According to Rabbit Redux: A Once-Lowly Fur Finds New Luster, fur is making a come-back with help from a special breed of rabbit:
Much of rabbit’s new higher status is due to a special breed of rabbit known as the ‘Rex,’ whose fur is denser and silkier than regular rabbit fur. The Rex’s growing popularity, especially among designers not normally known for working with fur, is helping democratize the once elite fur market. Now, instead of spending $20,000 and up on a floor-length mink status symbol, fur fans are buying a rabbit vest, shawl or poncho for just $150 to $2,500.
[...]
It has been a long journey back from fashion oblivion for the rabbit. For decades, rabbit pelts were considered declasse — cheap, scraggly and prone to shedding. Fur fans scorned rabbit, confining its audience to teenagers or those who couldn’t afford anything better. “Traditional furriers always pooh-poohed rabbit as something the maids wore,” says Ms. Cassin, the designer.Nearly driven out of business by the early 1990s by antifur activists, the fur industry has rebounded. A new generation of women who don’t remember the heated animal-rights battles of the ’70s and ’80s is embracing fur. “The whole morality issue about furs seems to have gone away,” says David Wolfe, creative director of Doneger Group, a fashion forecasting firm.
[...]
Rabbit’s transition from poor relation to star performer got a big boost from the Rex. According to the National Rex Rabbit Club, the breed was the product of a recessive gene first spotted in France in 1919 by a parish priest. Unlike garden-variety rabbits, the Rex has no prominent “guard hair” — the rougher top coat that characterizes traditional rabbit fur. The result is a silky, dense fur that furriers say most resembles chinchilla or sheered mink.Rex rabbits were imported into the U.S. in the 1920s, where their luxurious fur quickly made them popular at livestock shows, says Rex rabbit judge Cathy Szychulda. But after the antifur movement began in the 1960s, fur fell out of fashion and Rex rabbit breeders retreated to backyard sheds, where they raised small batches to show in demanding Rex rabbit competitions. “Ten years ago, you couldn’t give them away,” says Tom James, a Rex rabbit breeder in American Fork, Utah.
The rigorous show culture created steady improvements in Rex rabbit quality, including even more lustrous coats and much larger rabbits, whose pelts measure as long as 25 inches — or nearly three times the length of a traditional rabbit.
By the mid-1990s, U.S.-bred Rex rabbits became coveted for their champion bloodlines, attracting commercial rabbit farmers from as far away as China and Argentina.