What fashion used to accept: fur, exotic skins and the values of the time

Fashion likes to present itself as a matter of taste. It is at least as much a record of what a society was willing to accept.

When fur was simply luxury

For most of the last century a fur coat was not controversial. It was the photograph you took of your success. It appeared in advertising, in film, on the shoulders of the people other people copied. Nobody argued, because nothing about it needed arguing.

That consensus did not survive. Not because fur stopped being warm or expensive, but because the conversation around it changed, and then the houses changed. Today a long list of luxury names no longer use fur at all, and several capitals have moved against it in law and in retail.

Then exotic skins carried the meaning

As fur receded, exotic skins carried the same signal for a while. Crocodile, python, lizard: scarcity as status. That, too, has begun to move. Houses have withdrawn from exotic skins, retailers have stopped stocking them, and the conversation now sounds a great deal like the earlier one about fur.

Nothing in fashion was ever normal for good. It was normal for a while.

The pattern is the point

• A material becomes ordinary luxury because everyone is using it
• The reasoning behind it is examined and does not hold
• The most confident houses move first, and are called radical
• A decade later the same choice is simply good taste

We are somewhere in the middle of that pattern with animal leather. It is still the default. It is also increasingly a question, and questions do not get quieter.

Where a house can stand now

VOGAYA started from the position that beauty should never require harm. That is not a trend forecast, it is a design constraint, and it produced two pieces we are proud of: Bambote in bamboo leather at AED 1,750, and Espressa in coffee leather at AED 1,450, both PETA-Approved Vegan and designed in Dubai.

The values of the time will keep moving. We would rather be early than explain ourselves later.