World Top Stories News - Fendi milan fashion week spring summer 2013 : Haute celebrity, impeccable designer pedigree, and some often excellent clothes, shoes and bags - the spring/summer 2013 Fendi show in Milan had them all.
Yet despite the presence of Sharon Stone, the imprimatur of Karl Lagerfeld and a collection that my neighbour concluded "will be the one everyone wants to wear next season", Fendi presents a problem for many British fashion editors.
For Fendi is Italy's pre-eminent fur house, and fur - in the main at least - remains beyond the pale in Britain.
There were, it is true, plenty of fur-free looks in a collection notable for what Lagerfeld termed its "violent pastel" palette, the Bridget Riley-esque patterns applied to the company's highly-coveted handbags, and some wonderfully loopy, studded-heeled, Sydney Opera House-shaped shoes.
Nonetheless, even in summer, Fendi will always offer its customers fur. The first catwalk ensemble was an astrakhan and mink coat - its arms dyed with a colourful mosaic check - that came teamed with a handbag from which dangled a dice-like fur cube. And a panelled coat of goat, mink and fox, delicately hand-painted with a colour-splatter relief reminiscent of Martin Sharp's 1960's Jimi Hendrix 'Explosion' poster, was one of the key closing looks.
Seeing either of these featured in a British magazine next spring is highly unlikely, as most maintain strict no-fur editorial policies. British fashion, however, is riddled with double-standards on the issue: many designers on the London Fashion Week roster accept sponsorship from the fur company Saga on the understanding that they will feature fox, mink, squirrel or rabbit in their shows.
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Meanwhile, the fur business is booming internationally, fuelled by an insatiable demand from China, Russia and the newly-rich BRIC-nation elites that seems entirely undiluted by moral delicacy or concerns about animal cruelty. Global fur sales are worth £9.2 billion, whilst around 7,200 European fur farmers generate an estimated £1.2 annually.
Talking to British journalists this week, Miuccia Prada ingeniously explained away the flower-relief fur coats in her show as totems of feminine freedom: "You can't enjoy flowers because... people will laugh at you. It is the same with fur. So much is forbidden now. We have to behave."
These are the kind of elaborate hoops of logic through which we British fashion fur refuseniks must jump.
As one French fashion editor watching the Fendi collection commented, her voice dripping with irony: "Ah yes. We know you love animals in England. That's why you let so many beasts and dictators live in London." Hmm.
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