THE COAT WITH A STORYFashion

Just two weeks in 30 degrees can make you totally forget what it’s like to be cold. So landing at Heathrow from Sri Lanka last Sunday in just a hoodie and leggings (glamorous travel wear always) was a bit of a shock. After several months of Autumn, it felt like London had truly descended into the icy pits of winter while we were away. Action needed to be taken….
So on arriving back at my family home for Christmas, I dug out my great grandmother’s fur coat from hibernation. It’s so thick, warm and feathery, it temporarily turns you into a baby penguin – just what you need when trying to become warm blooded. I know there is a lot of hate around fur, so I wanted to give a little back story as to how and why this coat came to be.
During the rationing years of World War Two, my great grandmother bred rabbits for food. They lived at the bottom of the garden and were used for food when meat was rationed to one pound a week per person (game wasn’t rationed). Not for everyone I’ll concede, but having not lived through that period of historic hardship myself, I’m certainly not going to judge this decision to put a bit more food on the table when times were tough. Anywho, she saved the pelts of the rabbits one by one and years later when the war was over, turned them into a fur coat which was passed down to my mum. It’s since been very lonely tucked away in a wardrobe for years so I’m pretty chuffed to finally be taking it out into the big wide world again.
I wanted to flag the background story of this coat to clear up any confusion and hopefully quell any concerns. Some people immediately jump to ‘disgusting’ and ‘cruel’ at the first sight of fur and sometimes this is fair (we all remember the horrible angora rabbit video). But other times, it pays to learn a little more before jumping to any conclusions. I’m not going to be cooking up a rabbit stew anytime soon, nor am I encouraging anyone else to for that matter, but I appreciate knowing this coat is a beautiful, natural and warm by-product of a bleak period of world history. And I like to think my great granny would appreciate knowing those rabbits are still being put to good use today.