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Fur-gettaboudit!
Holier-than-thou Manhattan bars and restaurants are ejecting warm and well-heeled customers for the Cruella-style crime of flaunting fur.
The Back Room, at 102 Norfolk St., puts it plainly on their Web site: “The Back Room does not allow real fur.” The speakeasy-style bar, set behind a sign that reads “Lower East Side Toy Company,” puts it in even more emphatic terms on its boilerplate e-mail to inquiring customers:
“We also have a unique policy — we do not allow real fur. This includes fur collars. Please alert your guests!!!!!! (Fake fur is fine. Leather, suede, feathers, etc are all fine.)”
Are you fur real? Outlawing the couture coats that swaddled our parents and grandparents, while allowing leather and feathers — which are less likely to be vintage — is arbitrary at best.
And what about fast fashion, the root of real human suffering in the third world? Will they be banning Zara next? Doubtful, but anything for PC clout!
On a snowy Wednesday evening, I arrived at the upscale cocktail bar wearing a Dennis Basso coat with a sable collar and a matching fur ushanka hat. The bouncer didn’t bat an eye, but after I ordered a round of drinks, the bartender stopped the good times before they could start.
“I have to ask: Is that real fur?” he questioned.
“Why, yes, it is!” I replied. He frowned.
“You can’t wear that in here,” he said. “You have to leave.”
I choked on my Sazerac. The guy looked like he’d spent the last decade eating rib-eye for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but he didn’t give me a chance to argue. No tip!
To add insult to injury, I spotted no fewer than three controversial Canada Goose jackets in the bar — one with a genuine fur collar — as I was being 86’ed. I wasn’t going to narc. But it goes to show just what a stupid-impossible task the fashion police face.
I acknowledge that there’s a time and a place for pelts. A few blocks north, for example, the vegan Szechuan eatery Spicy Moon has a sign on its door that reads: “We prefer that you not wear fur. If you’re wearing animal’s fur, we still warmly welcome you to our establishment but we hope you’ll open your heart to animals and go fur-free.”
Shunning sable at a vegan joint makes sense to me — but not at the Back Room, which promotes itself as an authentic speakeasy. On its Web site, the bar brags of the “movie actors of the Roaring Twenties” and gangsters it once hosted: Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky. Just try to imagine any of them without a mink! It may not be alcohol, but prohibition is still alive and well on the Lower East Side.
Back Room is in influential company, too. This spring, the City Council proposed banning the sale of fur — a war on wintertime warmth already won on the self-satisfied West Coast. No matter that there are roughly 150 fur businesses in the city that create 1,100 jobs and produce $400 million a year, according to reports. No matter that faux fur is made from environmentally toxic synthetics!
Of course, restaurants and bars are fully within their rights to enforce a dress code. The best ones do. As a new arrival to the city, I sauntered into Le Cirque on a blistering summer day in my shirt sleeves and the hostess rushed to cover me up with a jacket.
But being asked to rise to an occasion is very different than being asked to strip and slum for one. New York is probably the last place in the country where a luxurious fur wrap doesn’t look out of place on the sidewalk. Short-sighted politicians and trendy barkeeps are trying to score publicity points at the expense of the style that makes our city great, and I’ll be damned — and fur-ious — if we let them.
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