By Rachel Tashjian, CNN
(CNN) — Only a few years ago, seeing scores of women strolling around New York City in real animal fur coats would have seemed unimaginable.
Fur has been out of fashion for so long that it’s been decades since Vogue’s Anna Wintour was regularly seen wearing it. (In one of the last instances, in 2005, she was pelted with a tofu pie by anti-fur protestors outside a Paris fashion show.)
But walk around Manhattan – or most cities with a wintry chill – and you may wonder whether you’ve fallen through some kind of sartorial portal to the 1950s, when lush, bracelet-sleeve furs were a symbol of old-world glamour and post-war wealth, or the 1980s, when an ankle-length mink was de rigueur for the peacocking matriarchs of new and old money alike.
Furs have come roaring back, despite continued industry prohibitions like bans at brands like Gucci, Prada and Chanel, and restrictions around the depiction of new animal fur in magazines owned by major publishers like Condé Nast, which includes Vogue and Vanity Fair. The European Commission is also expected to make a decision in March on whether to propose an EU-wide ban on fur-farming. (LVMH, which owns Dior and Louis Vuitton, remains an outlier.)
Rather than shelling out for brand-new chinchillas or classic minks, customers are gravitating towards workarounds that speak to a more considered appreciation for sustainability, and to investment shopping over quick thrills: vintage furs, scored from secondhand dealers online and off, and a new cohort of labels that make fur-like coats out of materials, like shearling, deemed to have less environmental impact.
In short, consumers are fur crazy, and are doing their best to feel warm and fuzzy about it.
“We’re seeing a massive spike,” said Kristen Naiman, chief creative officer of the resale site The Real Real. Searches for “vintage fur coat” were up a whopping 191% year-over-year in 2025, and “mink fur jacket” is up 280%, according to data shared by the platform. Meanwhile, the average selling price for fur outerwear on the site has gone up 18% year-over-year, meaning that buyers are snapping them up more quickly before they become steeply discounted, Naiman said.
Many consumers see vintage fur as a more ethical outerwear choice. “Our sense of what is sustainable, and what is responsible, is actually shifting and in certain ways, getting much more nuanced,” Naiman said. More consumers understand that faux fur is essentially plastic, and that wearing clothes for longer, and shopping secondhand, are more mindful choices. “There’s a part of me that feels that the single most sustainable thing you can do is keep things in circulation longer.”
The vintage look of the furs – maybe a shoulder pad, a dramatic length or standard wear and tear – also emphasizes that this is a used, not a new, piece, potentially easing any moral anxieties. “When a fur is old and gorgeous and lived in, you feel that, and it gives a different vibe,” Naiman said. “There’s an antidote to the hyper-consumption – all the newness, digital, all that.” TheRealReal has also seen a rise in interest in pieces that are labeled “as-is” or “fair,” inspired by the weathered handbags of icons like Jane Birkin and Mary-Kate Olsen.
Women aren’t simply looking for grandma’s castoffs, though. To cater to modern tastes, some designers have turned to shearling, which is touted as more sustainable because it is a byproduct of the meat industry that would otherwise be discarded. Shearling coats, many indistinguishable from traditional furs, have been all over runways for the past year.
This thinking has minted new fashion stars. While Nour Hammour was founded in 2013 to create the proverbial perfect leather jac