The fur industry is desperately trying to rehabilitate its image
‘Fashion influencer’ and fur advocate Sophie Hermann wearing a mink fur coat on the We Are Fur Instagram.
Fur has long been losing its appeal in the fashion industry. Thanks to decades of anti-fur campaigning by groups like PETA and celebrities like Pamela Anderson and Christina Applegate, many fashion designers have stopped using fur and a number of famous people including Kim Kardashian (apparently influenced by Anderson) have pledged to stop wearing fur in recent years. The Covid pandemic has further hurt the fur trade after mink on fur farms became infected with the virus, resulting in many farms being shut down, and slowing exports to China - the world’s biggest importer of fur - which has had prolonged lockdowns since 2020.
But the fur industry is refusing to accept its fate and go quietly into the night. Instead, it is trying to rehabilitate its image, latching onto the backlash against fast fashion and proclaiming itself the antidote. And unfortunately, there are still too many social media influencers and celebrities happy to help promote its message.
The International Fur Federation (IFF) recently made a video with Sophie Hermann, a fashion influencer and cast member of Made in Chelsea with half a million followers on Instagram, in which Hermann waxes lyrical about how wonderful fur is and how she acquired items such as a mink fur hat from her grandma. The suggestion is that we could all be looking in the back of granny’s wardrobe for our next outfit instead of going to Primark, drawing a link between fur and the sustainability of secondhand clothes. But it’s a false impression of what the fur industry actually wants. If people only sought out secondhand furs, this wouldn’t be much help to fur producers; they want people to buy new animal skins to keep them afloat.
In the video, Hermann also promotes the Furmark certification, which is supposed to guarantee good environmental and animal welfare credentials and make products traceable through the supply chain. Furmark tells consumers where the fur came from and which set of standards the product belongs to, e.g. WelFur or North American Farm-Raised Fur. But the welfare standards for these schemes are set by the industry since there are very few legal protections for the animals in the countries where fur is produced.
There is also ample evidence of the abysmal conditions that animals are kept in on fur farms, where the majority of the industry’s products come from. Traceability of products’ origins can be a useful tool for improving their sustainability, but it certainly has its limits when it comes to animal welfare. Knowing that a pelt came from a particular farm or from a wild animal who was trapped - and most likely suffered in the process - killed, and skinned, would only reassure a customer who didn’t genuinely care about the welfare of animals.
Hermann is, unfortunately, far from the only influencer ignoring the messages about fur put out by previous generations of celebrities. Others with much bigger social media followings such as Jordyn Woods and Taylor Ward have posted Instagram pictures of themselves wearing fur, and Megan Thee Stallion appeared in a Rolling Stone feature in 2020 wearing a fox fur coat - all of which IFF of course reposts. It’s troubling that such high-profile people may be helping to revive the fashionability of fur and make it socially acceptable to a younger generation.
But some cases of celebrities wearing fur may be a case of mistaken identity. One online clothing store posted a blog of its “10 favourite celebrities who wear fur” and included pictures of singer Ariana Grande in two different fur coats. Grande has in fact been a vegan since 2013, and one of the pictures from the blog is actually of her wearing a coat by Israeli fashion label Marei 1998 from its “I Am Furless” line. Moreover, for every Sophie Hermann, there is another Ariana Grande; other celebrities who shun real fur include Oprah, Gisele Bündchen, and Dua Lipa.
As for the sustainability of faux fur versus real fur, neither one is especially wonderful for the environment, and one is worse than the other depending, of course, on who you ask. Though avoiding real fur is better for animal welfare and for the sake of reducing the risks of zoonotic disease spread that we saw with the mink farms, simply buying fake fur instead is not the solution. As argued in this Teen Vogue article, which examines the faux fur versus real fur issue, buying less, buying secondhand, and keeping clothes for much longer are vital to improving the environmental footprint of fashion. And despite what the fur industry claims, you don’t need to buy the skins of dead animals to do that.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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