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Why fake fur is now a fashion crowd favourite

News from the fashion front line

There was one season – I think it was winter 2008 – when I seriously considered buying a real fur coat. ‘It’s fine because it’s vintage,’ I insisted in the direction of the fitting-room mirror. ‘You have nothing to apologise for.’ Yet I couldn’t overcome the ick-factor, or the mustiness, so I left it on the rail.

Ten years later, my coat cupboard is home to not one, but two of those fuzzy, furry, delectably tactile coats – only these are absolutely, 100-per-cent fakefur. I didn’t think anything of faux’s onward march in my wardrobe until October, when Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri announced that the luxury house would be fur-free from its spring/ summer 2018 collection. ‘Do you think using furs today is still modern?’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s still modern… It’s a little bit outdated.’

Fur: not modern. Has there ever been a louder death knell in fashion?

‘The fact is, faux fur is not what it used to be,’ says Lisa Aiken, fashion director of Net-a-porter. ‘The developments that have been made in a quest for realistic faux are astounding. The handle, colouration and weight of the fabrics are of such quality that it is now difficult to tell if a coat is real or faux.’

I’d venture that the shift has been greater than technological advances. We’ve witnessed a change of mindset, from women buying faux-fur coats in the hope of passing them off as the real thing, to women disregarding the notion of passing them off completely. London designer Hannah Weiland’s outré designs for Shrimps, the shaggy Yeti coats from House of Fluff, Staud’s retro ‘mink’, DVF’S bright-blue jacket and Stella Mccartney’s faux shearlings all make the case for un-fur coats. I, for one, would never want anyone to mistake my pink-collared, leopard-print beauty for a former big cat. It’s not the real thing – it’s fun, fabulous and faux.