Everyone’s trying to feel good about wearing fur
(CNN) — Only a few years ago, seeing scores of women strolling around New York City in real animal fur coats would have seemed unimaginable.
Fur has been out of fashion for so long that it’s been decades since Vogue’s Anna Wintour was regularly seen wearing it. (In one of the last instances, in 2005, she was pelted with a tofu pie by anti-fur protestors outside a Paris fashion show.)
But walk around Manhattan – or most cities with a wintry chill – and you may wonder whether you’ve fallen through some kind of sartorial portal to the 1950s, when lush, bracelet-sleeve furs were a symbol of old-world glamour and post-war wealth, or the 1980s, when an ankle-length mink was de rigueur for the peacocking matriarchs of new and old money alike.
Furs have come roaring back, despite continued industry prohibitions like bans at brands like Gucci, Prada and Chanel, and restrictions around the depiction of new animal fur in magazines owned by major publishers like Condé Nast, which includes Vogue and Vanity Fair. The European Commission is also expected to make a decision in March on whether to propose an EU-wide ban on fur-farming. (LVMH, which owns Dior and Louis Vuitton, remains an outlier.)
Rather than shelling out for brand-new chinchillas or classic minks, customers are gravitating towards workarounds that speak to a more considered appreciation for sustainability, and to investment shopping over quick thrills: vintage furs, scored from secondhand dealers online and off, and a new cohort of labels that make fur-like coats out of materials, like shearling, deemed to have less environmental impact.
In short, consumers are fur crazy, and are doing their best to feel warm and fuzzy about it.
“We’re seeing a massive spike,” said Kristen Naiman, chief creative officer of the resale site The Real Real. Searches for “vintage fur coat” were up a whopping 191% year-over-year in 2025, and “mink fur jacket” is up 280%, according to data shared by the platform. Meanwhile, the average selling price for fur outerwear on the site has gone up 18% year-over-year, meaning that buyers are snapping them up more quickly before they become steeply discounted, Naiman said.
Many consumers see vintage fur as a more ethical outerwear choice. “Our sense of what is sustainable, and what is responsible, is actually shifting and in certain ways, getting much more nuanced,” Naiman said. More consumers understand that faux fur is essentially plastic, and that wearing clothes for longer, and shopping secondhand, are more mindful choices. “There’s a part of me that feels that the single most sustainable thing you can do is keep things in circulation longer.”
The vintage look of the furs – maybe a shoulder pad, a dramatic length or standard wear and tear – also emphasizes that this is a used, not a new, piece, potentially easing any moral anxieties. “When a fur is old and gorgeous and lived in, you feel that, and it gives a different vibe,” Naiman said. “There’s an antidote to the hyper-consumption – all the newness, digital, all that.” TheRealReal has also seen a rise in interest in pieces that are labeled “as-is” or “fair,” inspired by the weathered handbags of icons like Jane Birkin and Mary-Kate Olsen.
Women aren’t simply looking for grandma’s castoffs, though. To cater to modern tastes, some designers have turned to shearling, which is touted as more sustainable because it is a byproduct of the meat industry that would otherwise be discarded. Shearling coats, many indistinguishable from traditional furs, have been all over runways for the past year.
This thinking has minted new fashion stars. While Nour Hammour was founded in 2013 to create the proverbial perfect leather jacket, the brand has zeroed in on shearlings that speak to a luxury consumer who is newly conscious of sustainability. In the past two years, the Paris-based outerwear label, which sells on Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter, FWRD and Moda Operandi, has become a phenomenon among a subset of tastemakers (Lauren Santo Domingo, Melania Trump) for its imaginative use of shearlings.
“We use shearling and leather that are by-products of the agriculture industry,” the brand’s cofounders, Nour Hammour and Erin Webb, wrote in an email. “The animal is not raised for its hide, which is fundamentally different from fur farming, and nothing is discarded.” Hammour and Webb note that while they shifted away from a made-to-order model two years ago, they keep their inventory “intentionally lean.”
“At the end of each season,” they explained, “remaining materials are reimagined into limited-edition jackets or small accessories, extending the life of what already exists.”
Many of Nour Hammour’s pieces, like its Luxurious Robe Coat and Decadent Shearling Pullover, could be mistaken for furs. Like fur, the material “offers the same warmth and visual richness, but within a very different sourcing framework,” the founders wrote. “That texture carries a kind of quiet visual confidence that resonates right now. It feels indulgent yet grounding, statement-making yet practical. Women are drawn to that balance.”
The RealReal has also witnessed the Nour Hammour obsession: searches for the brand were up 207% year-over-year in 2025. Taylor Barnett, writer of the Substack “Driving Shoes,” which specializes in secondhand luxury, said that her affiliate links to Nour Hammour products have driven the second highest conversion of any brand after The RealReal, with one reader spending $4,500 on the label. “They have a timeless appeal,” Barnett said, “but not in a way that feels like something I could just buy vintage.”
Reflecting on their success, Hammour and Webb wrote: “People are buying fewer things, but they’re buying better things, and outerwear is one of the few categories where that shift is very visible. A coat isn’t a trend piece; it’s something you live in.”
Of course, a woman buying fewer and better doesn’t have to buy a fur coat – she could select a vintage cashmere or wool instead. So why is she reaching for such extravagance? Naiman said that fur more broadly points to a confluence of politics and personal style. “The elephant in the room is that there’s a [President Donald] Trump of it all – a sort of political moment where blinginess and things that are considered front-leading fashion-wise – we’re through with quiet luxury, and then we’re also back into personal style.” Unlike a designer piece that may be instantly recognizable, furs vary. “Our individuality, and our hyper focus on wanting to look individual and have an individual signature – it’s like, fur is an immediate signature style.”
The consumer interest is in contrast to broader trends in the fashion industry, which has grown increasingly unfriendly to fur. Last year, after both Condé Nast and Hearst banned fur, the Council of Fashion Designers of America, announced that it would no longer permit the use of animal fur in collections shown on the official New York Fashion Week calendar.
These moves came in response to pressure from anti-fur groups. For several months in 2025, activists from the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT) camped outside of the houses of various Condé Nast editors’ homes, and protested at the New York retail outpost of American Girl, which is owned by Mattel, whose board members include Condé CEO Roger Lynch.
CAFT’s executive director, Suzie Stork, said that the organization chooses its targets based not on their prolific use of fur, but on their visibility. “Traditionally, with CAFT, our campaigns have focused on individual luxury brand designers,” Stork said. “Maybe in the last year, we started shifting our attention to, I would call them, broader cultural institutions, like Fashion Week, fashion publications – this is where the trends are born or reborn.”
Looking at the efforts of CAFT and other organizations like PETA, the anti-fur movement largely appears to have been a success. “What we hear is that pelt prices are down,” said Stork. “Sales have slowed significantly.” Stork advocates for the use of plant-derived materials like BioFluff and Fevvers, which emulate the look of fur or feathers without harming animals.
Yet somehow consumers have found a way around the stigma, by convincing themselves that they’ve made a more ethical choice. In fashion – or more importantly, in shopping – we will seize on anything that gives a purchase a sense of purpose. “Look good, feel good” isn’t just about the caress of a fuzzy creature’s hide under your hand; it’s about the emotional lift that comes with making a naughty purchase. Giving our acquisition of an indulgence the gloss of idealism makes the purchase go down much more easily. Purr.
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