How the Fur Issue Got So Confused

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News stories about fur being “back” have been everywhere lately. The Wall Street Journal reported that young customers want fur. The New York Times reported that fur “was once again part of the fashion arsenal,” citing the prevalence of real fur, faux fur, and shearling that looked like fur on the Milan Fashion Week runways. In a separate story, the Times highlighted a heightened interest in vintage fur, noting “women and men all over town were busting their furs out of storage in what felt like an abrupt reversal in social attitudes.” And Vogue reported that “the return of real fur has taken many in the industry by surprise.”

However, it’s not entirely clear what these stories are saying. Sure, faux fur has been a rather garish accoutrement on many runways (I could not unsee Simone Rocha’s faux fur bras or Chloé’s faux fur tails).

But real fur is not back.

First, many luxury brands and retailers have decided to omit fur from their product assortments. And two, it’s not possible for fur to come back since legislation has been enacted both in the U.S. and Europe that is effectively killing off the industry. (Today, the Chicago City Council votes on an ordinance that would ban the sales of new fur.)

“Are we talking about the fur look or are we talking about fur? Those are two very different things to me,” said PJ Smith, fashion policy director for the Humane Society of the United States, who has been working with fashion brands and others on go fur-free for more than a decade. “The goal of the fur movement wasn't to remove the fur look from fashion. It was just about reducing animal suffering and cruelty inherent to the fur trade.”

Ahead, Smith and I discuss the current state of fur.

I’ve been reading all these fur stories and I feel confused. Fur can’t be back since it’s illegal in many places and so many brands and retailers have fur-free policies in place now… right? Maybe there’s more interest in faux?

If you strip away that New York Times headline about “fur's back,” you're left with some cherry-picked quotes from fashionistas who were wearing vintage fur and a muddled debate about the appropriateness of the fur look, whether it's used or shearling or vintage. I think that's a fine debate. But to me, the policies that we've put into place are working.

We're seeing the lowest numbers of animals killed for fur in decades. The fur trade has gone from killing 140 million foxes, mink, and raccoon dogs on fur farms in 2014 to roughly 20 million animals in 2023, the last year for which we have data — an 85% decline. U.S. fur production was under a million animals in 2023, the lowest of all time going back to the 1960s. We know it's gone down even more since 2023.

Also, major financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, International Finance Corporation, ING — will no longer fund the fur trade. It's just not going to ever come back or become an acceptable trend again.

Do you think these news stories are largely anecdotal?

I don't know. Part of me thinks that the fur trade’s behind it. The mob wife trend was interesting in the sense that you see how fast these things come and go.

We're going to talk about this [fur being back] for two weeks and then it's going to be gone. And we're left with, again, this industry in rapid decline.

I wondered if the mob wife trend, which included a fur or faux fur coat, really influenced buying — like, maybe it’s a trend you wanted to look at but not necessarily shop. It wasn’t like, say, wide-leg jeans.

Someone wearing vintage, faux, shearling — no one's going to know the difference. They're just going to say, “That's fur.” This all aligns with policies that were put into place. Shearling was not part of these fur-free policies —therefore, that's where designers are going.

Do you think a shearling ban should be part of these fur-free policies?

The fur policies that were put into place had to happen. It was contentious, going back to the eighties and nineties. You really had to say, “These animals — foxes, mink, raccoon dogs, chinchillas — are being raised and killed solely for their fur.” One species of sheep called karakul is killed solely for its pelt as a baby or [fetus], so that is part of most of the fur-free policies.

But to say “mink is back” — that's just not true in any way.

Do we know if shearling — like leather — is a byproduct of the meat industry? I know the fashion supply chain is purposefully opaque, but do we know if brands even know? Ugg, for instance, says on its website that all the shearling it uses is a byproduct of meat production, but not every brand makes that disclosure.

I don't know what the latest the numbers are, but obviously we would want people to avoid shearling. If you can have a look without any animal [skins], I think that is going to be the preference. But brands are not there yet with shearling. They are with fur.

Fendi will include a “fur atelier” in a Milan store opening in September, and seemingly advertised it with two mink coats in its recent show. What’s going on there?

I remember having a conversation with LVMH and LVMH saying they would never even give their brands the ability to make any sort of announcement about fur because they would have to make a policy for all LVMH brands. Because of Fendi [which was founded as a furrier a century ago], they were never going to ban fur.

We do know that LVMH sends lobbyists to Brussels [the EU’s de facto capital] to lobby on behalf of the fur trade. We have documentation [from Belgium-based anti-fur group Gaia] that LVMH gave the International Fur Federation 300,000 euros last year. Their total budget is [2.8 million euros].

But why are they doing all that just for Fendi? Are they making that much money on fur? Do they just not want to be regulated?

I think they believe that this is a luxury thing that they're not willing to get rid of. I think they made a real effort to fund EU fur production as a better, more transparent supply chain than China, even though I would say that there is no difference.

Give us a recap of the legislation and policies in place that are killing off the fur industry.

Over 20 countries, mostly in Europe, have banned fur production. The last was Romania. There's a real chance that Poland and a couple others will follow. That's why these numbers are going down pretty rapidly — Europe's leaving that market on the production side.

On the demand side, you either have companies going fur-free, which decreases demand, or you have cities and states banning fur sales. California banned it in 2019. Cities like Ann Arbor, Michigan; Hallendale Beach, Florida; seven cities in Massachusetts. Those sales bans include online sales — that impact is pretty substantial. When Louis Vuitton in France has to decipher what little city in Massachusetts is no longer banning fur sales, I think it's one of those things where it’s like, let's just avoid it altogether.

Selfridges wanted to get to a place where they're not killing animals for fashion. They banned fur. They banned exotic skins.

I don't think these policies are going to slow down.

And what’s on the docket?

There's one in Massachusetts, there's a bill in Rhode Island. The UK is currently looking to ban fur imports and sales, and so is Switzerland. When that happens, it's going to collapse. That's how vulnerable the fur trade is.

In January, I got to go to a Ohio fur farm. I’d never been able to see a U.S. fur farm. There aren’t many, they're very standoffish. The owner of this fur farm died over the holidays, and the county didn’t know what to do. There were around 400 foxes and coyotes and skunks and all these weird species. This guy was not only selling their fur, but also their urine, which is used either as animal repellent by gardeners, or as an attractant to bring other coyotes or foxes to a trap. It was one of the worst things I've ever seen. The animals were missing limbs. They were dead. But it was what a fur farm looks like.

With these latest articles, I'm trying to think of ways to always make this about the animal cruelty. We're just trying to remove animal cruelty from this one part of fashion, this one material.

I thought the next frontier with animal cruelty and fashion was going to be exotic skins. What's going on there? People seem really into croc Birkin bags that cost $50,000.

Fur is all about status. The fur sales in the United States are not in Minnesota — Miami and Dallas have more fur sales.

We're looking at being more vocal about exotic skins. I do think that everyone just switched to wanting to talk about leather, and it kind of bummed me out because I thought the next logical step was these brands need to distance themselves from exotics.

To be clear, exotic skins you view as just as cruel as fur.

A hundred percent. I just don't think people think pythons and crocodiles are cuddly and cute like baby foxes.

The current practices are shove a steel rod down their neck and try to find the brain and scramble it or decapitation and put a hose down their throat, as horrible as it sounds. LVMH started buying tanneries and farms, which did nothing to clean up the industry. It just allowed them to say, “We have transparency of our supply chain.”

Why are these exotic skin bags so expensive? The prices on some of them (which come up in “Retail Confessions” quite often) are astonishing.

If you wanted to farm it, you have to feed a python protein for a year to get to a certain size that you can make a handbag, and it costs a lot to do that. It was just never going to be economically viable to farm pythons because they're plentiful out in the wild. For foxes, again, we know it costs X amount of dollars to raise a fox.

According to the International Trade Centre, 96 percent of the value of a high-end exotic skin handbag is captured by the European fashion industry, with hunters and local communities making just 0.5 percent. We hope the more educated people are, the more exotic skins lose some of that luxury status.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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