Fur comes back to wrap fashion icons

JAMES SHERWOOD tells a tale of behind-the-scenes lobbying.

Remember when fur was taboo? When fur-coat wearers in London's Oxford St had paint thrown over them, and assorted supermodels lent their support to campaigns with slogans such as, "It takes up to 100 dumb animals to make a fur coat, but only one to wear one"?

Then, it seemed, fur had become so stigmatised it was unthinkable it would ever come back into vogue.

Scarcely a decade on, fashion has fallen in love again with fur. During Milan Fashion Week, the city's superstar designers Gucci, Versace, Prada and Karl Lagerfeld for Fendi will show off their autumn/winter collections.

All are guaranteed to use fur with abandon, as did most of the big names at the recent New York, London and Paris shows.

And while British designers may still be more tentative than those in Milan, the recent London Fashion Week had more than its share of inky minks, full-fox stoles and dripping animal tails.

Designer Jasper Conran showed the definitive "Joan Crawford" black-fox chubby coat, as well as deep fox-fur collars and cuffs on his tailored jackets.

Another designer unleashed a river of chartreuse fox tails on to a black A-line coat; yet another ran rivulets of plum mink ruffles on the collars and sleeves of evening coats and another showed his black-velvet hooded cape with a fat, black fox trim framing the face.

Supermodel Kate Moss, possibly the most influential icon in British fashion, wore a fox-tail-trimmed gilet at London Fashion Week.

In the view of Jan Brown, spokeswoman for the British Fur Trade Association, "Kate Moss is the tip of the iceberg. Madonna wears fur, J Lo wears fur, Puff Daddy and Lil' Kim wear fur. So do the Sex and the City girls. These are style icons for a new generation."

Despite the UK's commitment to phase out fur farming by December, the pro-fur lobby seems to be winning the battle for the hearts and minds of fashion consumers.

According to the association, production of mink pelts was up 10 per cent last year on 2000, and the retail trade fur trade in Europe is still worth millions of dollars a year.

But while the fickle moods of public taste have played a part in the new fur revolution, British fashion's young designers have more tangible reasons for using fur in their work. To understand these reasons, you must look way beyond the trendy boutiques of Bond St to a powerful organisation based outside Copenhagen.

It was in 1988 that Saga Furs of Scandinavia, a coalition of Scandinavian mink and fox farmers, opened a research centre outside the Danish capital.

Their mission was to reintroduce fur to fashion.

Since then, Saga, which produces 66 per cent of the world's mink and 61 per cent of the world's fox, has been acting as the unseen marriage broker between fur and high fashion.

Working with fashion colleges around the world, including London's St Martins College, Saga invites students and established designers to attend and lead workshops in Copenhagen.

At Saga's headquarters, and its flagship mink and fox farming facilities in Jutland, you get a real sense of fur's importance.

The workrooms are where international designers come to play with Saga's vast resources of mink and fox.

The workshop is dedicated to experimenting, finding the endless design possibilities with fur and pushing the material into the 21st century.

Though the anti-fur campaigners People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals say, "Go out on to the streets of London and you won't see women wearing fur or shops selling fur", even a brief tour of Bond St or Sloane St shows that fur pieces are readily available.

- INDEPENDENT