Janice Breen Burns ponders the fraught facts of fashion’s most glamourous heirlooms.
The loveliest fur is still mink. Words fall pathetically short of its sheer, watery softness, its gentle gloss and the cool, slinky – minkiness – of it. The most astonishing fur is astrakhan: a dark, wiggling surface of tight, brain-like wool coils. The most glamorous fur is anything with a bit of height and boing to it; the fur equivalent of big hair with good surface coverage of long, strong, sticky-outy shafts, not just the soft, floppy, fuzzy ones. That’s another look entirely.
Fox fur gives good glamour but some cats and rabbits puff up enough for that line-backer bulk across a stole or coat’s shoulders, then a satisfyingly fat, boxy drop to the ribbed basque at the waist of a bomber-style jacket, or the chopped, mid-thigh hemline of a chunky mini coat.
In the 1970s, these all-purpose glamour pods that you could throw on over anything were called chubbies. They were cheapish if made from rabbit (lapin to you dar-rling) or offcuts of posher fur and, in the lexicon of fashion at the time, translated to real swank with a cherry on top. Or something like it.
And there you have it. The trouble with fur. Just too bloody lovely, for some. Lovely to the lip of heartbreak. And cool – as in too coo-oool – on fashion’s Richter scale for others.
Fur has always slotted like a jigsaw into the shallowest of fashion’s reasons for being: it can make you look rich. It can make you look fabulous. And, by all that is fluffy, on this lip of winter 2013, it appears fur is still preferred by the largest number of globally influential fashion designers since troglodytes skinned pterodactyls for shimmies. Or thereabouts.
But, fur feels increasingly less lovely, despite the frequency of its catwalk exits. In the slower, kinder world that some of us hope will clinch humanity’s survival on a planet NOT crisped like a chip with most of its former life forms rendered extinct, the idea of skinning animals purely for frocks just doesn’t seem right. We have arrived at a moment in history that is naturally draining the glamour out of all sorts of excess: out of fur coats, out of stupidly expensive designer handbags, out of wardrobes stuffed to busting with frocks and shoes and what-all-else-we’ll-never-ever-really-need.
Yep. We are paring and calming down, thinking more and bothering with details. Frocks can be tracked back to cotton seeds. Who would have bothered a decade ago? We track our jumpers, we hope, back to lovingly farmed sheep. Our shoes back to humane abattoirs. More of us are asking: how did this frock get here? Grower, mill, dye-house, cutter, machinists, finishers, truck, ship, shop, rack, me? For so long, it never mattered, but it sure does now.
Now we know this: the prettiest astrakhan is stripped from foetal lambs, the silkiest mink from sweet, ferrety things that chatter and tumble and are allegedly not always dead, or even unconscious, before they’re skinned by workers we might more accurately describe as “animals” than their victims. Is it still just a coat you’re wearing, then? Or a cuff or collar? Or a dinky furry bobble thing on your key ring?
I thank the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for some of the most chilling information (peta.org) that switched my own thinking a dozen-odd years ago. I don’t thank PETA however, or any comparable anti-fur organisation, for campaigns that are often combative, sexist and tacky and, in my orbit at least, have been known to spur certain belligerent fur wearers and fur-using designers into a F— You! mentality that ultimately seals the fate of even more sweet ferrety things.
Fur production for fashion’s sake should stop. That’s a given. The industry simply requires too many procedures that are at best barely humane, at worst, pure evil. We’ve evolved – technologically – well beyond needing fur to keep warm and frankly, whim and fashion are pathetic justifications to kill and skin living things.
However. We were once. They were once. And, the remnants of our fur-tolerant past (and persistent present) are all around us. What should we do? What of our heirlooms? Our glamour minks and foxes, our mothers’ coats and stoles? Anti-fur lobbiests would burn, bury or vandelise them.
How sad. How wasteful. How alienating for lovers of fashion history. How dangerous for the campaign against future furs.
(I feel an parabolic anecdote coming on.) I remember a particularly marvellous octogenarian, erect and glossy, a haughty crocodile on hind legs, elaborately draped in chocolate mink and clanking with jewels at a wake outside London. “I offered to help those anti-fur people once,” she said loftily, “They could have my furs, I said, sell them, put them in a museum, keep the proceeds, fund their projects; whatever they thought best.” A film about foxes being skinned alive on a Chinese farm had moved her to alter the habits of a lifetime. But, a young anti-fur activist who flicked through her magnificent collection of furs, dubbed it “disgusting” and offered to burn the lot, changed her again. “Burn?” She lifted a glimmering panel of chocolate mink and shook her head, “This beautiful thing….?”
Precisely. In our kinder, anti-fur future, our fraught pro-fur past must still be acknowledged with the joy and reverence it deserves.
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
