The queen’s new clothes … will definitely not be real fur

As the fashion industry falls out of love with animal pelts, so has the royal family. We won’t see a repeat of the hat worn on Christmas Day in 2010.

Camilla and Charles on Christmas Day in 2010. Picture: Getty Images

Some good news for mink. PETA, aka People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has received a letter from Buckingham Palace informing them that the Queen “will not procure any new fur garments”. Queen Elizabeth declared something similar in 2019. This week’s missive went on to state that “this comes with the Queen’s warmest wishes”. Though not quite warm enough to write the letter herself clearly.

This doesn’t rule out Camilla wearing items that are already in her wardrobe, however. Take the vast brown fur hat she last wore in public on Christmas Day in 2010, its proportions synonymous with the kind of footstool one can imagine fireside at Balmoral, which is, incidentally, ground zero – all 50,000 acres of it – when it comes to the royal family killing furry and befeathered things.

It’s unlikely we will see that hat again, though. It caused what might be called a furore at the time, the type of brouhaha that pertains specifically to the wearing of animal pelts. Fur is a bad look these days, whether you are from posh hunting, shooting and fishing stock like Camilla, or you are a more-is-more glamazon like Donatella Versace. (Versace began to phase out real fur five years ago. Fendi, a fur business in origin, is one of the few luxury brands still to sell it.)

Camilla wearing a rabbit fur scarf in 2006.

Camilla’s mother-in-law was sporting similar that day, the pair of them looking like something out of The Nutcracker or, to bring things closer to home – their home – the Foot Guards of the Household Division. The animal rights group Animal Aid accused both women of “an ostentatious display of cruelty”. Camilla’s statement that the fur had belonged to her grandmother and had merely been retooled by the milliner Philip Treacy didn’t calm the waters.

On the subject of the Foot Guards, their hats are, incidentally, still made of bearskin, a fact that is increasingly causing a furore of its own. Stephen Fry is among those making a fuss. The Ministry of Defence has stated that bears are not hunted to order, but that the pelts are a product of “legal and licensed hunting” in Canada. It also claims to be open to alternatives.

The origin of this – let’s be clear – entirely preposterous headgear, which dates back to the early 1800s, was to make soldiers appear taller and thus more intimidating in combat.

Humans may have first used fur because it was a nature-given way to keep warm, but for centuries it has also represented a sartorial flex. No wonder our royals and aristos – along with every other country’s – have long had a thing for it. Henry VIII wore so much of the stuff that in a number of his portraits he looks akin to a bear himself.

Indeed, as last year’s coronation underscored, our royal family’s procurement – to adopt Camilla’s turn of phrase – of animal by-products is, historically speaking, um, manifold. There was so much attention on whether or not Camilla’s crown would include the controversial Koh-i-Noor diamond (it didn’t) that no one even mentioned its ermine trim, nor Charles’s, nor the fact that more stoats (yes, ermine is the pelt of the more workaday-sounding stoat) gave up their lives for both the King and Queen’s robes.

Then there was, among other things, Princess Anne’s remarkable swan feather bicorne. Comedy hat No 4 as far as this article is concerned was conceived as a kind of sartorial semaphore that made it easy to identify senior commanders on the battlefield, but, it transpires, it is also great for blocking the view of a rogue nephew. What wasn’t in the coronation line-up this time round was ambergris from the intestines of whales and civet oil extracted from small mammals, both of which were used to anoint the new monarch in the past (yuk!).

Still, when it comes to Camilla’s personal wardrobe we haven’t seen anything other than faux fur for years. (Not that faux fur is without issues from an environmental perspective.) The new letter merely puts in black and white an eschewal that has been in place informally for some time.

After the 2010 debacle she went out and bought six – yes, six – faux fur titfers from Lock & Co, all of them dreadful, and has been inflicting them on us ever since. A crime against fashion, certainly, but I suppose I’ll take that.

The Times