An ‘excess of the normal’: Luxury and difference in Polish fur critique

Luxury in context

The eighth annual Kraków ‘Day Without Fur’ (Dzien bez Futra) was held on 25 November 2010, centring, as lamppost-affixed posters had advertised in the preceding week, on a demonstration beginning at Mały Rynek (‘The Small Square’) at 5 pm. Darkness had already descended over this spot set apart from the Rynek Głowny (‘The Main Square’) by 20 metres or so of cobbled paving, a kebab shop, a large building housing the entertainment megastore Empik, a branch of the French cosmetics chain, Sephora, a shop selling customized teddy-bears, and stalls selling variously, pretzels, boiled sweetcorn, and magazines. Protestors, mainly in their 20s and 30s, held up banners displaying anti-fur messages. A few drummed or performed ‘poi’, a performance art originating from the Maori, during which flaming tethered weights were swung from ropes around either side of the performer’s head. Other supporters handed out leaflets.

‘VICTIMS OF LUXURY!’ read one felt-tipped placard. This victimhood possessed religious overtones. Znicz, the vividly coloured candles used to commemorate the dead on All Souls’ Day (see Kubica, 1986), were placed on the ground. The feeling that fur animals were killed only for their pelts, with much onus placed on ‘only’, is crucial to understanding why anti-fur activists and people who wore fur alike both saw fur as ‘a luxury’. In their estimations, not only had the animals been ‘martyred’ or ‘victimized’ in the name of human consumer desires, but the substantive part of their bodies, comprising organs, flesh and blood, ‘the interior’ had been ‘sacrificed’ for the pelt, ‘the exterior’.

Empatia was one of many interest groups to protest in and around Kraków’s Old Town over the course of the year. However, the notable number of fur-wearing passers-by proved the particular aptness of the frigid November street setting for their particular cause. Anti-fur campaigns also seemed especially well suited to the public protest genre when compared with Empatia’s other ‘single issue campaigns’. ‘They [Empatia] do an annual “Fish Day” too’, one woman told me, ‘But obviously, in Kraków, fish aren’t really a “public” issue like fur is. Fish aren’t, you know, on the street …’

To gauge the persistent framing of fur as an uncommonly ‘public’ animal rights issue, consider the following passage from Empatia’s website:

In Poland you can still find fur shops on the main streets, and some celebrities associate fur with elegance, chic and prestige. What a parochial elite! [Coż za zaściankowość elit!] Perhaps such people want to feel appreciated in some way by dressing up in something that is sold for big money and refers to ‘the poorly understood nobility’, tradition, etc.

People who come from abroad see natural fur in every second shop and boutique in the prestigious shopping malls and arcades and experience a shock! It’s a bit like being in a museum. (Empatia ‘Day Without Fur’ webpage, my translation).

This supplication portrays the traditional and the powerful as in cahoots, calling to mind aspects of what Longina Jakubowska (2012) has written about the ways in which Polish elites have used their material possessions when reproducing themselves over time and through adversity. Value is placed upon things that have been in families for generations (see also Magee, 2015). At the time of my fieldwork, ideas such as ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’ seemed, out of all Polish cities, particularly powerful in the smart, pious, and internationally admired city of Kraków.

The idea that people wear fur thinking it is ‘elegant’ and ‘chic’ indeed resonates with the positive associations fur held for many at the time of my fieldwork. However, contrary to what the Empatia website implies, in everyday life in Kraków, fur was seldom associated with celebrity or utmost exclusivity. Tracie Wilson’s observation from 1990s Poland rang true when I carried out my fieldwork many years later:

Fur is not seen necessarily as a luxury or as a sign of decadence [to most], but as a practical solution to cold weather. For most Poles – as for many people throughout the world – the use of animals as resources for human utility goes unquestioned. (Wilson, 1999: 73)

Poland’s history of political and economic unrest seems relevant here. Memories and practices in a range of places that have known significant upheaval often testify to the attractiveness of the ‘normal’, the ‘ordinary’, and even the ‘boring’ (see Kelly, 2008). Kraków-based historian Jan Marian Małecki draws an example that features fur from the diary entry of ‘one man from Lwow’:

10 March 1945. We are in Krakow. We finally made it here the day before yesterday. When we left the station in the early morning and looked out over the streets, we were literally struck dumb. A living city! All along the pavements tenements with windows gleaming, doors and gates intact, high above snow on the roofs. Here and there normal people flitted around, in decent coats with fur collars, in shoes, galoshes, and washed. (Małecki, 2008: 249, emphasis added)

Fur, in this estimation, is conspicuous when it is absent, illustrating how ‘normal life’ is suspended during wartime. If fur is luxurious here then luxury is a matter not of abundance and superiority, but rather of the absence of pathology.

Instances in which consumers estimate that they ‘need’ (rather than ‘desire’, see Berry, 1994) luxury commodities map across a provocatively broad range of sites. Consider, for example, cosmetic surgery. Dutch patients ‘do not have cosmetic surgery because they want to be more beautiful, but to become ordinary, normal, or just like everyone else’ (Davis, 1995: 161, in Edmonds, 2007: 374). Alexander Edmonds begins an article on Brazilian plastica with carnival director Joãosinho Trinta’s pithy statement that ‘Only intellectuals like misery. The poor prefer luxury’ (Edmonds, 2007: 363). Reading about Edmonds’ informants, one sees that ‘the poor’ usually remain poor after receiving plastica, and that it provides short-term succour from their circumstances, rather than elevating them to positions of wealth or status. Poverty plus luxury does not seem to equal luxury, but rather a coveted – albeit fleeting – membership of the mainstream.

Noising up the normal

I now wish to describe why speaking out against fur was often taken to mean speaking out against ‘the normal’.

‘You’re not a ‘green’ (zielona) are you?’ asked a furrier whom I will call Marek. This seemed to be the potentially ‘deal-breaking’ question that could overwhelm answers to the other questions he used to gauge my harmlessness as an interviewer: did I support animal rights? Did I own any fur? What mattered to Marek, and indeed other people with whom I found myself in similar situations, was if I was a ‘card-carrying’ activist.

In urban Poland at the time of my fieldwork, all sorts of businesses (and many private homes) paid for protection from the Justus or Solid private security agencies. However, some fur businesses appeared to take extra measures to protect stock and personnel. Shop fronts were fitted with iron bars. I noticed that one furrier carried a keyring with a square centimetre-sized panic button.

The degree of threat posed by activist ‘trouble’ was usually couched in terms of having a friend, or perhaps a friend of a friend, who had been ‘targeted’. It seemed that these two, three, or four ‘degrees of separation’ suggested to some fur industry professionals that activism was creeping closer and closer to each business. Jarek, who supplied fur trim and accessories to retail businesses told me in 2010:

It started maybe 10 years ago, that’s when they [anti-fur activists] started. In my opinion they are not as active as in England, for example, and in some other countries, but of course we do hear about action from them. So some people need to scream about something. As a company we haven’t had problems but we can hear about it from other businesses. And it will happen more and more.

Indeed, many fur industry workers said that Polish animal rights activists sought to emulate North American and Western European counterparts. British people in particular, were often said to possess an amusing tendency to anthropomorphize. This sentimentality regarding who or what was fit to be worn, who or what was fit to be a companion was, it was sometimes pointed out to me, inconsistent. How curious it was, how ironic, I was asked to consider, that ‘Brits and Germans’ took issue with fur but came on holiday to chilly Kraków swaddled in leather jackets, boots, and bags.

Wilson also speaks to the intermingling of fur and national identity when she describes charges that anti-fur sentiment is ‘un-Polish’:

In the early nineties, older and middle-aged Poles sometimes reacted with hostility when confronted with anti-fur demonstrations. Some onlookers even doubted that the demonstrators could be Polish. There were shouts to the young protestors to ‘Go back to studying!’ and suggestions that they ought to try working for a change. Some older Poles were angered by what they saw as the squandering of resources on a frivolous cause (Chicago Tribune, 29 January 1992). This strong reaction was likely compounded by the fact that many Poles, especially in the early 1990s, were struggling to survive in the new market economy. Some critics do not see this concern for animals as a worthwhile cause when many humans are living substandard lives. (Wilson, 1999: 74, emphasis added)

In Wilson’s account, the noise made by animal rights advocates refers to the genre in general, with the subtext that those who were young in the 1990s had little to complain about compared with their elder compatriots. Jarek’s comment that ‘some people need to scream about something’ sought to undermine anti-fur thought by implying that it reveals more about its proponents’ characters than it did about the cause’s validity. Another fur industry worker explained why he did not worry about being ‘targeted’ by animal right activists: ‘the dog that barks doesn’t bite’ (Pies, który szczeka, nie gryzie).

The pervasiveness of ‘noisiness’ as an insult levelled at anti-fur protestors in these accounts is intriguing because ‘silence’ is a dominant theme in accounts of what it is like to live outside the mainstream in Poland. Joanna Mizielińska (2001: 293), writing of LGBTQ rights, asserts that

[the existence of] silence makes lesbian existence even more invisible. The process of coming out usually results in being stigmatized, and therefore lesbians prefer to stay in the closet … Silence strengthens silence. It seems that this vicious circle of invisibility and exclusion will never end.

Agnieszka Kościańska (2009: 66), however, addresses ‘silence’ and difference in Poland from a contrasting angle. It is instructive, writes Kościańska, that both ‘pious Catholic women’ and Polish female members of the Brahma Kumaris group, ‘converts to a new religious movement rooted in Hinduism’ (p. 56), and can be said to possess ‘the power of silence’. This concept challenges assumptions made by certain Western liberal feminist discourses that conflate silence with powerlessness and therefore are ill-equipped to consider nuances such as the role attributed to silence in postsocialist contexts (see also Aretxaga, 1997).

In Kraków, animal rights was sometimes problematically framed as a ‘women’s issue’. Aneta, a member of an animal rights organization, said to me of resistance to animal rights discourses:

Having empathy [for animals] is nothing to be ashamed of, to be afraid of. It’s also again a gender thing. Because when you think about values, the things that are popular and praised, they’re often qualities that are associated with men. In Poland, we have an expression męska decyzja, ‘a man’s decision’, and it means ‘serious, to be made quickly without delay’ and so on. And you have babski badanie, ‘women’s work’ and it means that it’s stupid and it’s about nothing and you know … and that’s why a lot of women have problems getting into politics. And I think that these issues also influence animal issues … Animal issues seem to be connected with women, children, and so on.

The image (or sound) of women who spoke against fur and therefore spoke against ‘normal’ (and normalizing) Poland was provocative because, in Kraków, women were frequently conceptualized as possessing a pointedly quotidian form of power. I was told many times, for example, that it was women who ‘kept things going without making a fuss’. This referred, in relation to younger women, to their mastery of modern languages, of working hard inside and outside the home, as well as paying attention to their health and appearance (see also Marody and Giza-Poleszczuk, 2000). I was frequently told too that older women were powerful because of their experience and memories, from the gratitude owed to them by younger kin (see Magee, 2015). It was sometimes stated that older women sustained the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland by planning weekend activities with kin that involved the attendance of a church service. Far from being perceived as ecclesiastical pawns, onus was placed on these women’s achievement of living in the manner they desired – morally and socially – while creating favourable circumstances for future generations to do so, too. Renderings of masculine power contrasted as strikingly ‘exceptional’, drawing on the images of supremely public figures such as Pope John Paul II, who was born Karol Wojtyła near to Kraków, Lech Wałęsa, and Jerzy Popiełuszko, an anti-communist Polish priest murdered by the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1984 and beatified in 2010.

In this section, I have cast the relationship between gender, silence, and marginality as a prerequisite area for comprehending the grounds on which anti-fur activism was seen by some to challenge certain notions of ‘Polishness’. I now move from analysing verbal expressions of fur criticism to unpacking the financial and somatic meanings of eschewing animal products.

Comprehensive veganism

Our main aim is to advocate a respectful approach towards other beings, which translates into a comprehensive veganism (not limited to diet). We do not forget humans, who, after all, also belong to the Animal Kingdom. Our activities include creative and non-violent education and providing information regarding these issues. (Empatia website, emphasis added).

‘Remembering that humans are animals too’ was an indispensable position from which to criticize fur for what it symbolized of humans’ maltreatment of humans. Anti-fur critique sometimes segued into advocates’ (allied to organised groups or not) statements that their aims were difficult to achieve for the same reasons that progress in LGBTQ rights and women’s rights were hard to actualize. However, ‘comprehensive veganism’ involved action that took the form of demonstration and education, but also of consumption. This meant not purchasing fur, but it also meant synchronizing body, money, and speech. Consider, as an example, Aneta’s account of becoming an animal rights advocate:

I got involved through the internet. I got some ideas from a story I read, and I watched television programmes about animal rights-related topics. And I decided I wanted to face this issue, the animal issue. I started looking on the internet for this and I researched it to the extent that I thought ‘I can’t eat meat anymore’. This was in 2004 and then I researched some more and I went vegan and then I thought I wanted to do more than this ‘personal lifestyle’ and I don’t know exactly how I found a group but I joined a couple of their events here in Kraków and then I met with one of their members to learn what it’s like to be a member blah blah blah and then we had a meeting and I said, you know ‘I would like to join, do you want me?’ and they said yes …

Aneta’s description of her decision ‘to do more than this personal lifestyle’ is an interesting starting-point for looking at how activists’ ideas about their diets and consumer habits intersected with their political activity. The fact that she refers to her ‘personal lifestyle’ including veganism rather bashfully is surprising given that many Polish animal rights discourses at the time placed the control of ‘individual choices’ at the very centre of organizations’ remits. The Empatia website, for example, stated that, ‘the first thing we do is try to live our everyday lives in accordance with our principles. Work should each time be started from the beginning and the beginning is after all within ourselves’ (www.empatia.pl).

Some of Kraków’s popular self-service vegetarian cafes held animal rights advocacy information evenings or displayed posters promoting Day Without Fur. Their main social worth, one woman told me, was to ‘de-normalize animal products … stopping people from going for them without thinking’. Pertinent here is Asianist food scholars’ care when choosing whether to write of ‘vegetarianism’ or, instead, of ‘meat avoidance’ (e.g. Klein, 2008). Friends and acquaintances frequently reminded me that although these locales served Nepalese momos rather than bigos, carrot and raisin salad rather than chicken with cabbage and potatoes, consumption provides fickle insights into ethical positions: how could I tell the difference between vegans or vegetarians and those who patronized such cafes because of proximity to work or because of a taste for particular animal product-free dishes that punctuated an overwhelmingly meaty regimen?

It was frequently asserted that older people might be ‘accidentally green’ because they were more frugal than younger Poles, consuming less meat because of insufficient pensions and because of what was referred to as a ‘socialist mentality’, which denoted people provisioning ‘as if they were rationing’. And yet, being a vegetarian or a vegan could also be very expensive. Some ingredients popular in vegetarian cooking could only be purchased from pricey specialist health food shops. During an interview with an animal rights advocate I mentioned that I liked the city’s vegetarian restaurants because they provided tasty food and because they were ‘good value’ and she agreed, although without particular ardour. When, however, we walked across the Main Square after our interview had ended, she said to me, ‘you know what you were saying before about how the vegetarian cafes are affordable: they are, but maybe only for treats’.

Using ‘comprehensive veganism’ as a starting point, the preceding section has drawn attention to two distinctive facets of the animal rights argument as it was understood by some of the people I knew in Kraków. Firstly, it described how some discourses emphasized the ethical imperative of using animal rights messages to meditate on how humans treat other humans. Secondly, it drew attention to informants’ musings regarding the actuality that one of the ways in which people might ‘live’ their beliefs in animal rights is through abstaining from buying or eating meat products. In doing so, however, it drew attention to the idea that eschewal of meat was not an inherently political act, containing as it did the possibility of being vegan or vegetarian for reasons other than those proposed by animal rights movements. Such concerns with Polish national collective memory, generation and the body travel to the fore in the next section, which discusses Krakowian opinions on North American animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Central to this article’s focus on fur, luxury, normality, these connections show fur’s complicated cross-cultural associations with women.

Fur and female bodies, or, ‘late to the party’

‘When you protest against one thing, you need to be really, really careful you do not advertise another bad thing in its place’, an animal rights advocate told me as she flicked through a stapled booklet comprising 10 or so pieces of white A4-sized paper. She pointed at a photocopied image of a fashion model next to the words ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fur’.

The fact that PETA had been founded over 30 years ago (in 1980) had given them, as it was put to me, ‘a head start’ in defining the animal rights genre. PETA was well known among young Krakowians due to the frequent use of the ‘I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ campaigns in fashion and celebrity magazines to illustrate stories about the female models, actors, and reality television personalities starring in the advertisements. No one minded that it was a North American organization that held such sway. Rather, comments such as ‘I feel like we [anti-fur Poles] “came late to the [anti-fur] party”, and now are being made to suffer the consequences’ referenced the manner in which PETA promoted the anti-fur issue by ‘objectifying’ female bodies.

Hoon Song (2010: 42) designates PETA’s anti-fur advertisements animal rights’ ‘dominant genre’ and later explains:

The persuasiveness of the ‘I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ campaign can be understood from the mutually reinforcing, multiple layers of paralleling figures: the models’ undressing, the consecrated model of PETA’s signature exposé style, and the photo effect of the animal icon … a fashion model rejects her clothes. The campaign is scandalous in the sense of seemingly rejecting a public persona, prestige, and power and revealing what it claims to be the hidden and unglamorous side of the personal, ‘real’ self. So even when the model in question had not been in any way linked to the fur industry in the past, her participation in the campaign is portrayed as though it were a major ‘change of heart’. (p. 50)

And yet, in contrast with Song’s tableau of consumer regret, many Krakowian friends and acquaintances thought the advertisements aimed to accentuate similarities between humans and animals, highlighting the parity between fur and human hair and testifying that to kill animals is cruel but also taxonomically illogical, a ‘category error’. The naked human’s vulnerability declares the defencelessness of animals, bare (of rights and property, of ‘a voice’) even when furry.

PETA’s images were sometimes difficult to take seriously. One woman reflected on a PETA advertisement condemning fur trim, a fur-styling often subtle and ‘modern’ enough to pass without censure: ‘there was this PETA ad that showed panties and fur around them. Like, fur trim is unattractive like pubic hair is unattractive. Ewww ‘scuse me!’, she laughed. Facilitated by the fact that even those who had quite minimal interests in animal rights were familiar with materials of this sort, comments such as this were common: ‘I know these pictures are meant to be a bit “camp” right? But the thing I wonder is, how many people “get” [understand] camp?’

Analogous to this concern about the manner in which viewers interpret PETA’s more tongue-in-cheek outputs was apprehension about those who had been swayed by the motivations behind these images. Aneta said:

It’s like [PETA] are pushing this model that you’re supposed to fit into … some kind of standard. There is this message that goes along with it. You know, ‘go vegetarian and be beautiful, young and shapely’, like a model right? And it’s not about being a model, it’s about an attitude towards ethics.

The buttressing of mainstream female beauty ideals was part of the same sexual and material economy as that which perpetuated the disproportionate influence of men within household provisioning decisions. Aneta told me:

It is sort of like PETA are trying to address the heterosexual male like ‘he is the one who is going to be persuaded. If he is persuaded, he is going to persuade his family’. He is not necessarily the one who does the shopping, but he is the one who has the wallet, who controls the bank account, etcetera.

At the centre not ‘only’ of individual but societal and international ‘problem[s] of what to wear’ (Tarlo, 1996), fur was a matter of both ethics and consumption. However, in the eyes of informants, commitment to animal rights advocacy was no excuse for the sloppy handling of another important issue: gender equality, which was generally phrased locally as ‘women’s rights’. Images of women with ‘model looks’ naked threatened this by presenting women to the viewer as ‘sex objects’ and, by extension, suggesting that it would be straight men rather than women who had the financial command to buy or to eschew fur. This might be seen as part of the larger, complex set of discourses about gendered power in Kraków to which I referred earlier in this article. The power that highly-qualified, hardworking ‘ordinary’ women were idealized as possessing was not reflected in equal pay.

The associations between luxury and sex evoked in this section are not limited to particular epochs and locations. Berry (1994: 87) reminds readers of ‘luxury’ and ‘lechery’s one-time interchangeability’. Maxine Berg, in Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2005), writes of how, in the London of that time, ‘The mistress, who even more than a wife was an object of conspicuous consumption, won with “fine buckles and beautiful china”, might take the “harlot’s progress”, trading her trappings for the Bridewell jail’ (p. 6, citing Brewer, 2004: 143). Germane to this article, Julia Emberley, argues in her 1997 monograph that, in addition to being ‘a luxury good’,

in the European or North American context, fur, in its various symbolic and material forms, circulates within libidinal as well as political economies. In other words, the symbolic production of fur cannot be separated from questions of desire such as the libidinal codification attributed to fur as a sexual fetish or the rise of the fur coat in the twentieth century as essentially a feminine fashion commodity. (p. 4)

When I lived in Poland, fur neither particularly connoted exclusive (as opposed to ‘normal’) luxury nor sexuality, two ‘economies’ that are entwined in Emberley’s thinking. More pertinent to my argument is Emberley’s questioning of what it means for a commodity to be overwhelmingly associated with women. Fur, in the estimations of many who opposed it in Poland, was a tricky material because it symbolized the excessive pressure on women to ‘be normal’ but its most visible critics, such as PETA, often buttressed ideas about men being more financially and libidinally potent than women.

Fur and generation, or, ‘the best way to communicate’

‘No, no no no no no’, said Aneta when I asked her if many older people were involved with animal rights advocacy. She continued:

Here in Poland, no. I think [this is] because of the historic … the social setting, the poverty, that sort of thing. These [older] people didn’t have the opportunity to be exposed to these ideas when they were younger and then generally speaking the tendency is to think that the older you get, the less flexible you become.

The consumption habits and tastes of older people were not uniformly conceptualized as unchanging. One young woman, for example, told me enthusiastically that she felt experiences of being older in at least more affluent areas and milieux of Poland were changing rapidly, presenting as an example her boyfriend’s grandparents’ recent trip to Asia. Nonetheless, it seemed quite widely held that the tastes one develops in one’s 20s and 30s – whether in food and clothes, pastimes, or friends – were formative. Older women were therefore not criticized for having fur in the manner that young women were. Instead, their perceived dependence upon animal products was often described, with notable empathy, as a result of past state politics. Aneta said:

When you think about the empty shelves in shops [during state socialism] and people finding a piece of ham or oranges, a sign of Christmas time or something, to a lot of people the idea of going vegetarian would be depriving yourself of something that you could get from time to time, so meat, or specialties like ham were considered to be a luxury. The associations were entirely different. So only when the shelves became full then you could change the perspective because you could choose to do it or not to do it, to buy it or not to buy it and you also have the choice of a great variety of other things, it wasn’t meat or nothing. So I think the social … the material situation changes the perspective. [In times of shortage] you pay attention to feed your family and to take care of yourself and if you have satisfied these needs, basic needs, then you can think about others [such as non-humans]. I think it also has an impact on how vegetarians could have evolved or could not have evolved in Poland.

Aneta uses ham to exemplify (while talking with a foreign researcher) how products that were, at the time of this interview, readily accessible to middle-class consumers were ‘luxury’ goods for parts of the 20th century. Aneta implies that, historically, not halting to consider the meaning of eating animals was a consequence of working to provide for one’s family.

The presumption of ‘the normal family’ (glossed as gender-normative and heteronormative) in Polish socio-economic life rankled with many of those who were critical of fur. However, for some, families and, in particular, the intergenerational bonds that constituted both families’ skeletal structures and, as affect, fleshed them out, offered the best chance of redefining fur as an unacceptable luxury as opposed to a ‘normal’ material. Aneta said:

The only way you can try [to de-normalize the use of animal products] is through some emotional link, like a grandson talks to his grandmother and asks the grandmother to cook something without meat and he praises her and says ‘I like it!’ You can try to make a connection right? You don’t change the situation, grandma keeps cooking but she cooks something different. Another way is to try to find something universal. So look at [animals’] suffering, ‘you know what it was like to suffer when you were younger … you lived in difficult times right?’

This form of thinking evokes the memories of suffering and sacrifice of men and women who were in their senior years around the beginning of the 21st century. It also speaks to the pervasive idea that making food for kin is a prime facet of Polish kinship (see Dunn, 2004). The ‘emotional link’ between grandmother and grandchild refers in the first place to the desire and obligation to please kin (see Magee, 2015). But it is hoped that this love is also productive, cultivating and spreading empathy and respect for condemned non-humans and calling into question their edibility.

Aneta recounted how, during his 2010 presidential campaign, Bronisław Komorowski’s fondness for hunting had come under scrutiny, not only from animal rights activists, but from a more general section of society who considered hunting an elitist and antiquated pastime. Aneta had heard that Komorowski had subsequently agreed to give up hunting ‘at the request of his grandchildren’. However, although Aneta was happy that the Komorowski campaign had publicized anti-hunting arguments, she was hesitant to interpret this success as a sign of a deep-seated change in attitudes towards animals. To Aneta, the actuality that it could be taken as a given that one would go to great lengths to avoid upsetting one’s grandchildren had permitted Komorowksi to stop hunting without ‘stopping looking manly!’ I was told several times in various situations, ‘hunting is just such “a thing” [for elite men like Komorowski]’. György Péteri (2010), in his chapter in Reid and Crowley’s Pleasures in Socialism, discusses hunting’s embeddedness within political influence and masculine power in Hungary. Some of the men and women I knew saw a parity between hunting and fur-wearing. Hunting for sport and wearing fur were actions that were once essential but that were, to some people I met during fieldwork, now luxurious because they were no longer necessary. While it would be overreaching to argue that ‘hunting was to masculine power as fur ownership was to feminine power’, such a pattern nonetheless chimes with the observation made earlier in this article that, in the case of older people in Poland, power was often located with elite and perhaps famous men on the one hand and familiar and ‘everyday’ women on the other.

However, fur, when spoken of in relation to luxury, was not ‘just’ an issue of 20th-century material culture but a matter of, as one man put it to me, ‘big history … natural history’. Just as some people working in the fur business told me how criticizing fur was senseless because it had been worn ‘since the dawn of time’, those critiquing fur wondered why fur continued to be an object of desire after the advent of warm and fetching synthetic materials. Empatia, for example, sought to show that fur was no longer ‘the natural choice’ for outdoor wear. A quotation from the British mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington featured in the ‘Day Without Fur’ website as evidence. Under a bold type subheading reading ‘We no longer live in caves!’, Bonington states, ‘When someone goes on expeditions, like mine, ensuring heat is very important. I never use fur. There are many more suitable, practical and warm man-made alternatives’.

Ideas of modernity and archaism were also at the centre of anti-fur opinion and pro-fur responses. An instructive example was a 2009 controversy in the letters page of Wysokie Obcasy (‘High heels’), the glossy pullout ‘women’s section’ of Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. After the magazine included fur garments in a fashion feature, a reader wrote a letter under the name ‘Ana’, lambasting the magazine’s editor for authorizing such an article, asking if he was aware of the methods used in the acquisition of fur. Hubert Kujawski, the President of the Polish Association of Animal Breeders and Fur Producers, saw ‘Ana’s’ letter and wrote a response. One of the reasons why Kujawski’s letter was notable was that it situated the fur production debate not only within animal rights discourses but within a discussion of sustainability. Kujawski wrote that, ‘This pseudo-ecological approach means that instead of natural, healthy fur garments for men, these supposedly modern women choose clothes from artificial production that consumes thousands of tons of petroleum products, which will never biodegrade’ (Kujawski, 2009, my translation).

Until quite recently, it would have been difficult to imagine fur’s promotion as an ethical product, an emergence that seems to be the result of a growing concern with sustainability. The pro-fur sustainability argument’s focus upon long-term ecological well-being contrasts with the immediacy of anti-fur supplications depicting wide-eyed caged animals. Joy et al.’s article states that one understanding of sustainability is as a position of ‘meeting a current generation’s needs without compromising those of future generations’ (Joy et al., 2012: 274, drawing from Fletcher, 2008; Partridge, 2011; Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). This idea is particularly thought-provoking because of fur’s Polish generational resonances. The recasting of ‘luxury goods’ as ‘anti-consumer[ist] (Joy et al., 2012: 277) was, I would expect, equally unanticipated. To some, unusually expensive garments are ‘ethical’ because they are ‘higher quality’ than the ‘fast fashion’ (see also Crăciun, 2014) provided by the high street, withstanding wear better over time and thus precluding the need for regular shopping. This raises the question: what does it mean that only some people can ‘afford to be ethical’? Clothing once again demonstrates the difficulty of materializing one’s ethics and aesthetics: what one wears is not only a matter of taste but also of access and wealth.

An excess of the normal

Fur is frequently associated with clannish elites. Lise Skov (2005: 10) writes of how,

in December 2003, the CEO of Saga Furs of Scandinavia was invited as a keynote speaker at the International Herald Tribune conference for luxury industries, which brought together a star panel of influential fashion people including Giorgio Armani, Luca and Rosita Missoni, Ferruccio Ferragamo and Santo Versace, as well as Bernard Arnault of LVMH and François Pinault of the Gucci Group.

In this article, in contrast, I have framed fur as sometimes signifying an ‘excess of the normal’, embodying less standing out than fitting in. The actuality that even some people in Kraków who were deeply critical of fur empathized with older people’s wearing of fur speaks to local ideas about coming of age and about the bearing of history on taste and consumption. Luxury emerged at an intersection between morality and temporality. In the eyes of some of those who disagreed with fur, its normality was the very reason why it continued to be produced and consumed.

I wish now to attend to the onus placed upon the ways in which fur was a product of Polish society in a surprisingly literal sense. Institutions, I was told, ‘scaffolded’ it. The Roman Catholic Church in Poland exemplified this. Many people, both those who were troubled by fur and those who were not, described fur as typical church attire. More than this, however, dismayed exegeses of how it was that fur continued to be consumed ‘even’ in modernity sometimes segued into critiques of the local clergy’s attitude towards animal welfare. Mishtal and Dannefer (2010) write of the kolęda ritual in which Polish priests visit local homes each January in relation to some priests’ alleged interference with female parishioners’ contraceptive choices. In my research, in contrast, kolęda struck one animal rights advocate as a prime example of a missed opportunity for clergy to demonstrate a commitment to animal welfare:

These priests could effect, not to a revolutionary extent, but to some extent, the welfare of these animals during the parish visits after Christmas. If they are in the country, they could see that a certain dog doesn’t have a kennel or they could see something’s wrong with the other animals, they could speak to these people about it. They wouldn’t have to make this the main subject of the conversation, but just to mention it and I think that already this would be a different atmosphere. You know, they could pay a little more attention.

Fur, framed in this way, is ‘the fault’ neither of the clergy nor of the devout laity. What is at stake instead is the clergy’s maintenance of a status quo regarding how humans conceptualize non-humans. This was why, to its critics, fur’s excessiveness was located in its normality. Its outrageousness stemmed not from the outré but from the failure of those who consumed it to question their consumption habits and to challenge a material that, I was often told, became progressively less defensible as one era rolled into the next.

Luxury is surely always a marker of difference; it is ‘exclusive’ not just in the sense that might appear in marketing spiels but in the ‘truest’ sense of the word. Fur, in a Krakowian context, illustrated how luxury is not just a matter of elites but a matter of normativity. This chimes with the meaning of luxury in other, quite different ethnographic contexts. A prime example here is Julian Brash’s (2011) ethnography of ‘CEO mayor’ Michael Bloomberg’s quest to brand New York as ‘a luxury city’. Brash describes how lavish urban development projects and the attempted beguilement of elite incomers intensifies a class politics in which

the concept of luxury itself is a highly charged one, with by no means unambiguously positive connotations. For many New Yorkers struggling with the high costs of housing, food, and other necessities, the city’s luxuriousness was exactly the problem. Moreover, for many New Yorkers the decidedly nonluxurious qualities of the city – its grittiness, embrace of radical difference, and status as a fount of alternatives to the cultural mainstream – constituted its appeal. (p. 128)

In addition to having to rise to the fiscal dictates of ferocious gentrification, for Brash’s New Yorkers, an agenda of luxury is also a pathway for unwanted homogenization: it signified, as it did for some Krakowians, an erasure of alternatives.

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to show the ways in which a specific charge levelled against fur – luxury – indexes local concerns about the sometimes suffocating power of institutions over individuals’ power to actualize ways of being that fall outside the ‘mainstream’. I have explored a type of clothing’s ‘resonances’ (following Tarlo, 2007), or, the ways in which certain clothes ‘mean something’ not only to those who buy and wear them but to those who observe them being bought and worn. Advertising copy frequently evokes images of the power of luxury goods to sensually overwhelm, the idea that one can ‘lose themselves’ while enveloped in commodities that are sumptuous and even ‘orgasmic’. In this article, in contrast, I have presented fur as a ‘social skin’ (Turner, 1980) that invites certain inferences from those who perceive it. Luxury materials (however luxury is defined locally) are never ‘only’ about their owner. Their existence also indexes the position of those who do not have them. For those in and around Kraków who objected to fur on ethical grounds, this was not a matter of wealth-based class position, but of allegiances with a particular moral–material standpoint, coupled with imaginative projections of a different sort of Polish society.

It has been asserted in this article that the fur clothing dotted about the Krakowian streets that were illuminated by znicz (memorial candles) during the Day Without Fur march sparked charges of luxury not because of their associations with and continued consumption by a famous or particularly wealthy elite, but by a milieu with a ‘normal’ way of life. They were perceived to have worked hard to perpetuate such a lifestyle through turbulent times (see Jakubowska, 2012). History, it was frequently asserted, best explained contemporary life. There was little puzzling about the potency of institutions in Poland (see Kubik, 1994; Marody and Giza-Poleszczuk, 2000). What was at stake for informants critical of the bias towards the ‘normal’ in Polish life was a matter of scale – hence my focus on ‘excess’. The Roman Catholic Church should ‘have power’, but maybe not so much power. A critic of fur could lambast it as ‘absolutely’ wrong yet not contradict themselves when they added that fur was more defensible when worn by older people than by members of younger generations. What fur made clear was that it was not avant-garde, outlandish, or offbeat materials that said something about difference, but those which were set securely in historical precedents, those which were ubiquitous, and those which were the norm.