“Don’t think about animals. Think about beauty,” says Russian fashion designer Igor Gulyaev, in his store brimming with fur coats.
“I guess that’s what it all comes down to, right?” muses presenter Reggie Yates, a natural in front of the camera, where he’s been since he was eight. He has a knack for acknowledgements that speak truth to the viewer without alienating his interviewees.
It’s a talent that served him particularly well in last night’s Inside a Billionaire’s Wardrobe (BBC2), which explored the sourcing of animal skins for an ever-growing luxury market. Yates first went to Siberia to follow hunters on the trail of wild sable (“It’s at moments like this,” says Yates, watching his companions chop enormous logs in sub-zero temperatures, “that you realise how much of a man you aren’t. Maybe I can help carry…”). They caught one and skinned it carefully to provide one fortieth of what it will take to make one of Igor’s coats. Undamaged, it will net them about $90 (£62). In the west, a wild sable coat can retail for over €1m (£777,000).
That wild sable, you could argue as his pale pink carcass was tossed out into the snow, was one of the lucky ones. Yates’s next stop was a fur farm in Kursk, where 70,000 mink, sables and other animals are bred and killed every year. They whirl around in tiny cages in endless desperation (“They need to move to keep warm,” explains the owner. “They are comfortable”). What conditions are like in China, where farmed fur can cost less than fake fur, does not bear thinking about.
But we must have our coats, our trimmings, our “entry-level” products, as one retail expert described the likes of Fendi’s pompoms for attaching to accessories, purses and handbags. So on we went to Australia to see crocodiles bred for their skins, and Indonesia to watch bagfuls of snakes caught by impoverished locals (“Usually I would pull its teeth out with a stick,” says one inquiringly, but Yates shakes his head), killed with a spike up the nose and sold for a few dollars to make goods that will eventually retail for thousands. The hunters have already noticed that some breeds are absent from formerly populous areas. Indonesian legislation is so threadbare that it makes any claims made by retailers to sustainability questionable. But you’ve got to remember that some of those animals may have ended up as the patches (of boa constrictor, crocodile, ostrich, python, elephant, sting ray, lizard and more) on one of just 10 pairs of customised trainers known as Brooklyn Zoos: maybe even on the very ones worn by Jay Z! Who wouldn’t say yes to a spike through the brain for that kind of glory?
Fashion has saved the Australian saltwater crocodile, hunted almost to extinction, by making it economically viable. Habitats are now preserved to supply eggs to farms. The hatchlings are reared til four, when their bellies are wide enough to be turned into handbags. Congratulations, humanity. Sustainable killing to service insane luxury has become the best we can hope for.
This wasn’t the flaying of the industry some will have hoped for, but it was the kind of good, clear, unsensationalist examination that perhaps encourages people to sit down and keep watching rather than bring the mental shutters down in horror. Let’s hope.
That talk brings us neatly to Camping (Sky Atlantic), the latest Julia Davis masterpiece, whose six-part tale of holiday misadventures came to an end last night. I was entirely broken by the opening few minutes of the finale, which began with Noel (David Bamber, whose penis I hope gets nominated for a Bafta) describing to Fiona how his wife “pooed away her entire body” and got steadily worse, which is to say better, which is to say worse, which is how things go in the barbarically knotted world of Davis. I remember only fragments after that: Tom’s haunted face as he was required to go down on Adam (“It’s – mmph – like a hammer!”). Kerry in her ketamine stupor. Adam shagging Fay with kidneys on his head. Robin sniffing Fay’s breasts. Separately. “Mummy’s stinky was bald” briefly replacing Hunderby’s “bubbly milk” as the worst thing I have ever heard until “Her urethra’s very fat and raw”. I laughed until my own was in danger of giving way and then, abruptly, as Fiona grabbed Robin’s hand as she sobbed in the wake of his confession, I cried. Oh, the humanity.
She’s an appalling genius, that Davis. I shall need a holiday to recover. Not camping.
