Skin in the game: mink coat at ethical fashion show fuels sustainability debate

The Guardian

10-03-2025

Gabriela Hearst is an ethical fashion designer, with sustainability at the heart of her brand. And she wants to sell you a mink coat.
Hearst's Paris fashion week show included a coat, jacket and stole made from vintage real fur. 'We bought all these old mink coats in Italy, and pieced them together,' she said after her show.
The collection also included fake fur made from silk schappe, which is spun from fibre left over from silk cocoon processing. Real python was used for clothes and accessories using skins from Inversa, an 'ethical exotics' company which sources skins from invasive species. The python skin comes from Florida where, according to Inversa, non-native pythons are causing a severe decline in animal populations in the Greater Everglades.
Hearst's minks are part of a rapid rehabilitation of fur in the fashion industry. A moral battle which seemed definitively won has had its lines redrawn, between those who object to real fur on animal welfare grounds, and those who object to fake fur on environmental grounds. Mass-produced fake fur is often plastic-based, and its critics argue that even if made from recycled plastic, a fake fur coat is not sustainable – a plastic bottle can be recycled many times, whereas once converted into a coat, the plastic is destined for landfill.
Then there is the vibe-shift. Quiet luxury is out, and 'boom boom' is in. Boom boom means gold and greed, visible hierarchy, the return of masculine and feminine as stay-in-your-lane aesthetics. A mink coat is as 'boom boom' as it gets. And while real furs have all but disappeared from most shopfloors in the past decade, they are easy to find in vintage stores – which have become aspirational shopping destinations for many younger style consumers.
Another through line of Paris fashion week has been an about-turn from stadium-scale catwalk spectaculars to intimate shows in smaller rooms with fewer guests, to emphasise an up-close-and-personal reveal of the clothes.
At Balenciaga, the catwalk was whittled to the width of a pavement flanked with simple black office chairs. There was no seating plan – a mind-bendingly radical twist at the shows, where hierarchy is observed with courtly precision. 'I wanted proximity to the clothes, because fashion should feel urgent,' the designer Demna said backstage after the show. This desire for intimacy echoed Friday's debut at Givenchy by the British designer Sarah Burton, where the designer limited the guest list to 300 and narrowed the catwalk to a width which she said was based on 'how close can we get without being caught on a handbag?'
Similarly, at Schiaparelli, models were spritzed with fragrance before they stepped on to the runway, to emphasise how close they should be to the audience.
At Balenciaga, the first three models were dressed in simple black business trouser suits with no discernible gimmicks. They wore glasses and carried briefcases, and their suits had tiny nicks in the fabric, or creases at the back from being sat on. A man in a cotton polo shirt wore a bike helmet, like a courier just stepped off a bike, a woman in a party dress had her phone in her hand.
Some models had their hands balled in the pockets of their hoodies, or carried plastic shopping bags. 'It's easy to put a chair on a head and call it wearable art, or whatever, but I'd rather make a coat that someone tells me is the best coat they've been wearing for the past five years. Fashion is about right now, fashion is about what people wear,' Demna told a scrum of reporters after the show, before his democratic debrief was paused for an interruption by the iconic French actor Isabelle Huppert, the crowd parting for her to give him a post-show kiss. At Paris fashion week, iconoclasm knows its bounds.
Sign up to Fashion Statement
Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved
after newsletter promotion
Intimacy took a different form at Valentino, where the designer Alessandro Michele designed a set based on nightclub toilets, complete with strip lighting and stainless steel soap dispensers, with each model making their entrance from behind a cubicle door.
'A lot of disclosure and intimacy happens in this place, in the toilets of a club, in front of those mirrors,' Michele said after the show. The look was Chappell Roan goes to Glyndebourne: grand-soiree glamour, but with thrift-store tastes and a wink to kink.