by Lisa Marcinek

The fur industry is widely touting its influx of new design talent this season and promoting the fact that this phenomena has put fur back on the fashion map. Certainly many young designers and established ready-to-wear names have thrilled the fashion press with nontraditional furs, but whenever designers begin to work in fur, they hit certain obstacles and must get past certain traditions. While innovative ideas -- or at least a fresh perspective -- might be what will force the trade to move forward, this is not an easy process. Along the way, designers, manufacturers and fur technicians experience frustration that can seem an insurmountable wall. Yet, when brilliant young people like Veronique Miljkovitch decide to work in fur, the entire fur trade must respond if it is to practice what it preaches: that fur is indeed part of fashion.
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"At first I found fur very creative," says Miljkovitch. "But when I was presented to a manufacturer and began to work, I found that I couldn't do anything I wanted, so I changed my mind."

Such was the Montreal designer's first encounter with fur as a student at Lasalle College in 1992 and a winner in the Fur Council of Canada's design competition, that it's surprising she continued to explore the medium. Yet she entered again in 1993, won the contest and a chance to go to Denmark to study at Saga Furs of Scandinavia's International Design Center. Saga's outlook on fur was so much more forward-thinking, that she decided to stay in the field of fur design.

"They're so advanced compared to Montreal," says Miljkovitch. "They respect new ideas and didn't make me feel like I was crazy. That convinced me that there are other things to do with fur than just traditional styles, that I wouldn't be wasting my time designing fur.

Saga returned her enthusiasm. The pelt marketing association's think tank asked her to create part of its 1995 Inspiration Collection, which tours the world annually, offering furriers new design ideas. Her portion, called Ethnic Light, showed off not only her unique vision and philosophy about fur, but also the best and most natural qualities of the pelts (which quite possibly is why Saga decided to use them to promote their skins).

Miljkovitch believes that fur should be sporty, casual and more accessible than it has been. She also believes in interpreting it in its most natural state, emphasized by primitive, Aboriginal design influences such as rough edges, suede cross stitching and natural details like wood or horn buttons. She also tries to use mostly natural colors. All of this is designed so the wearer gets the message that fur a natural, ecological product. As opposed to some young designers who want to obscure fur's natural origins in order to defend the product from possible animal rights harassment, Miljkovitch feels it's important to emphasize that fur is the most ecologically correct fabrics there is: it is renewable, recyclable and biodegradable.

In order to achieve her fluid, casual designs most effectively, however, Miljkovitch used some of Saga's advanced processing and cutting techniques, ones which make a garment totally fluid, malleable and unlined -- reversible to its own hide if necessary in order to eliminate the weight of adding lining. When she returned from Saga and signed a license to design a collection for Jean Crisan Furs, Montreal, she found herself dealing with the everyday realities that face new designers.

"We've been doing everything we can to execute Veronique's designs the way she sees them, but those dressing techniques just aren't available in North America," says Steve Zuckerman of Jean Crisan. He's been trying to get North American dressers to suede the leather side of the mink, to make it "hide-out," but without much luck. This is a common technique in Europe, but sending garments to be done there is prohibitively expensive.

Meanwhile, marketing furs that look different from the everyday norm also can be a tricky task. Designer-level merchandise never sells the quantity of units that commercial merchandise does. There are considerably fewer retail outlets for it, and it must rely on the support of an inspired buyer. Unique designer lines can be viewed by successful manufacturers as their "prestige" collections only, made more to generate publicity than for profit.

Even given these expectations, Miljkovitch's downtown Manhattan style, which could be viewed as bohemian primitive, is not so outrageous as to make it unsalable. It just has to find the right consumer, one who is sophisticated enough to appreciate its signature chic -- because it is chic, despite its rough edges. What else could be expected from a young woman whose family includes French aristocrats, who grew up in upper Ontario, where she learned to appreciate nature, but then moved to Paris for her formative years -- ages 17 to 22. That was where she got bitten by the design bug and started her fashion training.

This cultural mix also makes Miljkovitch one of the most modern thinking of the new young fur designers. At age 30, she is the picture of urban practicality. Which means she is a study in contradictions. As a designer, she is acutely aware of the society she lives in (she defines designers as artists who are sensitive to what people need to wear, and she gets inspiration from what's "in the air" this season, be it cocooning or glamour).

This means that she is refreshingly honest and unfettered by animal rights sentiment amongst her peers. She approaches it head-on, saying, "Before I went to Saga, I viewed fur as a luxury. I didn't want to use pelts the same way. I wanted to make them casual and functional. I think that a lot of the bad publicity fur has gotten has been due to the fact that people saw it as frivolous and therefore wasteful. They disguised this sentiment as ecological concern, but it's not."

And in case you didn't hear her the first time, hear this: this young designer is so sure of her convictions that she plans to use seal as trim on some leather pieces in an outerwear collection she's planning to design and produce herself for Fall '96. She's anticipating heat for her decision (realizing full well that she won't be able to export anything containing seal to the United States, Canada's largest taker of fur garment exports), but she's ready for it.

"They don't have the correct information," she says of activists. "But a lot of people haven't even thought about it. Right now there is an overpopulation of seal. Fishermen are on welfare, because the seal have eaten all the cod. Killing animals is not pretty, but it is reality. The seals are not going anywhere. Maybe if people see a garment they really love, and then they're disappointed to find out it's seal, it will make them think seriously about the issue."