GRIANGHRAF AN LAEFURS BY Sydney Vard
AMHARC EILEFur-tive comeback
EARLY afternoon last month in a smart midtown New York restaurant Anna Wintour, the famously soignee editor-in-chief of American Vogue, was lunching with a colleague. Suddenly their conversation was interrupted as an animal rights protester hurled a frozen raccoon at Ms Winter.
The editor's crime? She has recently announced that fur is back in fashion and permitted advertisements for mink coats to appear in her publication.
"Fur. It's about time, announces Bloomingdales department store in December Vogue. But is that true on this side of the Atlantic where, certainly since the late 1980s, women wearing fur have felt unprotected from a glacial chill of social disapproval. For more than a decade, various groups have campaigned with notable success against fur. In this month's Tatler, for example, four women, including London socialite Tamara Beckwith and Joan Collins's daughter Tara Newley, are photographed nude on behalf of PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. A particularly high-profile American organisation which has now started to target Europe and organised a protest meeting in Dublin last autumn during Ireland's European presidency, PETA has managed over the past few years to persuade many well-known models to shed their clothes and be photographed with the slogan "I'd rather go naked than wear fur."
PETA has inherited the mantle of Lynx, best-remembered for its 1980s billboard posters proclaiming "It takes up to 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat. But only one to wear it."
Both in Ireland and Britain, women appearing in a fur coat, at the very least risked hostile glances, if not verbal abuse and, in a few much-publicised cases, physical assault. On a number of occasions, coats were even permanently destroyed after being hit by pots of paint.
Fur became distinctly unfashionable and the majority of department stores made a decision to stop selling all animal pelts. It is almost 10 years since Brown Thomas and Switzers closed down their fur departments, while Clerys discontinued stocking fur coats in 1990 with a spokesman commenting at the time, "There's just no demand for them anymore". Around the same time, Oxfam announced its shops would no longer carry second-hand furs, the organisation's appeals director citing pressure from the anti-fur lobby as one reason for this policy decision.
The opposition continues unabated. At the London premiere of Evita last month, Madonna was heckled by animal rights protesters because, just like the woman she portrayed, the actress had worn real fur in the film. In Dublin, a seven-year-old group called Alliance for Animal Rights has maintained a steady weekend vigil on Westmoreland Street as well as protesting once or twice a week during winter months outside Barnardo's, Europe's oldest furriers on Grafton Street.
According to one of the alliance's founders, Gerry Boland, the persistent protests have made a difference. "In terms of the general public," he says, "we'd find there's been a significant change and now there's a much greater awareness of and empathy towards animals and what's happening to them."
FOR Mr Boland and his fellow protesters, who have plenty of grisly facts and statistics to support their arguments, the main objection to fur would be on the grounds of gratuitous cruelty. "We'd argue that animals have rights. The fur trade is cruel and unnecessary. It's not even a by-product of the meat industry, so it can't be equated with the leather trade." Until recently, many people would seem to have agreed with this line of argument.
And yet, according to Elizabeth Barnardo, the fifth generation of her family to run the business, sales of furs have begun steadily increasing in the past few years. "I've no definite figures," she explains, "but off the top of my head, I'd say we've had a 30 to 40 per cent increase." While traditionally men purchased fur coats, Ms Barnardo believes that today women are more likely to buy such a garment for themselves.
This is confirmed by Howard Vard of Sydney Vard Furriers on South Anne Street in Dublin. Not only are more women buying fur coats, Mr Vard insists, but his overall sales have increased by some 50 per cent in the past three or so years. Both he and Elizabeth Barnardo agree that mink remains the best-seller, with a knee-length coat usually costing £3,000-4,000. In conspicuous-consumption Ireland of the mid-1990s, nothing beats a fur coat to let everyone know how well the wearer is doing. While many women might be loathe to step out in a fur coat by day, come night the number of mink coats on display appears to be on the rise.
If fur really is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, what can be the reason? One explanation may be that the public is suffering from a form of "charity fatigue". After all, animal rights groups have been decrying fur for so long without saying anything particularly new. The effectiveness of their arguments has been diluted through endless repetition. And PETA's policy of using high-profile models in its anti-fur campaign could actually be seen as unhelpful; after all models have never been renowned for the authority of their intellects.
Elizabeth Barnardo - who is happy to give out a leaflet called Fur Facts published by the London-based Fur Education Council - argues that her family business has "a long-established and very loyal clientele, so the animal rights people never got a grip here". In addition, she suggests that because Ireland is essentially a rural country, with the majority of the population not far removed from a farming background, there is far less sentimentality towards animals than in post-industrial societies such as Britain.
Everywhere, fur appears to be quietly creeping back into favour, thanks in part to the fashionability in recent seasons of fake animal-skin coats and trims. New fabric technology means the quality of fake fur has improved hugely of late. It's now possible to buy a full length coat made from what appears to be snow leopard or any other endangered species. The price will be a few hundred pounds - considerably less than a mink coat - and only close examination will reveal the fur not to be the real thing.
Perhaps because telling the fake from the genuine has become so hard, after years of being unofficially excluded, animal pelts have begun to be seen again in the collections of international designers such as Italian duo Dolce & Gabbana, who obviously had no trouble finding models willing to show coats on the Milan catwalk.
And whereas once no one would have dared criticise the anti-fur lobby, now that reserve has gone. "Don't give me that animal rights crap," actress Sharon Stone remarked when tackled on the subject, while Anna Wintour after the raccoon assault incident summarised her opponents as "extremists who advocate rights for rats".
Whether the revival of interest in fur here is just a passing fad or not, the global trade is booming. The English animal rights campaign group Respect estimates around the world some 30 to 40 million animals are reared and killed annually for their pelts. In other countries, fur remains a status symbol; probably the fastest growing market for fur coats is Russia where there's also the excuse of extreme winter cold to justify the boom in business.
And elsewhere in Europe, the kind of reaction against fur witnessed here and in Britain just never happened. Italian women, for example, never forsook their fur, although they have learnt that sometimes a degree of caution is advisable. In some parts of Italy, it seems, a reversible fur is known as an English coat - women know that they should wear the cloth side out when visiting London.
Rocky Road to Dublin
Luke Kelly, Dubliners
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