"On a gut level, I decided to experiment with materials I've never worked with before," Collins recently told furs.com, explaining her decision to use fur for the first time. "It's part of the evolution of my work, the material growth. I'm responding to an esthetic that is natural and primal feeling. Perhaps caveman sophistication is my response to the whole luxury trend; it's a more primal and sensual experience."

The result is a blend of fur with Collins's now-signature knits. She is best known for her knit-grafting technique, in which a layer of fabric is fused using suture-like stitches with a knit fabric during its construction. For fall 2001, she sliced pieces of frosted shearling and curly lamb and fused them to knits of other material for effects that are sometimes like roofing tiles in disarray and sometimes romantic lace edges. The knits themselves are made of different yarn recipes, or varying blends of cashmere, wool, alpaca and nylon.

"I wanted to get over the idea of fur as a status symbol, to not see it as so precious. It's just another material, and I think these are accessible furs," Collins said of her first fur endeavor. She expects to use more next year, since she "ran out of time" to do everything she wanted this year.

That's a bit hard to believe, since the furs shown here evoke a myriad of reactions and references in their unique use of the material. At first glance, perhaps, some are off-putting and irregular to traditional fur consumers. These certainly aren't furriers' furs; there is no mink or fox, no let-out work and no rich-bitch haughtiness, acknowledging that Collins's fans are often young, downtown girls who wouldn't buy these furs for their status value. Her fall 2000 collection was a store best seller by Kirna Zabete in New York City and Hanna in Tokyo.

But a closer look shows why Collins has been heralded as a standard-bearer for some of the latest movements in fashion, ranging from deconstruction to neo-punk to organic. This year's fur-trimmed, long cardigan with safety pin closures brings all of the above themes to mind. Apparently this particular garment is so popular, it has prompted a retailer bidding war over the rights to carry it this fall.

Collins describes her influences as punk but romantic. "I'm a child of the '80s, and that's part of what I grew up with. But I don't hear as much discussion as I'd like about the sense of decay, disintegration and anarchy that was part of that esthetic. Those are things I believe in, alongside the romantic, sophisticated influences."

It always goes back to the materials for Collins. Examine one ensemble, where a leather skirt is topped by a cashmere-wool blend sweater accented by panes of shearling lamb. Deconstructing this outfit is like deconstructing shearling fur itself. Shearling, of course, is lamb's wool still attached to its leather hide. This ensemble combines leather, wool and shearling -- which is both.

Collins's background as an artist and intellectual is obvious. She earned both a master's and bachelor's degree in textiles from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. After she launched her own design house last year, she received a sizeable grant from the Rhode Island Slater Center for Design Innovation. She continues to work in Rhode Island because she finds it "easier to focus."

Collins seems like an independent spirit. She took time off between earning her two degrees (the second came in 1999) to teacher herself to make clothes and to produce theater costumes. She worked briefly as a textile designer for companies Franetta and Westwood, but describes her twenties as a time she spent "doing little enterprises." Learning to use a knitting machine was a revelation. "I saw the potential to spend my life developing different fabrics and garments in knit," she said. From there, she started small with her own company, self-financed for a while.

Her absence from the crazed New York fashion scene hasn't prevented her from gaining a celebrity following (Lil' Kim, Gwen Stefani, Cate Capshaw, Claire Danes, Cameron Diaz). She credits MAO public relations for helping to keep her connected. Actress Emma Thompson was at her latest show and sung Collins's praises in Time magazine. Not surprisingly, she is becoming something of a darling of fashion editors and has appeared in numerous international publications.

It won't be long before Collins also gains cult status among fur-lovers who are looking for something a little more interesting in their fur fashion.