Collection: Fur Coats

The deepest kind of warmth. Vintage furs, mostly crafted in the ateliers of traditional furriers where handwork was the norm, not the exception.

Many pieces still carry the name of the house that made them — Pellicceria Capo Nord, Pellicceria Maria Levati, Barbini Pelliccerie Roma, Raab & Metz Nürnberg, Couture Hélène, Lucien Daville Paris. Pellicceria is the Italian word for a furrier's workshop, and a label like that points back to a specific one. Fur allows little else: pelts have to be sorted for depth and direction, cut, and stitched one at a time, and no two skins match exactly.

The archive runs across several distinct kinds of pelt, and the differences are worth knowing before you choose. Astrakhan — also sold as karakul, Persian lamb or swakara — is the tight, flat, moiré-patterned curl, cut close and usually made up into structured coats. Teddy and curly lamb is the looser, rounder pile: softer in the hand, fuller in silhouette. Penny Lane and Afghan shearlings are the embroidered, fur-trimmed 1970s cut, worn open. Longer-haired fox and raccoon pieces sit closer to outerwear than to tailoring.

Each coat here is one of one. When it is gone, it is gone.