Orange County Summer : Cool Cats : It’s That Time of Year for Affluent to Shed Their Prized Furs for Safety of Cold Storage

The heat’s on in Orange County. And as fields of lima beans shade to green and spring fades to summer, a few thoughts turn to fur.

That’s right, fur.

“Heat is the worst enemy for furs,” said Carol Eisenstein, an assistant buyer at Nordstrom’s fur department in South Coast Plaza. “They have to be kept in cold storage.”

At the Revillon fur salon at Saks Fifth Avenue, fur coats and hats are “flocking in at this time of the year,” manager Thelma Sanders said. “Not caring for your fur is like buying a car without putting any oil in it.”

It’s reverse hibernation time. Just as live furbearers burrow into holes for the winter to save their hides, fur owners save theirs by putting them into cold storage for the summer. After all, who needs to be wrapped in sable now that those nippy Balboa winter nights have passed?

It makes good business sense, too. Furs can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Neiman-Marcus recently advertised a $300,000 coat.

But even a lowly $12,000 mink needs looking after, what with fur prices having jumped a third last winter, according to Sandy Parker Reports, a weekly newsletter for the international fur industry.

Storing a favorite pelt only costs about $40 for the season.

“You’re looking at a long-term investment in a piece of wearing apparel that can have a second or third life if you keep the pelts in good condition,” Saks’ Sanders said. “I’ve seen furs come in as new as 7 years old in dreadful condition because the skins are dried out.”

“It’s supposed to be good for your fur,” said Pam Nestande, wife of former Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande, who stores her coat with Revillon at Saks because “I just liked them.”

To prevent that $75,000 Russian lynx coat from degenerating into something more closely resembling a road kill, it must be properly protected. That means keeping the fur from two summer scourges, heat and moths, said Michael Jacques, master furrier and proprietor of M. Jacques in Newport Center’s Fashion Island.

“Furs have natural oils and a natural tendency to dry,” said Jacques, who for 20 years has draped Orange County’s social set in fur. “In the heat, they dry, of course, faster. You also need a certain amount of humidity, not too much, not too little.”

So it’s into a dark storage room for the well-tended pelt, kept carefully at 48 degrees Fahrenheit with 35% to 45% humidity.

While kind to the fur, these wintry conditions are unfriendly to unwanted pests such as moths.

If left to their own devices in a closet with a sheared beaver coat, the insects burrow into the pelts, lay eggs, then the hatching larvae eat the hair follicles, Jacques explained, grimacing.

“When you get moths in the fur, that’s why the hair falls out,” he said.

But don’t try to put that fur in your own fridge, Jacques warned.

“It’s not a piece of meat,” he said. “In one day, the fur will be ruined. It will get wet, mildew and shrink. It will destroy it.”

The cold storage season typically runs from late spring through Thanksgiving for Southern California furs.

Jacques, who is retiring in June to study Japanese after 56 years in the business, used to hang 2,000 furs in the storage room above his Fashion Island shoproom, and another 1,000 were stored off premises.

He said he can remember storing a coat dyed to match one customer’s kitchen wallpaper. Another client had her baby’s mink dyed irridescent pink to match her own. But his favorite was the coat dyed emerald-green for a customer who marched in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, Ireland.

Two exotic coats in his storage room have been there for 20 years, Jacques said. The leopard- and jaguar-skin coats were banned for sale--somewhat after the fact--by federal law. Not that he would want to part with them anyway, he said.

“I plan to make them (into) pillowcases for my apartment,” Jacques said.

Back in the days before more efficient methods of refrigeration, “we beat furs with bamboo sticks,” the 69-year-old furrier said. “Like a drummer, once a month, every piece of fur. You have to disturb the skins to get the oils out.”