The Skin Game

MINK and sable, the Big Two of the fur world, can still be seen on the salon racks, regal as ever in traditional brown or black. But their luster is somewhat diminished this season by bright new competitors designed to make the fur--and the fur sales--fly. Right up there with the mink and the sable, the chinchilla, the ermine and the fox, are such low-status pelts as wolf, monkey, weasel, bull and yak. Without examining the label, however, even a zoologist would have trouble identifying the newcomers. For the furs have become checked, striped, flowered and wholly unrecognizable. Mostly they have been dyed. The dusty drabs have all but vanished; mink has gone pink, and puce, and pimento, and so has everything else. There is aquamarine beaver, lavender chinchilla and ore number, of Manchurian weasel, in a curious, yellow hue.

Moreover, the skins have been newly shaped. Although some elegantly fitted furs have always been available for years, most designs were amorphous clumps, minimally styled and varying only in depth of cuff and the width of hem. The new models are cut with an eye toward lean grace and contemporary flair. Now, there are gently fitted capes and coats, designed with spare straight sleeves and narrow shoulders and waists that do not swaddle the figure but merely graze it. Now, in fact, there is fur that does the work of cloth.

Warmth and Style. "It is the young," according to Furrier Jacques Kaplan, "who are making furs an up-front fashion. They do not want status, just warmth and style." With youth in mind, and to revive a market that dropped 40% in sales between 1947 and 1967, Kaplan branched out into inexpensive furs like mink paw, fitch and squirrel. When they caught on, he went farther still--this year into wildcat, Spanish bull and monkey.

Kaplan's colleagues are hard on his heels. Emeric Partos will not tamper in any major way with the Big Two: "A mink is a mink," he says with reverence, "and a sable is a sable, and I will not tear them, trim them or tuck them." Nonetheless, Partos has rimmed a black Alaskan seal cape with flowers made of 40 different ersatz shades of mink. Revillon Furs' designer Fernando Sanchez likes a long-haired mink, worn with the fur inside, that presents a hairless--though embossed--exterior.

Five-Finger Exercise. It was Madame Potok, grande dame at Maximilian Furs, who first treated fur like a fabric; an old-style mink coat weighed twelve pounds before she scissored away at waists and armholes, sleeves and bulky seams and reduced the total to a mere four pounds. This year's collection moves Madame Potok to grandiloquence. "For the girl who forgot her gloves," she has a broadtail coat whose sleeves drip ermine over naked hands ($7,800); "for unheated castles," there is a black mink, floor-length caftan with a gold-beaded bib front ($5,900); "for a five-finger exercise," a calfskin coat, dyed an unpretentious wine and appliqued with black antelope in the shape of fingers ($1,815).

Not all the new furs are so high-priced. Some of them (wolf, mole, bull and hamster) cost well under $700, several (rabbit and fox paws), less than $300. The customer will obviously be paying more for the labor than for the fur. For, as Kaplan says of the new furs, "We have plucked them, unplucked them, sheared them, dyed them, cut them out, stenciled them and printed them. In other words, a little bit of God, and much of man."

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