NEW YORK'S FUR SUPERMARKET AND YOUR ONE SHOPPING FOR ALL YOUR FUR NEEDS

THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES AND WAS REPRINTED IN PAPERS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY

Martha's chinchilla scarf warms the hearts of furriers

By Geraldine Baum
Special to The Morning Call


NEW YORK | Martha Stewart may be a felon, but in what's left of this city's long-suffering Fur District, she is a hero. Furrier Larry Cowit has heard from not one but two customers who ''had to have'' that luxe scarf Stewart was wearing after she got the bad news.
Was that chinchilla or rex rabbit framing Martha's sober mug splashed all over television?

"There's a silver lining in every bit of bad news," said Cowit, chuckling.

Martha's lining, it turns out, was dyed chinchilla, and the silver will be going to Cowit and his brother, Steve, the third generation to run Henry Cowit Inc.

After two dreadful decades -- years of watching their friends go bust or retire to Florida -- the furriers in Manhattan are happy to revel in a few good turns of events: Finally, last year, national retail sales in fur bounced back to 1984's $1.8 billion high. Finally, winter back East is bitter again. Finally, the paint throwers with ethical objections to wearing anything that once had a mother are widening their scope to target animal-research labs, taking heat off furriers.

And most important, finally, the fur is, yes, flying again on the runways. From Paris to New York this spring, designers who could barely afford to put on shows were trimming their fall suits to sports clothes in dyed everything -- rabbit, lamb, pony and, of course, chinchilla.

So guys like Larry and Steve Cowit can maybe take it easier this summer. And play a little golf. ''You always gotta worry because we may be looking at 60-degree Januarys again or the economy could go south,'' says Steve, 48. He's the older brother, the expert ''matcher'' who spends his days in the shop wearing a blue apron and combing clear liquids (peroxide, but don't tell) on a new pelt to age it to repair a sleeve on an old coat.

Larry is the salesman. He's the charmer who tours customers through the un-chic retail showroom, crammed with 2,000 new and used -- rather ''pre-owned'' -- coats. Larry is the more buoyant brother, but even Steve can't suppress a smile these days: ''We're not as reliant as we used to be on the weather or just one type of customer,'' Steve says. ''Fur is everywhere, and the business is totally changed.''

"Every building, every loft, every office along here was about fur,'' says Larry, describing the district at its height from 26th to 30th streets between Sixth and Ninth avenues. And everyone specialized. There were manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, skin traders, designers, guys who knew only fox or lamb, or how to make scarves or lengthen minis to maxis. The Cowits competed with no fewer than 60 ''matchers'' remodeling and repairing.

Now, Steve is about the only fur matcher in Manhattan, and the businesses, mostly retailers, that remain are as Greek as they once were Jewish.

Manufacturers either went out of business when competition with Hong Kong became too stiff or closed their factories and opened retail shops downstairs in their buildings' moving storefronts. From 1979 to 1989, the city's manufacturers fell from 800 to 300. Now the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't keep that statistic. But the worst were the wounds inflicted on furriers by the animal-rights group PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which managed for at least a decade to inhibit some shoppers' tastes.

Supermodels began declaring they'd rather go naked than wear fur, and a long list of nervous designers dropped their fur licensing agreements.

A decade of activism made many women embarrassed to wear fur. But more recently, PETA has kind of petered out in New York. This fall's protest involved only a handful of people flinging bloody carcasses of skinned foxes at opera-going fur wearers, compared with the 3,000 activists who annually marched through Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

The Cowits have borrowed 100 chinchilla pelts in ''tobacco'' tones, just like Martha's scarf, from a skin dealer in the neighborhood.

Their customer, a wealthy lady who owns several sables, was coming in to pick out the pelts for a chinchilla ''Martha'' of her own and buy several more to sell to friends.

Larry estimated he'd charge less than $2,000 a scarf -- not cheap but about half of what it would cost at a fancy Fifth Avenue shop. At those prices, if Kmart knocks off Martha's neckwear, it'll have to be fake.

Geraldine Baum is a writer for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

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