Faux fur: fashion trend, or the future?

Last week, Donatella Versace declared that her namesake label will no longer be using fur in its collections. Her announcement follows a spate of designers, including Gucci, Michael Kors and Furla, turning away from using animal pelts in their designs.

It is a movement that has gathered steam over recent years – Selfridges has not sold fur products since 2004 and Stella McCartney is well known for creating her collections, and building her business, along a vegan, eco ethos.

But while fake fur has become fashionable in the UK (especially with temperatures like those we’ve seen of late) any fashion editor wearing a faux fur coat to Milan fashion week would quickly realise that in this hub of luxury Italian fashion, faux fur has always been seen, quite simply, as a bit cheap. But with luxury Italian fashion houses like Versace – which has long sold the “fur and diamonds” idea of glamour – using faux, it seems that’s finally changing.

The recent shifts within the fashion industry seem to chime with wider societal opinion. At last month’s London Fashion Week, both Burberry and Mary Katrantzou’s shows were targeted by anti-fur protesters. This Friday, March 23, marks the deadline for a petition for a #furfreeBritain, which to date has close to 200,000 signatures, including a number of high-profile celebrities including Dame Judi Dench, Ricky Gervais, Joanna Lumley and Paloma Faith.

“I think faux fur has become a commodity that feels just as luxurious as real fur – especially in the UK,” says Hannah Weiland, who founded her label Shrimps in 2013 with a line of brightly coloured faux-fur coats that have since been widely worn by London’s style set including Alexa Chung, Adwoa Aboah and Poppy Delevingne, and stocked at Selfridges and Matches. At £350-£595 a coat, this isn’t a less-expensive alternative to real fur, but a conscious rejection of it, and a move towards establishing faux fur as a designer option.

But can faux fur fetch designer price tags? The average price of a faux-fur coat on global fashion search platform Lyst is £344, with searches up 29 per cent year on year. While online luxury behemoth Net-A-Porter officially announced its decision to stop selling fur products in June of last year, citing customer feedback as one of the reasons, fur quietly disappeared from its virtual shelves much earlier.

“Many of our customers are now looking for faux fur items,” says Lisa Aiken, Net-A-Porter’s retail fashion director; “anything from Ganni’s leopard print jacket for £295 to Givenchy’s panelled version for £2,690, which has proven popular with our EIP’s [the e-tailer’s Extremely Important Persons]. Our buy for this particular area has increased fourfold in the last year and sales have increased in line with this – so much so, we are growing our faux fur offering to include three new brands next season.”

As for the snobbery around wearing a “fake”, Aiken has seen a dramatic shift in the market. “The fact is, faux fur is not what it used to be. The developments that have been made in a quest for truly realistic faux are astounding, so that it has become difficult to tell if a coat is real or the cruelty-free option. When shopping for faux fur, while it doesn’t come with the same price tag, it is worth investing in the best quality you can.”

Of course, change doesn’t happen overnight. With many designer brands still selling real fur, and customers still buying it, the shift is more gradual.

Charlotte Beecham, the founder of Charlotte Simone, who produces her brightly coloured jackets and accessories in both real and faux fur, was unavailable to comment, though she’s currently in the process of phasing out the real stuff from her label.

In a world where consumers are becoming evermore aware of the impact of our choices, using animal fur for fashion apparel is a contentious issue. Many of the labels who have rejected fur cite the savvy and eco-conscious millennial consumer, as well as the plethora of “fur substitutes”. Even the Fur Free Alliance, which many of these now fur free brands have joined, speak about, “sufficient alternatives” to the use of animal fur. These sleek, sophisticated faux fur options seem like an obvious solution.

MatchesFashion are working with Livia Firth’s brand/marketing consultancy Eco-Age on a code of conduct to share with all of their brands. But it’s not as simple as simply switching real for fake. While faux fur may be the ethical choice, it isn’t necessarily an ecologically sound one, though some animal rights activists blame furriers for spreading this “propaganda” against faux fur.

The facts are that the majority of faux-fur products on the market use acrylic or modacrylic fabrics. These man-made fibres are fabricated using petrol, coal or limestone – all non-renewable resources. When faux fur is washed, it releases microfibres (tiny hairs of plastic, with similar effects to the microbeads that are now banned) into the water supply, contributing to the contamination of oceans, and severely affecting the ecosystems of marine life. And when, inevitably, the pieces are thrown away and end up in landfill, faux fur takes over 600 years to biodegrade.

“There is always some environmental impact with the production of any material,” agrees Weiland, “but I do believe faux fur is a more conscious choice than real fur. The manufacturing of real fur involves chemicals and tannins that are harmful to the environment, and the reliability of the source and whether any harm is caused to animals is difficult to determine and be certain of. Our aim is also to make high quality products that last and will avoid disposal and waste – I still wear my Shrimps coats that I designed over five years ago.”

The same can’t necessarily be said of the lower-quality faux fur items sold on the high street and sent to landfill each year. And while real fur might be associated with a higher price point, in reality it’s often the cheaper option than manufacturing faux-fur alternatives. Last year, a number of high street retailers were called to task for selling real fur, marketed as fake, as pom-poms on hats, shoes and bags.

In response to similar allegations, in February Camden Market announced that, as of March 1, it would no longer allow the sale of any real fur products.

“I’m very happy about the death of fur,” says Tamsin Blanchard, fashion journalist and author of Green is the New Black: How to Save the World in Style. “Long may it last, but already I feel there is a backlash. The environmental impact of fake fur is a strong argument against it – a whole different argument to the ethical issues around real fur – and it is being used by the fur industry to turn the debate into one about the environment. Obviously most of us don’t want to burn fossil fuels to make furry jackets that then shed microplastics when we wash and dry them. But that’s a separate issue to not wanting to kill animals for their fur – I don’t see why it has to be one or the other.”

Many brands pitch the rejection of real fur as a move towards a more responsible approach: “This decision is part of a broader plan that centres on Versace’s sustainable initiatives to embrace a more conscious and environment-savvy approach” said the Italian label’s statement. But are they going far enough?

“An abundance of innovative natural materials are coming to the market,” says Yvonne Taylor, director of corporate projects at Peta, “from pineapple leather to seed-fibre down alternatives.”

Modern Meadow, which is responsible for many of Stella McCartney’s fabrics, creates replica leathers using cell engineering, and Bolt Threads makes spun silks by replicating a spider’s spinning process using the fermentation of yeast, sugar and water. “In a perfect world, people would wear natural fibres, but for those who want the look and feel of fur without the cruelty, faux fur can be a good option,” she says.

When asked whether we’ve got past luxury fashion’s snobbery around wearing faux fur, Taylor quotes one on the fathers of modern fashion. “Even notorious fur user Karl Lagerfeld admitted, ‘you cannot fake chic, but you can be chic in fake fur’.”