The winter of 1917 and 1918 was bitterly cold in New York City. In December, the meteorologist in charge of a local weather bureau described the “sleighing” as “excellent and continuous,” but winter wonderlands were not on the minds of city dwellers battling frozen pipes and streets slick with ice. That same season, furriers, stores, and catalogs in New York and beyond were busy trying to convince people that they could be a whole lot warmer, if only they would bundle up in fur.
Meanwhile, fur was offered as a solution to the era’s drafty homes and cold rides in cars open to the elements, says Sarah Byrd, a fashion historian and educator. In 1917, to promote its business, the furrier known as C. et E. Chapal—a French outfit with branches in Montreal, Sens, Paris, and Brooklyn—issued a handsome pictorial map that charted the continents by the animal fur that could be collected on each one.
Pictorial maps were just gaining attention, and would burst onto the cartography scene in a big way in the following decades. They weren’t strictly scientific, but instead mingled landscapes, terrain, images, and text “frequently for the purposes of telling a visual story or to capture a sense of place,” writes geographer Stephen J. Hornsby in Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps, which draws upon a trove in the Library of Congress to describe the charts’ place in the canon of Western cartography.
A glance at the sketches on the map reveals the silky sable (zibeline) in Russia, foxes (renard) and wolves (loup) parading across Europe, and the chinchilla and nutria or coypu (ragondin) in South America. The map also includes shipping routes, so potential buyers could easily see that Hamburg was linked with Rio de Janeiro, close to where otters could be found.
At the time, Byrd says, fur was accessible to shoppers with a range of budgets. The 1918 Sears catalog peddled a child’s squirrel scarf-and-muff set for $9.95, and asked less for items made from goat hair. Rabbit fur—also known as “coney”—was another option for fur fanciers with tighter purse strings, and was sometimes gussied up to stand in for pricier varieties, advertised as “imitation ermine” or even “imitation tiger.” Squirrel, skunk, and muskrat would have been used for inexpensive or mid-range clothes purchased straight off the rack, Hays says.
On the higher end, there were $50 beaver muffs and capes, peddled to debutantes in the pages of Vogue. Since couturiers were also getting in on the action, women could opt for dresses trimmed with pelts. Hudson Bay hawked seal coats that were true luxury items, with a full-length version running $250 (more than $5,000 in 2018 dollars). Shoppers with money to burn—people with “extreme wealth,” Byrd says—could spring for a wrap made entirely from Russian sable. Meanwhile, “‘exotic’ furs [such as] tiger, leopard, and lion were used primarily for interior decoration, like rugs,” Hays says.
Furriers set out to convince shoppers that the coats and accessories were not just useful for keeping warm, but worthy of investment, even at the cost of a bit of scrimping and saving. As World War I drew to a close, they pitched prospective buyers on the idea that furs were long-lasting, functional, warm, and durable, and that you could always get a coat refashioned to stay with the style of the times, Byrd says—say, by cuffing the sleeve or shortening the hem. This public relations effort sometimes involved mapping the whole world, one mammal at a time.
Journey-based charts from the past can help us track the progression of transportation technology.