(Re)presenting Fur
- May 30
- 3 min read
By Tineke De Witte and Kirsten Russo
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fur catalogue developed within a changing commercial culture of production, print and consumption. New manufacturing methods expanded the availability of luxury goods, while developments in printing and photography, such as halftone reproduction, made it possible to produce illustrated catalogues with increasing regularity and refinement. For furriers, and other luxury fashion retailers, this created new opportunities, allowing the visual, material and sensory qualities of fur to be carefully staged across the page.
The catalogues of the Brussels furrier Raymond Mallien show how this process worked in practice. Each year, changes in layout, typography, illustration and photography gave fur a shifting visual identity. At the same time, the catalogue helped shape the public image of the firm, presenting furriers such as Mallien as modern, selective and visually attentive to the rhythms of fashion. The fur catalogue therefore performed important cultural and commercial work: presenting fur as both an established and modern form of luxury.
One important way the catalogues presented fur as modern luxury was through space. Mallien’s catalogues, for example, were often placed fur within recognisable settings: bourgeois interiors, intimate rooms, theatres, museums and Brussels cityscapes. These spaces played a key role in how fur garments were to be understood. Interiors, for example, associated fur with comfort, domestic affluence and cultivated display. Theatres and museums linked it to leisure and cultural refinement. Urban landmarks situated the firm within the architectural and social fabric of Brussels. The catalogues also included manufacturing spaces, where skins, workers, and workshop processes appeared as part of a highly organised and expert trade. Fur was thus situated within a wider urban culture of skilled making, fashionable consumption and public display.
These settings also reframed how fur’s material qualities were understood. Fur’s desirability rested on qualities produced by animal bodies: softness, warmth, sheen. In the catalogue, these qualities were translated into the language of fashion. Fur appeared as texture, silhouette, atmosphere and status. Its animal presence remained materially important, but was also carefully managed and reorganised through styling and setting. Skin became surface, fitted to the gestures, interiors and social rituals of the modern city.
Other fur catalogues and advertising ephemera from the period show that this negotiation could take different forms. For example, animals appear as prey, companions, caricatures, decorative motifs, as well as refined textures and objects. These representations demonstrate the different ways in fur could be imagined: as rare, exotic, natural, playful, fashionable or luxurious. While Mallien’s catalogues typically tend to emphasise the finished garment and the social world it enters, other catalogues brought the animal more directly into view. The animal’s presence in fur advertising was therefore carefully adjusted to the particular image of luxury each catalogue sought to produce.
To examine historical fur catalogues critically is therefore to look beyond changing styles of fashion and advertising. It is to consider how fur was made meaningful through images: how animal matter was converted into surface, how surface became fashion and how fashion was attached to particular spaces, behaviours and social identities. In Mallien’s catalogues, luxury is not an inherent property of fur. It is constructed through visual arrangement, commercial repetition and cultural setting. Fur becomes desirable because it is made to belong to a world of refinement, even as that refinement depends on the remains of animal bodies.
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