My mother didn’t give me much advice, but one thing she told me was, “Make sure you wear the clothes and they don’t wear you.” As I flounced out of the house at thirteen in my shiny, purple hot pants I didn’t know what she meant but now I do.
I found myself this week at a dinner party sitting by a lady in a leopard skin. It was, she explained, an antique; the waistcoat she was wearing would once have been a coat and over the years as it had been worn away it had been cut down to make gloves, hat and gilet.
It was mesmerising. The skin was so beautiful –intricately patterned like the wing of a butterfly. I’d never been that close to a leopard before – seen them in zoos lolling lazily on branches, but never in the wild and never at the dinner table – so I couldn’t help but stare at the intricacy of the spots, each one reminding me of a leopard’s paw prints.
It came at a time when I have been clearing out a maiden aunt’s house. My aunt was a staunch vegetarian, member of Greenpeace and WWF. She would carefully capture spiders from the bath and put them in the garden, bake organic buns for the birds and worked tirelessly for the donkey sanctuary. Therefore I was surprised to find two fur coats, lovingly wrapped in moth balls in the attic. One was made of moleskin. I recognised it as my mother’s.
Goodness knows how many moles it had taken. Must have been at least a few hundred. The other was brown bear. It was Granny’s. I didn’t know why they were still there, I supposed that she had kept them for sentimental reasons. Old clothes usually got sent to the local Oxfam shop.
Then I found a note that said: “Took to Oxfam, they refused them, too good to throw away.” So here is my dilemma, what shall I do with them?
I have never had a problem with fur and skins from farmed animals. After all, we all wear leather shoes. But animals hunted for the scarcity of their pelts is something else. It was the fickleness of fashion and the industry’s demands which brought about the near extinction of the spotted cats. Their populations have been devastated by the huge numbers killed for their fur.
In 1962, the US President’s wife, Jacqueline Kennedy was, literally, often spotted in her leopard skin coat. It became the height of chic to have coats, trousers and handbags made from leopard, cheetah, jaguar and ocelot. In 1964 alone, 50,000 leopard skins were exported from East Africa, while in 1968 the US imported 157,419 spotted cat skins with a similar number finding their way into Europe.
If I lived in the Russian steppes, facing temperatures of minus 30 I would, no doubt, be grateful for my brown bear coat, but there has always been something ostentatious about furs in temperate climates. For my taste, it’s too much of a status symbol. Goes with personalised number plates and gold medallions. And the truth is that the price of fashion has been the almost total extinction of species like the snow leopard. There are still those who go to Nepal and try and buy one from local poachers, even though it is against international law and actually illegal to possess one.
There are just a few hundred snow leopards left in the wild. It’s worth remembering that most leopard skin coats use up to seven animals, the last ones, before the ban, were sold in the US for over $50000 dollars.
So I am left with my mother’s words of wisdom and a sadness at our silly vanity. What we wear tells the world a lot about us and, in my view, wild animal skins look much better on the animal they were meant for. Their beauty merely mocks ours. Does anybody want a brown bear coat?
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