. The debate around fur was over and won, right? Wrong. At the recent M.
