When real fur is both cheaper and less damaging to the planet and its environment than fake fur, it throws the antis into a tailspin as they watch the fashion industry go to the real stuff for all the right reasons.
With fur back in fashion, you’d expect there to be some cheaters out there passing off faux fur as the real thing. In an ironic twist, however, Humane Society International (HSI) cautions consumers that some designers are actually using real fur, and trying to pass it off as fake.
Why fake? Because as Alice Hines points out in Vice i-D, “Fake fur is a political statement as much as a fashion statement.” That may be so, but “[M]any people now seem to regard wearing fur as a matter of individual choice,” writes Richard Conniff in National Geographic on the return of fur to the fashion world. “In some cities you are more likely to be glowered at for texting while walking,” he adds.
The antis attribute this fake faux fur phenomenon to economics, with Claire Bass, HSI UK’s executive director, telling Daily Mail that, “real fur can be made more cheaply than fake fur.”
So what is the cost of faux fur?
‚ÄúAcrylic, the principal fiber in fake fur, is bad for the planet,‚Äù reports Vice i-D. ‚ÄúIt had the worst environmental impact of nine fibers studied in a 2014 report by the European Commission, coming last in four out of six categories including impact on climate change, human health, and resource depletion.”
In contrast, fur farming and trapping, like hunting, involves a renewable resource. “[W]e only use part of what nature produces each year without depleting wildlife populations or damag[ing] the natural habitats that sustain them,” explains the Fur Council of Canada. “Thanks to modern wildlife management and trapping regulations, there are as many beavers and muskrats in North America now as when the Europeans first arrived in the continent. Raccoons, coyotes and foxes are more abundant than ever.”
