Christian Dior offers a crocodile coat with mahogany mink collar, Fendi a feathered sable jacket. There's a mink cape with tails from Armani, and Roberto Cavalli's chinchilla-trimmed kimono. These are just a few of the luxury furs festooning the autumn collections of practically all the top designers, aided and abetted by Anna Wintour, the ice queen editor of American Vogue who adamantly refuses to ban fur from her pages. Just like her fictional counterpart, the demonic glossy magazine editor Miranda Priestly, portrayed by a mink-shrouded Meryl Streep in the new film The Devil Wears Prada. Despite the protests, the exposés and recent declarations of abstinence from celebrities like glamour icon Paris Hilton and the designer Ralph Lauren, fur is firmly back on the catwalk, basking in all its traditional associations with wealth, influence and glamour.
Yet only a few years ago it would have been unthinkable to be seen in public in a fur coat. Successful campaigns by prominent anti-fur lobbies like LYNX and PETA saw celebrities discarding their minks and ocelots and models like Naomi Campbell forswearing any connection with fur. In the UK fur sales plummeted by 75 per cent between 1975 and 1984, and passionate protests against the beastliness of fur-wearing led to the total banning of mink farms and the husbandry of any animal purely for its fur. But all this has had very little impact on what has now become a truly global industry. In North America and Europe, the traditional heartlands of the trade, fur farms continue to flourish, though their dominance is now being increasingly challenged by producers in China, Korea, and Vietnam, where there is little regulation of conditions and the treatment of farmed animals is notoriously brutal.
So how has fur managed to be so thoroughly rehabilitated after such a prolonged onslaught? It seems impossible that it could ever be acceptable again, now that we know what we know: of the smashed heads of baby seals; rabbits whose necks are snapped before they are strung up and beheaded; animals in such agony from the steel traps that crush their bones that they chew off their own limbs; the tearing of soft-pelted foetuses from still-live pregnant ewes; battery cages where crazed minks are forced to cower in the dark until they are brutally killed, usually by electrodes in the anus which will fry their inner organs.
For fashionistas it's simple: fur is just fabulous. The supermodels may have turned their beautiful bare backs on it for a couple of years, but that was really just a fad. Going green was fashionable and now it's not. As one of my fashion lecturer colleagues put it: "If it's a conflict between ethics and glamour, glamour will win every time."
But how did the skin of dead animals achieve a status so hallowed that Flaubert, in his mischievous Dictionary of Received Ideas, defined fur as synonymous with wealth? Its credentials as the height of luxury have been established for centuries, ever since in the early 1300s Edward III published the Statutes of the Realm, which decreed that only members of the royal family, aristocracy and those holding high ecclesiastical office could wear fur.
Throughout the Middle Ages, monarchs across Europe would issue similar 'sumptuous clothing ordinances' in repeated attempts to create a sartorial hierarchy of privilege.
But it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that the fur coat became so absolutely and exclusively a woman's garment, achieving by the 1950s a position of aspirational absolute, lavishly paraded by the sex goddess Diana Dors in the film She Wore Mink and idolised to the point of satire by Eartha Kitt, who used to appear on stage in a stunning full-length mink coat before allowing it to slide carelessly into a heap on the stage.
That's why fur provides such a perfect visual commentary to the action in Some Like it Hot. When we first glimpse Marilyn Monroe at the station in Chicago she's wearing a jacket with a black fur trim suitably enough for the freezing midwest winter snows. But for her first date as a pretend society girl with Tony Curtis's pretend millionaire, she's covered in a floor-length white mink, regardless of the Florida heat. She's moved from necessity to luxury, from the practical to the romantic dream.
For traditionally, a woman's fur coat has been a declaration of a man's wealth. As the cipher, the vessel for displaying his power, the woman in fur represents an extreme version of femininity. And it's that stereotype of womanhood which has been singled out as the naked target of the anti-fur campaigners.
In the massively powerful LYNX poster campaign of the 1980s, the woman in a fur coat is derided as the real bitch, the real dumb animal. Indeed, the crude sexism of such slogans may well have fuelled some women's defiance of the anti-fur brigade.
In Venus and Furs, Julia Emberly compares the tactics of the animal liberationists with those of the anti-abortionists, who also allow a blind devotion to one set of rights to disavow another. Greenpeace parted company with LYNX after its campaigns led to the desecration of Inuit and Dene communities who had traditionally relied on hunting and trapping for their livelihood. It's that most classic of moral dilemmas: the conflict between personal ethics and respect for different cultures.
Those who support the cause of the traditional communities facing such wholesale destruction will point to the qualitative difference between the activity of hunting and trapping out of necessity for food and covering and the factory farming of furry animals simply to provide luxury items. In response, their opponents will often use the example of the Holocaust. "If anyone says to me 'It means jobs,'" declared the anti-fur MP Tony Banks in 1996, "well so did killing Jews in concentration camps mean jobs, probably for the gas oven lighters."
The extreme positions elicited by the fur debate typify the false dichotomy described by Brian Morris (p10 of this issue) between those who cultivate a 'sacramental' attitude towards nature, and those who promote a mechanistic, ultra-capitalist philosophy.
American culture has exalted the spiritual approach, the primeval struggle with the wild frontiers, to the point where it has become the epitome of masculinity in its various guises from Nanook of the North to Davy Crockett. In his celebrated novel White Fang Jack London portrays a rugged team of wolf-hunters:
"But at front and rear, unawed and indomitable, toiled the two men who were not yet dead. Their bodies were covered with fur and soft-tanned leather. Eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals from their frozen breath that their faces were not discernible. This gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral world at the funeral of some ghost. But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space."
They may embody the spirit of the wilderness but London's protagonists also represent a ruthless imperialism: the forces of civilisation which require that nature must be tamed. In the Christian world order, it is perfectly acceptable to conquer the wild and plunder its riches, because God made man higher than the beasts. A similar view was expounded by Descartes, who believed that the ability to use language and to reason made man superior to and separate from animals.
And this is the central tenet challenged by Darwin's theory of evolution. A shocked world recoiled from the suggestion that man was not special, not second only to the angels, not a superior being at all but merely an animal, a descendent of the apes.
So the wearing of fur denotes a bizarre contradiction: a declaration of power over wild animals, but also an identification with them. And one particularly extreme garment seems to epitomise this inner conflict. Inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt's hallmark fox fur, generations of women in the last century would proudly drape a full pelt round their shoulders, complete with paws, tail and face. So unmistakably animal was the cape, so clearly dead, it's hard to determine whether the wearers were basking in the glory of the conquest or submitting to their own natural beastliness.
"The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognised," writes Walter Benjamin in One-Way Street. He concludes: "He may not deny his bestial relationship with animals, the invocation of which revolts him: he must make himself its master."
Fairy tales are redolent with this ambiguity, where animals are both protectors and assassins, invested with magical powers but also with brute, raw nature. In 'Allerleurauh', a variant of the Cinderella tale collected by the Grimm brothers, the heroine flees her father's incestuous attentions by disguising herself in a coat made of many different furs and hiding in the woods. She escapes the unnatural by returning to her safer animal self.
The dark sexuality inherent in our bond with animals is a recurring theme in Angela Carter's lascivious retelling of traditional fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, republished this month. In her version, for example, Little Red Riding Hood beds the wolf, while in 'The Tiger's Bride' the identification of woman with animal is even more palpable.
"He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. He will lick the skin off me!
"And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur."
But while these stories recognise an affinity with animals as well as a revulsion from our own base origins, a dominant male culture has consistently denigrated women by reducing them to animals through descriptors of their pubic hair: beaver, pussy, muff-diving. If you want to know why, you only have to turn to the master.
"Fur and velvet as has long been suspected are a function of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member," declares Sigmund Freud in 'Fetishism'. He explains that through fear of castration, a man may develop an exaggerated sexual attachment to fur: an obsession with the symbol of the castrated phallus and of the castrator: the woman who wants his penis for herself.
In extreme cases, the victim will abandon himself to the castrator, transferring his power to her as a defence against whatever violence she may enact. And this sexual transaction was dramatised and given voice in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's seminal late 19th-century novel Venus in Furs.
Wanda is a self-willed dominatrix who enacts her violent degradation of the hero, Severin, dressed in what would now be regarded as almost laughably clichéd S and M costume: high leather boots, black velvet knee-breeches, a whip and, of course, acres and acres of fur. She is a magnificent creation: savage, tyrannical and driven by her lust for power. When Severin quivers in dread she whips him the harder; when he begs for respite she kicks him.
Wanda is the archetype and role model for every femme fatale whose glamour derives from her brutality: the perfect full lips must be capable of curling in cruelty, the furs disguising the hard, relentless body which they swathe. She's also the origin of children's literary demonesses like Cruella de Ville, resplendent in black and white, whose first reaction on seeing a litter of Dalmation puppies is to imagine the brilliant coat they could make, and Narnia's White Witch, whose furs cannot conceal the frozen heart of a despot who has turned all the furry animals to stone.
For Freud, who insists that woman's essential cruelty derives from the terrorism of penis envy, Venus in Furs is the ultimate exposition of the fetishistic disorder named after its author. Severin, fearing the castrating woman, becomes weak and womanly himself in order to offset the threat. By initiating the exchange he is guarding against it. And it is by association with these deep terrors that fur has come to be synonymous with transgressive sex: with masochism.
What Freud fails to recognise, though, is that it's not a man's penis Wanda craves but his autonomy. As Severin explains: "The moral is that woman, as Nature created her and as man up to now has found her attractive, is man's enemy; she can be his slave or his mistress but never his companion. This she can only be when she has the same rights as he and is his equal in education and work. For the time being there is only one alternative: to be the hammer or the anvil."
Wanda was driven to wallow in her empowering fur. But in our quest for equality, we don't need it any more. Its myriad meanings and tensions may strike deep chords within our troubled psyches. But, as Brian Morris brilliantly demonstrates, that's no reason to succumb to a mistaken polarity between mechanism and spiritualism, mind and body, civilisation and nature. We can embrace our animal nature but also transcend it, evolving "a universal ethics that recognises the sociality and unity of humankind."
So don't be seduced by the touch, the exquisite softness, the incredible transformations that fur can enact. It's a trap, a subterfuge to lure us away from true nature, away from organic, ecological humanism and into the dark forests of oppression and global capitalist savagery.
Venus in Furs has been reissued by Penguin. The Bloody Chamber has been reissued by Vintage
