For Mina Ely, fur has never been out of style.
With her family’s Russian Jewish heritage, furs were the norm for both esthetic and practical reasons during cold Toronto winters.
“I would always remember when they would go out, or when they would go to shul, it was just something they would wear, because you can’t drive on Shabbat,” she told Cost of Living. “I always looked at my mom like, ‘wow’ … I loved the way it looked. It just symbolized so much elegance.”
Today Ely runs her own luxury fur brand based in Toronto, Arpino, designing coats for celebrities, hockey wives and other wealthy clients. She says business has been up in the last year.
“I always believe that fashion’s a cycle … so it went out for a little bit and then it came back. And then once you started seeing celebrities endorsing it and wearing it, that opened a little of a door of like, ‘hey, this is OK.'”
Ely and others who work in the fur trade and the wider fashion industry say there’s been a recent uptick in interest in wearing real fur — both new and vintage. That’s following decades of contraction in fur sales, largely fuelled by successful campaigns from organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which drew attention to the plight of the animals killed to make fur garments.
Part of the renewed interest, fur industry people say, is linked to growing concern for sustainable fashion, both reusing existing materials — in the case of vintage fur — or in choosing natural materials over plastic-based alternatives that won’t break down in a landfill.
But animal rights organizations dispute claims that furs are more sustainable and more popular, saying it’s just the last gasp of a dying industry.
Canadian furs selling out
Mark Downey, CEO of the Fur Harvesters Auction in North Bay, Ont. — the only wild fur auction house in North America — said he first noticed a spike in interest in the summer of 2023.
That’s when buyers from countries that require visas to travel to Canada started getting in touch to gather the necessary paperwork to attend the auction that would be held the following spring.
“So you got like [people from] Turkey, China, any of these places that want to attend our auction have to call here and ask for what’s called a letter of invitation,” Downey said. “The amount of letters of invitation we were getting requested for, starting in August of 2023, was like every week they were coming in. It was just crazy.”
Prices rose accordingly. The skin of a marten, sometimes referred to as Canadian sable, averaged $49 in 2023, rising to $98.50 at last month’s auction where every species sold out, he says.
“They bought everything, right down to the last hair; we had nothing left, cleaned us right out.”
‘Grandma’s fur coat’s back in fashion again’
Part of the demand, says Downey, is a kind of retro appeal.
“What was cool back in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s is cool again … it was kind of like grandma’s fur coat’s back in fashion again.”
Leah Van Loon, a stylist and fashion writer who splits her time between Calgary and Paris, has been wearing fur since she was a teenage thrift shopper in the ’80s, regardless of whether it was in style.
Lately Van Loon says she’s noticed a resurgence she attributes partly to the fact that, these days, “a lot of young people want to look like old people.”
“You kind of want to look like you are successful. You want to like you’re sort of already at an age where you’ve made it.”
Fur coats also fit with the so-called mob wife esthetic that peaked in early 2024.
“Some of it is cosplay to look like you’re rich. Some of it is also to signal more conservative values, I think, because the U.S. has gone so far in that direction.”
Stronger still, though, is a trend away from fast fashion, she says.
“You don’t need more things; you just need better things that you take care of better.”
Rob Cahill, who runs a new and vintage furrier called Cahill’s in Peterborough, Ont., says the family business just had a particularly good season.
“We sold more volume of fur coats this year than we have in probably 20 years.”
He says thrifting enthusiasts in their 20s and 30s are behind most of their shop’s boost in sales, particularly of vintage coats. Parting with a few hundred dollars — or even up to $1,000 or more — for a second-hand fur they expect to last a long time strikes these customers as worthwhile given a high-quality goose down parka can retail for $1,500 to $1,800, Cahill says.
It also didn’t hurt that it was a particularly cold winter, he says.
Fuelled by interest in sustainable fashion
That tracks with what Anne Bissonnette, a University of Alberta professor and curator of the university’s clothing and textiles collection, has observed.
“People might spend a whole lot of money on outdoor wear that is very high tech, but this outdoor wear … is often made out of polyester and nylon and things that don’t biodegrade,” said Bissonnette.
The front zipper tends to be the first part to fail on new coats and jackets, she says, and since most people don’t bother to have it repaired, those garments wind up in landfills.
Ethically, some will not be comfortable with that, Bissonnette says, despite improvements to programs that help consumers trace garments to particular fur farms to get to know their practices, or, as Mark Downey points out, new, more humane standards for traps on the wild-fur side of things.
“Now, they still get killed at the end, right?” said Bissonnette. “But the same is true for cows, and we use leather.”
Animal rights orgs dispute a fur comeback
The Animal Welfare Foundation of Canada said in a statement to CBC it “does not support industrial-based, non-Indigenous use of animal fur for fashion. The practice of fur-farming is unethical, and subjects animals to inhumane conditions.”
Ashley Byrne, director of outreach communication at PETA, says the organization is aware that “the fur industry is back with the same desperate pitch that they do every year, which is trying to convince the fashion world that fur is back.”
“The truth is that a handful of vintage shoppers have been buying vintage coats for years. Most of those people would never dream of buying a new fur coat,” said Byrne, who lives in New York. “I think it’s a little more visible now because you have all these little micro trends going on, you know, TikTok, and they’re visually blowing up.”
Byrne points to contraction in the industry, which includes the closure of the two other major North American fur auctions in 2018 and 2019, as well as Kopenhagen Fur, the world’s largest fur auction, in 2023.
