The following article first appeared in the National Post, Canada, Feb. 21, 2004, and is reproduced with permission.

It's Safe To Wear Fur Once More: Animal-rights folk have lost the ability to intimidate

By Sondra Gotlieb, best-selling author, journalist and wife of Allan Gotlieb, Canadian Ambassador to the United States, 1981-88

It's February, it's cold and I'm thinking it might be nice to have a warm fur coat when I walk the dog. She's got one, so why shouldn't I?

Not too long ago, women were afraid to wear anything furry in case they were doused with red paint by PETA, the animal-rights people. These red-paint incidents are no longer in the news, if they happen at all. During Fashion Week, at Bryant Park in New York, the animal-rights protesters were out there picketing, but, for whatever reason, they have lost the power to intimidate. Furriers are no longer going bankrupt and fashion designers now put fur on everything, including bikinis. In fact, fur coats are flying off the rack.

The saleslady at Holt Renfrew told me this has been their best fur season in years. What happened to make the fashionistas, an easily cowed bunch, suddenly unafraid? Is it that the police have cracked down on the violence?

Or is it that fur doesn't look like fur any more? When you walk down the street and see someone wearing a fuzzy lime green coat, you can't tell if it's mink made to look like Polartec or Polartec made to look like mink.

Where are those pelts? I remember when female mink pelts were considered finer than male pelts. Or was it the reverse? Now nobody talks about pelts.

That's because pelts remind us of the animal . Blackglama, very pelty, is déclassé.

Within the past five years, new techniques have been developed so that mink and other furs are sheared, plucked or knitted to resemble velvet, feathers or wool. Sometimes they cut the fur in grooves so the coat or jacket has a professorial corduroy chic. And the furs are dyed to match the colours of meadow flowers. They can and will do anything to fur, just so it doesn't remind us of the cute little critter it came from.

At the dry cleaner's, I bumped into a friend of my daughter's and admired her attractive purple jacket decorated with what seemed to be red embroidery on the patch pockets. Was she wearing fur or some sort of synthetic?

"Sheared beaver," she said. It looked warm and wonderful and I wished I were tall enough to wear something like that.

In Winnipeg, where I was born, everyone used to wear fur coats, even the policeman. They would stand around in 40-below weather keeping warm in huge buffalo coats. Stand around was the operative phrase: The reason they stopped wearing the coats was that they were too heavy. The police couldn't run as fast as the crooks. In those days, police spent more time on the streets than in squad cars.

Men, including my husband, wore long raccoon coats, and women wore persian lamb (not considered warm enough for Winnipeg) muskrat, seal, raccoon, fox and, if they had the financial resources, mink - the lightest, warmest and most desirable fur apart from sable. I never set eyes on a woman wearing sable until I went to Washington and then it was just a stole.

Mother wore a classic postwar mink stole - which, I'm told, is making a comeback. She and her friends also used to wear those squirrel pelts around their necks that sported animals' heads decorated with glass eyes. This was the Eleanor Roosevelt fashion symbol. Plump Bess Truman, hardly a clotheshorse, sported a pale grey mink stole. At least that was what she wore in Oxford, in 1956, when I watched her husband receive an honorary degree.

Winnipeg, colder than Moscow, home of the Hudson Bay Co., had a substantial fur industry. None of my mother's pals ever bought a coat retail. Each knew a little guy in the wholesale district who would make her a coat for half the price she would pay at Eaton's or Holt Renfrew or the Bay.

At least that's what they believed. The little guy would bring out pelts, which would be closely examined by one of their friends who was supposed to know about fur. After scrutiny and the choosing of the pelts, the little guy would make my mother and her friends a style that would be classic, meant to last, not some crazy fashion they were showing this year in New York or Montreal.

When I was in Washington a few women wore fox boas as an evening cover-up. They were about $500 at Neiman Marcus. From Winnipeg, my mother brought me a duplicate from her little man. I paid less than $200.

When I lived in Ottawa I shopped for groceries in an old mink coat that had belonged to my mother-in-law. It had worn-out skins and the coat was much too big for me. This was in the '70s, when the "vintage" look was not considered fashionable.

That's always been one of my problems - being right too early. I'm sure that coat would look sensational now, despite its pelts. If I do buy a coat this year, it will be red and sheared to look like velvet. Perhaps it will be beaver. Or should I think mink?

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