Faux fur, yet not-so-faux concern? Fashion is under its siege. Again.
For a brief moment in recent contemporary culture, publicly wearing (or alluding to) fur was anathema to everything one desired to embody. Lately, a tectonic shift seems to have insidiously seeped into our collective fashion consciousness, breaking the grounds of our common sentiment. The blame is hard to place within this resurgence – after all, fur has forever been a treasured prize of luxury, the most plausible commodity of status-showcasing (and what is fashion week if not exactly about that?). While use of real fur is still condemned at large in the industry, the most recent fashion season in Milan evinced a playground for the designers’ & consumers’ deep, yet frowned upon desire; overall, in the ready-to-wear realm, animal prints and textures are having their conquest (and it seems like they are gaining territory, fast).
Read below our (albeit tiny) curation of this month’s most evocative examples.
Tweed, corduroy and faux leather – heavy Giorgio Armani slid through the fur-indulgent pipeline by shy additions to its traditional silhouettes and a classy culmination in fur jackets; it’s eccentric counterpart, Emporio Armani, went head-first, incorporating vast furry pieces within their brand’s established maximalism.
David Koma launched in full Milan season new collections encapsulating the essence of the entire surge. Cheetah, zebra and deer prints are showcased through Koma’s sculptural silhouette dresses and bodysuits in the Resort 2025 collection. Correspondingly, his Menswear line is subdued by foxy, voluminous (very) real looking fur coats and handbags.
Miuccia Prada & Raf Simons’ collection remains, however, the prime example of the subverted eroticism of animal fur. While SS20 was the last recorded time the Prada house ever integrated real fur into their garments, their AW25 Milan menswear collection denotes a stubborn, pseudoreal take on the use of the controversial material. There is a certain rebound to the primitive in the cuts and the Western motifs put forward in the collection, as the designers themselves emphasized. The pinnacle of the strive for nostalgic liberation lies in the faux fur patches and faux sheep-skin thrown over models’ shoulders, torsos and heads like perfectly clean carrion, a necessary detail in the construction of their animalistic eros.
While anti animal cruelty still permeates the fashion scene in declaration and ideology, the catwalk view is blinded by vivid pieces denoting a crave for facsimile fur. Is the line between aesthetics and ethics getting fuzzy again, and what will these developments imply for the upcoming fashion year?