POSSIBILITIES OF FUR ARE NOW LEGION

Southland Times, Issue 24153, 15 June 1940, Page 12

POSSIBILITIES OF FUR ARE NOW LEGION

Until a - very few years ago there was no satisfactory response to the fur coat prayer except for the woman with a sable-mink income and even that—apart from the fact that it did place people—was not entirely satisfactory. Rabbit, dyed a hundred different “unrabbity” colours, still remained rabbit. Other furs, dearer than rabbit but cheaper than mink, ermine, or sable, were hideously unbecoming and so women either went without or plunged on a wildly expensive coat which had to be worn morning, noon, and night, and on every day when the thermometer didn’t actually soar over a hundred degrees. And what shapeless garments even those were! In the last few years, however, furriers have learnt new tricks. They cater for the woman with a handsome dress allowance by showing her such luxuries as peach-dyed ermine (long enough to sweep the floor) and woo her with platinum or silver red fox, and they prove to the-woman-with-nothing-a-yeai- that there is value in furs with long-wearing furs which they dye, fluff up by turning upside down (they do this with kolinsky), strand, clip, shear and shave and tailor like cloth. The list of fur possibilities stretches almost to infinity. There is, of course, chinchilla, which is being bred in England now and which may, in time, cheapen to silver fox prices (furriers remember when a good silver fox skin was almost priceless). At the moment it comes way up at the top of expensive furs, followed by sable (the finest skins come from Siberia and are imitated by skunk, baum-marten and kolinsky, which are all being dyed as near its wonderful blueish-black colour- as possible), ermine (which isn’t quite as much of a luxury in Australia as it is in London where a London fog will yellow white ermine in a night), mink (which has had years cut off its age by being flared and bloused) and fisher (which Paris, following up the craze for all things Victorian, has revived again).