"New Clothing and How It Should Be Made" (Girl's Own Paper, December 31, 1881)

 The important news for the would-be fashionable young lady of 1881 is that dresses are getting shorter:

It is a great pleasure to believe that the fashion for wearing short dresses, morning, noon and night, will not alter, and long trains show no signs of coming in again, and are not worn except on very special occasions, by elderly matrons, who prefer not to cut up a very handsome dress.  Short skirts are wider and though equally tight in the front, the advent of the tournure has made the sides and back much wider and more graceful for slight figures, because not so tight and clinging.

Enter "the second bustle"!  It's interesting in this context that "short" means "without a train", though skirts still trail on the floor.

The latest winter furs are discussed:

The lighter-coloured furs seem to have slipped out of fashion this winter, and the taste leans to dark browns and black.  The principal furs are—stone marten, seal, musquash, skunk, coney, opossum, black fox, and what is called Russian cat.  These are all moderate in price, and our illustration, "On the Ice", will show how they are worn.  The first figure wears a brown poke bonnet, a mantle of plush, trimmed with black fox, brown cashmere dress, brown velvet and fur muff, and a bunch of yellow crocuses.  The central figure wears a skating costume of plum-coloured, with a fur or feather border.  A wide lining of velvet on the tunic, which is caught up on one side.

Genuine Red Fox (Spiegel Catalog, Fall/Winter 1965)

 Some years ago I visited a vintage clothing shop which had an entire long wall devoted to old furs.  There was everything from 1930s fox fur scarves (complete with heads and tails) to floor-sweeping mink evening capes.  It made me think of how values change, and how the status symbols of one era turn into the embarrassments of another.  Who, in the 21st century, would want to parade around in dead animal pelts?

Which brings me to this image.  Women in the 1960s were still wearing furs as a sign of wealth and status, but their value was being nibbled away on the one side by cheaper, artificial furs that looked like the Real Thing, and on the other by blatantly artificial "fun" furs worn by the young and with-it.  As for the ethical side of things, the anti-fur movement was still nascent at this point.  It first started making the news as protests against sealing in the 1970s, and coalesced in around 1980 as a movement against all kinds of fashionable fur-wearing.

This, incidentally was a real red fox fur, lining a coat made of mixed wool and nylon, and available from Spiegel for $US179 (that would be around $1642 now).