Fur Is Flying in Beverly Hills Over Coat Label Issue
Hackles have been raised. Attorneys are getting involved. In Beverly Hills, the unofficial fur capital of the West, if not the world, fashion-conscious women are reacting as though they’ve just seen the latest Blackwell list.
“It’s just madness,” says mink shopper Gail Jones.
“Ridiculous,” says fox aficionado Barbara Colvin.
“I’m just appalled,” says shop owner Wanda Presburger.
The issue is a warning label that may soon be required on new fur coats sold in the city, explaining how the animals were killed--i.e., the possibility that they were clubbed, electrocuted, gassed, stomped to death or drowned. The City Council voted Tuesday night to put the initiative on the ballot for a special election May 11, a major victory for an animal-rights group called Beverly Hills Consumers for Informed Choices, which collected more than 3,300 signatures.
As social movements go, it does not yet rank with women’s suffrage or international human rights, but the burgeoning effort has caused an ample stir on Rodeo Drive. Fur buyers are outraged. Fur sellers are apoplectic. The issue has vaulted right to the top of the agenda for the spring meeting of the Fur Information Council of America, a trade group scheduled to convene in Beverly Hills this very weekend.
“What [the activists] are proposing is inflammatory language that may or may not be true,” charges Keith Kaplan, president of the Southern California Fur Assn., who maintains that farm-raised furs are killed by the means deemed by veterinarians to be most humane. These animals, he insists, are a “renewable resource,” while some critters in the wild are best served if their numbers are kept in check. Beavers, for example.
“If they were allowed to run rampant,” Kaplan says, “they would cause more than $2 billion a year in damage just in the state of Louisiana. They are voracious little buggers.”
Of course, some fur buyers don’t much care one way or the other.
Colvin is one of those. The blond retiree from Santa Clarita, who was visiting a well-known Beverly Hills fur boutique Wednesday, conceded that she owns eight furs and has never given so much as a passing thought to how the animals died.
“My attitude is, they were already dead before they put the coat together,” Colvin says. “I just see it and think, ‘I’ve got to have that.’ ”
A longtime enthusiast, she bought her first fur--a mouton, or lambskin--about the time she graduated from high school in 1947. She went on to mink and leather, bought both stoles and full-length coats.
“There’s nothing more exciting than a fur wrapped around your body,” Colvin gushes, recalling how she slept with her first fox coat. Of the activists, she says, “I think some of them are probably a little envious that they can’t have them.”
More than a few fur fanciers do have moral qualms--they don’t want the animals to suffer. But, they wonder, why pick on furs? Other animals die in the name of shoes, belts, purses, chicken dinners. Why worry about fur coats and ignore all those?
“I’m sure a chicken doesn’t like its head cut off,” says Jacque Heebner, a party planner who owns four cats and a Doberman in addition to the llamas, minks and foxes stashed away in her closet. “There’s nobody who’s more animal-oriented than I am,” she says.
The debate is especially heated because furs have regained favor in recent years, in spite of the ongoing efforts of animal-rights groups.
“All the tenants on Rodeo Drive have fur products,” says manager Caroline Cohen at Fendi, showing off a $32,000, full-length moleskin coat and a $9,350 chinchilla scarf. “Fur is coming back. It’s a natural product, no allergy. It keeps you warm. It makes you feel good to touch it--like you pet your dog, you pet your cat.
“People don’t ask me how they kill it,” she says of the pricey merchandise. “They say, ‘Oh, it’s mink! Where does it come from?’ ”
Presburger, whose Somper Furs boutique is one of the oldest furriers in town, says a lot of her clientele are women in their 30s thrilled to discover that many of today’s furs are nothing like the coats their mothers wore. The new designs are trendy, versatile. She held up one example, a blue beaver biker jacket that sells for $2,500, just a fraction of the cost of the mink and sable coats on a different rack.
“So the price is very affordable,” Presburger says. “It wears like a sweater.”
Presburger, a board member of the Fur Information Council, vowed to fight the ballot measure with all the gusto she could muster. An attorney is flying in from Chicago, and 150 furriers and fur farmers are planning to attend this weekend’s conference, she says.
Born in Poland under a Communist regime, Presburger said she is terrified by the specter of oppressive government regulation.
“Look, Hitler was a well-known animal activist,” she says. “Should the initiative pass, it really gives other radical movements an opening: ‘Come to Beverly Hills. You’re welcome with open arms.’ The city becomes a play toy.”
