Word: coats
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When Anna La Barbera, a 33-year-old psychotherapist from White Plains, N.Y., bought a silver fox coat in 1984, she did so with joy and absolutely no hesitation. She would like to replace the aging fur, however, and she is in a quandary. "There's nothing like the warmth of fur," she says. But her physician husband is concerned about animal rights, and the arguments of anti- fur activists have moved her. "I've been struggling with the dilemma of buying fur," says La Barbera. "I like the look, but I feel real guilty." She is now shopping...
...Barbera's dilemma is increasingly common among American women. Until recently, owning a fur coat, usually a mink, was an unquestioned emblem of luxury and social status. But lately a growing cadre of animal-rights activists has been aggressively denouncing such garments as "sadist symbols" that, they say, require the deaths of some 70 million helpless creatures each year (about 50 minks for each coat). That emotional claim has touched off a bitter battle that pits the animal lobby against fur owners and an increasingly embattled fur industry. So nasty have the hostilities become that in some cities around...
...force. Last month Trans-Species Unlimited, an animal activist organization, staged its fourth annual Fur-Free Friday in 90 cities across the nation. In New York City some 3,000 protesters, led by perennial TV game-show host Bob Barker, marched down Fifth Avenue carrying signs and taunting fur-coat wearers with shouts of "Shame!" Says Barker, who resigned last year as host of the Miss Universe pageant because contestants wore fur: "We want people wearing fur to be embarrassed when they walk into a restaurant. Fur is obscene, fur is cruel, and fur is archaic." Two weeks...
...ruining his business. The show aired gruesome video clips of animals caught in brutal leg traps. On an upcoming episode of Designing Women, narcissistic Suzanne Sugarbaker is mauled by anti-fur activists. When Atlanta disk jockey Scott Woodside this month mentioned that he had bought his wife a mink coat, listeners deluged his station with calls. The result was an informal poll in which the anti-fur forces carried the day, 702 to 684. Said Woodside: "I was extremely surprised...
...women -- and fur-wearing men too -- are starting to think twice before they shrug on a fur and nip off to the office or the grocery store. Ever since she was called "animal killer" on the street, Susan Singer, a Manhattan executive, has been ambivalent about wearing her fur coat. So is New York department-store employee Suzanne Pandjiris, who still wears her mink but fears attacks by protesters. "It makes me nervous," she says...