The Skins Game: Canada's Fur Trade Revival

Jessica Barrett

| December 1, 2010

Image by: Paul Joseph

Snowflake Trading Co.'s Rokie Bernstein, outside her new Vancouver store, says fur is hot once again – despite the concerted protest efforts of the "antis."

Canada’s fur trade – arguably the country’s oldest industry – has suffered through recessions, protests and changing consumer tastes. But after two decades of decline,  things are finally looking up. Thank the Chinese.

In the world of high-end fashion – and certainly in the wake of a recession – the presence of brash signage heralding fire-sale prices at a posh boutique is generally interpreted as a very bad sign.  

And so it might have appeared to anyone walking down West Georgia Street in late September. There stood the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver’s lone independent Canadian tenant, a clothing store called Snowflake, its street-level windows blotted out with poster board displaying the kind of slogans you’d expect to see in a used-car sales lot, not a prim ladies shop specializing in Canadian-designed fur, leather and cashmere outerwear.  

“Prices so low we’re practically giving it away! Come in and make us a deal!” the signs read.  

How Fur Coats Are Made: Okay, so a few lynx, minks and beavers were harmed in the making of these videos

It seemed the end was nigh for a store that had held its own in the hotel lobby, alongside neighbouring luxury boutiques Gucci, Louis Vuitton and St. John, for more than 16 years. And if it were Friday, between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., you might formulate a theory as to why. Anti-fur protesters, as they did most weeks at that time, would be handing out pamphlets outlining the cruelties of the fur industry. A glance around would reveal very few fur-clad people on the street, and you might conclude the Canadian public’s tendency to regard fur as politically incorrect and passé had, at last, conspired to put Snowflake out of business. Perhaps, you might also infer, the country’s iconic fur trade was not far behind. 

You would be wrong.  

“The bad news is, the traditional fur coat is dead. The good news is, fur is hot,” says Rokie Bernstein, the diminutive 63-year-old founder and CEO of Snowflake Trading Co. When we first meet on a muggy August afternoon at a Davie Street sushi bar, Bernstein is far from calling it quits. The protesters may have succeeded in getting her out of the Fairmont – after years of enduring demonstrations, hate mail and harassed staff, hotel management announced her lease would not be renewed when it came up at the end of September – but Bernstein is undeterred. She’s busy opening a new store just down the street, at the corner of Pender and Howe.  

The Vancouver store is one of five Bernstein-owned boutiques located in popular tourist destinations across Western Canada, including one at Chateau Whistler and three in Banff, where she opened the first Snowflake in 1979. Intended as a high-end alternative to the many trinkety souvenir shops flooding the Alberta resort town, Snowflake quickly gained an international reputation for its Canadian-made or Canadian-designed fur-, leather- and skins-based garments, reaching its peak of seven locations by the mid-’90s. A decade later, that number was down to five: four under the Snowflake brand and the fifth a Banff-based cashmere boutique called Miriam Joy, named for Bernstein’s late mother. Sensing fur was headed for a renaissance, Bernstein also launched three private labels during the past decade, Il Fait Froid, Gazelle and Honey Furs, designing them in-house using primarily Canadian furs, but manufacturing in China to save costs. Although Bernstein doesn’t consider herself a furrier – by definition furriers store and repair fur, and Bernstein does neither – skins-based garments have always been Snowflake’s bread and butter. While styles and sentiments have vacillated wildly over her 30 years in business, Bernstein says sales have not, though she declines to provide specifics.  

Tags

Barbaric fur industry is the

Submitted by Justtrudeau (not verified) on Wed, 2010-12-29 20:23.

Barbaric fur industry is the disgrace of Canada. This industry is dying industry. Canada is not China so far, but step by step is becoming hypocritical puppet of ruthless and brutal communistic Chinese Monster.

Jessica Barrett argued to an

Submitted by MichelleKay (not verified) on Mon, 2010-12-13 23:51.

Jessica Barrett argued to an activist after publishing this article that it was written to show people the other side of the fur story, but I argue that there are not two stories here – the merchant’s story and the activist’s story – there is one story. Whatever profits this industry ever accrues will always be derived from violence. The Skins Game starts off on a faulty premise: taking the word of Rokie Bernstein - whose fur business was recently evicted from the Fairmont Hotel - as fact. “While styles and sentiments have vacillated wildly over her 30 years in business, Bernstein says sales have not, though she declines to provide specifics,” Barrett writes.   Isn’t it the writer’s job to dig deeper and challenge Bernstein to provide details to make these claims real? If Bernstein is not able to account for statements like these, then Barrett needs to be accountable for deriving the information from other sources. Another murky point - Barrett’s article claims that Snowflake Furs only carries fur from Canada, with rabbit fur from China as the one exception, but Snowflake’s website states: “Now that fur is hot again, Snowflake and Miriam Joy feature another private label, Il Fait Froid, furs and furries from China. Gazelle and Honey Furs are the newest private labels to join the team. Honey Furs are not so traditional-traditional furs mostly in mink. Both Gazelle and Honey Furs are made in China.” So does Snowflake obtain other furs from China as well? Or simply send the raised and killed Canadian furs there for fabrication? (Taking away jobs from Canadian workers to preserve Canada's identity.) I went into Snowflake and asked for an answer to this question, leaving my email address over a week ago. I have not received a reply. The girl at the counter did send me to furisgreen.com though, referring to it as Snowflake’s website, when it is actually a national (greenwashing) website. Barrett includes numbers in her article about how many millions have been made in fur sales over recent years, but does not examine these sales alongside comparable textiles and garments. How many faux fur coats are selling in comparison? What other types of dress coats and winter coats are available on the market? How do the sales of these alternatives compare? Because dropping fur seems to be just as hot lately. Aritizia officially went fur-free this fall, as did Bebe a few years ago, and even fur-loving Karl Lagerfeld dropped fur from Chanel this spring, too. Other fur-free designers: Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hilfiger, to name a few. Another question: how does Rokie Bernstein – who is so concerned about animal welfare that she supposedly traveled to China to tour rabbit fur farms - feel about purchasing fur from a country whose first animal welfare law was only put into place this year (watered down to become more cruelty-based, less welfare-based for economic reasons). (china.org) Not to even begin to question if Bernstein has the credentials to decide what makes a humane fur farm when she is personally profiting from the lowest production costs possible. If she was playing the skins game fairly, she would hire a neutral party who actually knew what they were doing. Yet another glaring fact omitted from Barrett’s article is the ban on Canadian seal products implemented this year across the entire European Union, despite Steven Harper’s tantrums. (canadians.org) This unprecedented ban exemplifies an international acknowledgment of the cruelties of the fur industry and Senator Mac Harb’s cross-country campaign in 2009 provided photographed and filmed proof that the Canadian seal pelt is no longer worth what it used to be – piles of discarded pelts dumped into landfills after sales plummeted in April of 2009. (The Senator and the Seals) At the end of the article, Barrett attempts the “you can’t be anti-fur if you eat meat” argument via Kai Chan, even though she spent the beginning of the article classifying fur as a luxury (ie. something you don’t need). Many activists are not okay with having animals slaughtered for one reason and not another, but instead of stopping all violence at once or none at all, activists focus on fur to eradicate from society its most frivolous forms of animal abuse (eg. fur, foie gras, veal), using progressive reform. And using the concept of a cull (humans need to kill animals to keep them under “control”) defies the very concept of green – that nature sustains itself best when humans leave (little to) no trace. Bernstein claims that she is being bullied. She is not a victim. She is probably not living out her life confined to a cage no bigger than her own size and will probably not die by being vaginally electrocuted, as many fur bearing animals are. (alv.org) The quest to abolish fur is not about Rokie Bernstein or Megan Halprin. No one is bullying these ladies or Canada’s “identity”, which, by the way, is not up to them to determine. The biggest misconception is that animal rights activists want a fight. They might be angry and hurt, but they don’t want a fight. They want better laws to protect animals and they want to live in a less violent, entitled world. Rokie Bernstein is an activist of her own right, on a mission to conserve a violent world and make money off it. Writers like Jessica Barrett who give Rokie Bernstein a podium to garner more credibility and more profits are just as responsible for perpetuating the cycle of violence in fashion. Bernstein swears that fur has never gone out of style, but should we really be taking fashion advice from this woman? Clearly she would be stopped by Stacy and Clinton for overdoing it. Better to take fashion advice from Tim Gunn (Project Runway) who questions why anyone would buy fur these days when such believable alternatives exist. Barrett recently replied to a concerned activist that she didn’t include clear information about how fur is actually derived because this has already been well documented and publicized for the last 25 years, but this information has not been well documented by the mainstream media. Barrett also said that her article was written to make people think more about their consumer choices, but the feedback I have been hearing from readers so far is that it sounds like a paid advertisement. And since the mainstream media dares not get in the way of business - maybe, in an indirect way, it is.

Adrian Nelson sounds like a

Submitted by yasmine (not verified) on Sat, 2010-12-04 12:15.

Adrian Nelson sounds like a self-righteous moron. The connibear traps might look vicious, but they are the best way to kill an animal: instantly. There's no chance that the animal could be left alive and suffering until the trapper returns for his prey. And his comment about "To say (the fur industry) reflects who we actually are I think is bogus" is also ridiculous. Fur is local, sustainable, biodegradable, and lasts long, which is a great way to describe Canad'as most prestigious fashion export. Personally, I'd prefer for everyone to be buying one fur coat every ten years, than buying jackets made out of petrochemicals and synthetic fibers. How many animals did the Gulf of Mexico oil spill kill?