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A little over a decade ago, at the end of a friend’s holiday house party, I went to fetch my coat from a pile on the sofa. It was easy to find in the heap of wool overcoats and down puffers—because it was an unbelievably soft, deep-auburn mink.
As I slipped it on over my dress, I heard a snippet of conversation from a cluster of twentysomethings chatting at the other end of the room. “Fur is murder,” one of the women said. I assumed she was referring to me and my coat, but figured I’d merely overheard a comment not meant for me.
Then, she said it again, louder this time, almost yelling. “Fur is murder!” I looked over, a little stunned. It was clear that this woman wanted me to hear her, but she continued to face into her circle of friends, avoiding eye contact with me, maybe lacking the courage to start a true confrontation.
If I had cared to debate my moral code with this stranger—or if she had demanded a response—I would have told her that I hadn’t purchased the coat myself. I’d inherited the thing from my great-aunt, and I found it more offensive to let the warmest and most expensive coat in my closet rot in a landfill than to honor the exploited mink community by putting the pelts of its dearly departed to good use for another generation. I might have added that, as a vegetarian, I prioritized animal welfare and environmental sustainability at every meal. Instead, I let out an awkward laugh of disbelief and sidled out of the room.
I have been thinking about this episode for months now, ever since fur emerged as the leading trend from the fall/winter 2025 fashion season. On runways in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, designers debuted hundreds of fuzzy garments in a widespread turn toward statement-making opulence. Simone Rocha presented a fur bra that evoked a fantasy of cavewoman lingerie. Valentino trimmed cropped blazers in sleek minky ropes. Alaïa showed sculptural, big-shouldered vests made from flaxen fluff and figure-swallowing coats covered in long, silky hair. Etro dressed models in comically oversized, impossibly cozy-looking fur trapper hats.
Almost all of the fur on the 2025 runways was fake, save for several sumptuous real-fur coats and stoles from Fendi, which was in fact founded as a fur and leather shop a century ago. (More than one-third of Fendi’s runway looks featured fur this year; it’s one of the last luxury brands to offer the real thing.) The major exception to the industry pseudo-ban on real fur is shearling, which gets a pass as a byproduct of meat production. And we’re not talking about the matted, woolly lapels on your dad’s vintage leather jacket: Some of today’s shearling can look almost exactly like mink, as in a luxuriously fluffy shearling coat from Miu Miu or a Ferragamo cape that boasts a subtle sheen one wouldn’t expect of wool.
Big fashion hasn’t backed down from the ethical stance that took hold in the late 2010s, when most major labels stopped using real fur and high-end department stores banned it from their shelves. But the wholehearted embrace of increasingly realistic faux fur and glammed-up shearling among the marquee names in fashion marks the dawn of a new era. Celebrities are already in on the trend: Check out the Jenner sisters looking fuzzy in Aspen, or Megan Thee Stallion at this year’s Met Gala, wearing a colossal Michael Kors coat with a sprawling train in snow-white faux fox fur.
Once so stigmatized that you could be splattered with red paint—or apparently shamed at a house party—for wearing them, furry looks are strutting back into the zeitgeist with an air of unapologetic glamour. Shoppers are into it, too. Women’s Wear Daily reported that, on Net-a-Porter at the end of fashion month, searches for faux fur jumped 220 percent and searches for shearling rose 250 percent. The owner of one major U.S. (real) fur retailer told the BBC that, for the first time in years, college students are coming to the store with an intent to buy, expressing strong interest in pre-owned pieces.
Why now? Fur might be just what we needed in 2025. It’s the ultimate expression of the mob-wife aesthetic: a braggadocious affect, riding the line of classiness and trashiness while taking up considerable physical and psychic space. The style is ripe for this aesthetic moment, with its maximalist textures, layers, and silhouettes—and for the sociopolitical one, which prizes fleeting dopamine hits and rolls its eyes at moral inquiry.
Morality used to be a major factor in the discussion of fur. Over the past several years, real fur hadn’t just fallen out of style—it tanked as an industry. Global fur production fell 85 percent in the last decade, urged along by several European countries outlawing or strictly regulating fur farms. The absence of real fur from trend-setting runways—and, by extension, taste-making fashion publications—surely helped fur lose favor, too, as did California’s 2023 ban on selling new fur products.
This was a sound victory for animal-rights advocates, who had spent decades mounting protests outside stores and fashion shows to bring dishonor on the makers and wearers of fur. Activist groups saved their worst condemnations for newly made real fur, but neither fake nor secondhand fur escaped their scrutiny. The Humane Society advises against wearing any fur-like product, because even if your grandmother’s mink or a today’s furry polyester vest do not support the fur industry or require any animal deaths, they just might look cool enough to influence other people to buy new garments, made of real fur.
It wasn’t just the activists, either. Collina Strada designer Hillary Taymour, who once used deadstock fake fur in her pieces, decided in 2018 that even that was unethical. “You have a responsibility as a designer to create things that aren’t going to trickle down in a wasteful manner or a politically incorrect manner,” she told Vogue. In the fashion world and the real world, fake and vintage fur lost social currency as real fur became less desirable.
As far as environmental concerns go, it can be hard to say whether fake or real fur is worse. Faux fur is made of petroleum-based materials, which are bad for a multitude of reasons: They shed microplastics, their production creates toxic pollution, and they sustain global demand for fossil fuels. But raising carnivorous minks is worse for the climate than making synthetic textiles. One analysis found that a natural fur coat would only have a lesser impact on climate change than a faux fur one if it was worn for four times as many years, which sounds like a long time—until you try to think of anyone whose inheritance included a great-aunt’s polyester “fur” coat.
But in the current resurgence of mostly fake fur fashion, these calculations are beside the point. The return of fur is a vehement rejection of all ethical considerations, in keeping with the YOLO-nihilist vibes of the second Trump administration. In a post-pandemic, increasingly authoritarian, rapidly warming world, people are in no mood to ponder whether they’re chic-washing the mistreatment of foxes and minks. They’re grasping for the quick-hit satisfaction of conspicuous consumption. Fur hits all the primal pleasure receptors we are addicted to smashing in tumultuous, alienating times: It’s rich, comforting, suggestive, indulgent. It’s an Instagram Reel cheese-pull for the body.
Both sides of the political spectrum have declared the era of “fur is murder” social shaming over. In a piece on the rising popularity of vintage fur, the editorial director of 1stDibs told the New York Times that right-wingers love it as a symbol of their newfound freedom in a “post-PC world,” while left-wingers see it as a way to prove their sustainability bona fides. Clothing is no longer considered an area where we’re expected to live our values, so no one is scared of being accosted by PETA on the sidewalk.
The ongoing Trump era, which by my count began in 2016 and never paused, reopened the door to fur by eroding the promise of collective action among people otherwise committed to worthy causes. I’ve experienced this firsthand: In the fall of 2020, when I gave up my 13-year-long stint of vegetarianism, I told myself it was because I was yearning for new experiences and any ephemeral glimpse of sensory pleasure during the monotony of the pandemic. But I think there was something else to it. Witnessing the failure of institutions and people to work together to confront the pandemic had chipped away at my belief that personal sacrifices can meaningfully contribute to a better world. Living in a society that so clearly values individual freedom over the common good has a way of discouraging responsible behavior. Why “be the change” and all that when everyone else is being whatever the hell they want to be?
Part of the appeal of fur is that it represents the epitome of slow fashion: A real fur coat is produced in accordance with the life cycles of mammals, requires specific expertise to construct, and is the rare clothing item regarded as heirloom-quality. Real fur transports the wearer to a time before fast fashion—before the fabrics that pill and seams that disintegrate after three washes, before trend cycles shrunk from years to weeks. Of course, most of the fur that trend-followers will wear in coming years will be cheap and fake, fully embodying the opposite of the thing it’s imitating. But in this moment, people are desperate to wring every last drop of superficial sensual delight from life in an era starved for sources of deeper well-being. A simulacrum of timeless luxury will do just fine.
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