As models strode down the Paris catwalks last week draped in
ready-to-wear collections, it was clear that fur is once again the
height of fashion.
London, New York and Milan were also buzzing with new takes on mink, fox, and raccoon furs during their shows.
‘This
year’s autumn and winter collections are completely orientated around
fur,’ says Shelly Vella, Fashion Director at Cosmopolitan magazine. ‘Fur
is not just back — it’s everywhere.
‘The fur industry has
re-branded itself as the ethical alternative to “fast fashion”. I think
this is complete nonsense. People are losing their morality.’
But
fashion is a fickle business and the fur trade knows how to manage
changes in taste better than most. Over the past decade it has spent
tens of millions of pounds re-branding itself as a purveyor of ‘ethical
fashion’.
Although many in the fashion industry have embraced
such claims, an undercover film shot by an animal welfare group — and
seen exclusively by the Mail — will surely give them pause for thought.
Filmed
last month in Maryland and Pennsylvania, the footage shows animals
being crushed, strangled and drowned as trappers struggle to keep up
with booming demand from the fashion industry.
The investigator
from Respect For Animals spent two years infiltrating two groups of
American trappers, who catch animals in the wild as an alternative to
raising and killing them on fur farms.
The groups were chosen not
because they were regarded as being the most cruel, but because they
were believed to be among the most humane. In fact, their pelts are
eligible to be sold under the fur industry’s Origin Assured scheme, the
trade’s equivalent to the organic label.
