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Are you fur real? Gone is the social stigma around wearing animal skins | Ellie Violet Bramley

From gen Z’s interest in ‘natural’ materials to the darker ‘boom boom’ aesthetic of the Trump era, the trend wheel has turned back to pelts, says Ellie Violet Bramley, the Guardian’s acting fashion and lifestyle editor

Cut to now and, several years of anti-fur campaigning later, you might have thought that the outlook would be different, that fur would be an archaism at best and an ethical abomination at worst; the embodiment of a bygone era when we were still using the planet and its creatures like they weren’t going anywhere. At one of the buzziest shows of London, Simone Rocha, models including Alexa Chung walked in faux fur (yes, no animals have been killed, but the optics are the same). But we can’t lay this all at the feet of gen Z. I have a hunch that many people never stopped liking the aesthetic of fur, and would still have worn it – even in the knowledge of the cruelty involved – had it not been for the shame factor.

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