At Last, the Mable

In the realm of fur, sable reigns while mink merely serves (albeit nicely). A sable coat costs about $15,000; a good mink runs around $6,000. Still, mink has qualities that no other fur can match.

It is sleek and lightweight, lustrous and warm. "You can do anything with mink because it handles as easily as cloth," says Ernest Graf, executive vice president of Ben Kahn Furs Corp. "Mink is durable. Mink is beautiful."

For years, fur animal breeders have wanted to combine the practical qualities of mink with the lush fullness of sable. The goal has now been reached; next month a brand-new variety of sable-like mink goes on the market. Called "Kojah" for reasons best understood by the trade (although the name does have a bit more class than "mable" or "sink"), the fur is much thicker and softer than conventional mink and less bulky than sable.

Founding Father. The new breed was born of frustration. In 1945, a group of Midwestern mink ranchers and businessmen decided to try to start a sable industry in the U.S. Since all the best sables were in the Soviet Union, the group offered to swap live American mink for live Soviet sable. Their Russian counterparts agreed and the animals were exchanged. Though the sables arrived in fine health, there was a rather serious problem: all the males had been castrated.

In retaliation, the Americans toyed with the notion of sneaking into the sable grounds of Russia's Baikal region and doing a bit of poaching. They even went so far as to pick a leader for the expedition: a much-decorated Army lieutenant colonel named Carl Piampiano. The harebrained scheme never materialized, but Piampiano was by then intrigued with the mink business and bought himself a ranch in Zion, Ill.

Buyers would stop at the farm and say, "Your pelts have quality, Carl, but they lack size." Mulling over this, Piampiano remembered a friendly Indian guide in northern Canada who had boasted of catching rare, big, square-nosed, smooth-haired mink. He wrote to the guide, asking for one of the brutes. Two years later, in 1951, "Big Boy" arrived in Zion and became founding father of a new breed.

Well-Invested. Piampiano carefully bred Big Boy to his conventional mink, anxiously watched for large, square-nosed offspring. It took twelve years to produce 13 such mutants. Finally the breed began to multiply as nicely as well-invested money. Piampiano franchised 22 top mink ranchers to raise the new minks.

Some 5,000 pelts are now ready to go before the auctioneer in New York. While conventional mink skins average about $35 apiece, fur experts figure that the new pelts will sell for as much as $2,000 each. This means that the first mable coats, made up of some 50 skins, will cost $150,000 or more. Piampiano hopes that his partners will produce 35,000 pelts in 1970 and eventually reach 100,000 pelts annually--hardly a dent in the 7,000,000 mink skins on the U.S. market last year, but enough to bring the price per coat down to a less incredible $15,000.

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