How the leading designers fell for new adventures in the skin trade

Blame Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, for promoting fur in the world's most powerful fashion magazine. Not even a bloody raccoon, tossed onto her dinner plate by an anti-fur activist in New York's exclusive Four Seasons Hotel, could extinguish this woman's passion for mink.

Blame Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, for promoting fur in the world's most powerful fashion magazine. Not even a bloody raccoon, tossed onto her dinner plate by an anti-fur activist in New York's exclusive Four Seasons Hotel, could extinguish this woman's passion for mink.

Blame Catherine Zeta-Jones and Liz Hurley for snuggling into skins other than their own in the full glare of the paparazzi flashlights. Blame Jerry Hall for wearing the odd mink coat or chinchilla trim. Blame Sean 'Puff Daddy' Combes for promoting floor-sweeping silver fox coats in his "ghetto fabulous" menswear collection and blame fellow rap stars Lil Kim and Missy Elliot for sporting as much fur as possible at one time. Blame all those high profile twits marching around in their sable, skunk, fox, rabbit and multi-coloured mink, shrugging at the idea that they could ever give up fur because 'it wears too well with gold'.

But most of all, blame designers. "I can't emphasise how important it is that more and more designers are using fur," says Jan Brown of the British Fur Trade Association. "In the autumn / winter 2000 collections, 240 of the world's top designers were using fur, six times more than in 1985 when records started."

Fur has always put in an appearance on the winter catwalks, particularly in Milan and New York where luxury goods companies reign supreme and fur is inextricably linked with anxieties over status: it defines who you are. But no-one could have predicted the full scale fur fest - later coined the "rich bitch" look - as it swamped catwalks across the board in every fashion capital.

While few British fashion editors batted an eyelid when they saw the ultimate in luxury goods swoosh down the Gucci or Versace runways, they turned a paler shade of puce at the kaleidoscope-coloured fur-flying Fendi show. Leopard skin? Lynx? Fox? Mink? Fendi used them all, and very little else. What exactly were the British anti-fur-policy magazines going to feature from a label that is so generous with its advertising budgets?

Sadly, it isn't just the major labels who have embraced fur. Saga Furs of Scandinavia, which produces the majority of the world's farmed fox and mink, has been canny enough to push fur at college level, just when impoverished students are most vulnerable to the offer of fabric worth thousands of pounds. It is currently in talks with a variety of colleges including Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, specifically to promote the use of fur as a fibre with textile students, and it has recently worked with young designers across the board, from Jeremy Scott in Paris to Bella Freud and Julien Macdonald, although Macdonald dropped Saga as a sponsor hours before his autumn/winter show after receiving threats from animal rights protesters.

"There is absolutely no point in any designer doing fur to sell in the UK," says Macdonald. "No-one will touch it, retailers can't sell it."

Even in Harrods it is impossible to find a fur coat, and any garment carrying a fur collar or trim is labelled.