Oddly, it was the supermodels who made it official. Who, after all, is better placed to note the emergence of style trends and assess their staying power then those on the frontline? So when Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer - many of the girls who famously and frontally proclaimed "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" in an advertising campaign - started showing up a few years ago in mink and fox, it was hard to escape the conclusion: for fur, fashion is no longer a cold climate.

"In five years, the number of shops selling fur around the world has grown 400 per cent," says Tom Steifel-Kristensen, director of international communication at Saga Furs of Scandinavia, the association of fur breeders that supplies 65 per cent of the world's farmed mink and 70 per cent of the farmed fox. "Last winter, retail turnover increased 10.8 per cent from the year before." No mean feat, given the luxury goods climate (in fact, fur was the best-performing luxury item in 2002). Meanwhile, the average age of a fur buyer has dropped from 49 to 35.

After a decade when fur fell as far from favour as a fabric can get, it is once again having a moment. In fact, it's been having a moment since 1997. It's just that said moment has finally reached Britain, notoriously the most anti-fur country in the world, over the past decade or two. Although the UK is far beyond the fur-embracing ways of Spain, Italy and the US, walk down any high street, check out any department store, and there's no avoiding the fact that skin is in.

"This year, the sale of fur, fur trim and fur accessories has increased by 35 per cent compared to last year," says Andrea Martin, press and PR officer of the British Fur Trade Association.

At Spanish leather house Loewe, which "almost stopped selling fur in the UK during the 1990s", according to chief executive Fabien Debaedker, select pieces made from the fur of Bengali cat, mink and fox, as well as trimmed leather, are slowly being re-introduced - though they are kept on the store's lower level, out of sight. "The customer was asking for it," says Debaedker simply. Similarly, London-based retailer Hockley, which in 2000 got an injunction against fur protesters who were approaching clients, has stopped feeling a need for legal recourse.

The reasons are multiple. There is, bizarrely - given fur's history as an in-your-face symbol of the establishment - an element of rebellion to the current trend that has attracted a new generation of twenty-somethings. Tired of being preached at, they associate wearing fur with the slightly dangerous, and favour second-hand fur tippets unearthed on Portobello Road and shaggy goat moon-boots. It's a form of protest, as well as part of the hip-hop, P. Diddy democratisation of fur.

Then there is the fact that, truthfully, the rampaging anti-fur campaigns in the 1990s have had an effect: now, fur is generally farmed responsibly and the fashion houses that use it in their collections (pretty much every fashion house) have become pro-active about researching the origins of their materials.

Marni compares its fur to "organic beef" in terms of how the animals are raised and treated. At Revillon, designer Rick Owens says: "We are careful about using only responsibly farmed fur." And at Loewe, "we pay a great deal of attention to the provenance", says Debaedker. The European Fur Federation has recently introduced a fur labelling initiative so that each garment or item sold will be labelled with its English as well as Latin name.

"Consumers have grown far more sceptical of stories they are fed, and much more interested in seeking information for themselves," says Steifel-Kristensen. "This has worked to the advantage of the fur trade. Whereas the animal rights movement had made the picture very black and white, now consumers understand there is a history and morality at work."

Finally, there is fashion itself, which has embraced fur to such an extent that the material has been transformed in people's eyes. Gone are the "big confrontational fur coats", in the words of Owens. In their place are almost casual sheared mink jackets (best worn with jeans), patchwork multi-coloured confections, fur-trimmed jumpers, and accessories. Indeed, during Owens' first Revillon show last July, which was filled with "bias" fur waistcoats and jackets and stoles of mink strips linked by cotton tape "to air it out a bit", there were no coats below the knee.

In this, Owens is following the path of two leather houses which pioneered the imaginative treatment of fur: Marni and Fendi. It was almost a decade ago that Fendi first began producing its feather-weight fur coats of many colours, transforming the public's perception of skins and what they could be. Marni followed suit soon thereafter.

"I have always treated fur as one of the natural elements of the earth, along with silks and cashmeres," says the house's designer Consuelo Castiglione. Case in point: the black and white geometric patchwork goatskin coats and fox wraps in the current autumn/winter collection.

It was Castiglione's husband who told English furrier David Zilberkweit, chairman of Polar Furs, a supplier to companies from Dolce & Gabbana to MaxMara, as well as chairman of Hockley: "We had an image problem," and had to lighten up - literally. Now Hockley's own-brand lightweight reversible coats and knitted mink accessories are attracting a new and younger customer - not to mention the Ferre mink stoles and Valentino sable-trimmed cashmere they also stock. On the supply side, Zilberkweit is currently in talks with a number of British designers about collaborations for autumn/winter 2004 (he won't name names). Indeed, Stella McCartney aside, it's hard to find any designer who doesn't do fur.

"I think designers are attracted by the possibilities of the fabric," says Steifel-Kristensen. "You can groom it, you can dye it, you can shear it to various levels, so it can be a skirt [Louis Vuitton] or a summer jacket [Marni]."

"For me, it's about the tactile nature of the material," says Owens, "the textures and possibilities of discrete luxury." Jean-Paul Gaultier went similarly fur-happy after visiting the Saga Furs design centre in Copenhagen, a kind of R&D headquarters. The result: dramatic marriages of fur and chiffon, and fur and jersey. John Galliano and Michael Kors have also made the trip, and fur has leapt, as opposed to crept, onto their runways.

But aesthetics are not the only reason for fashion's hot and heavy embrace of fur; economics come into it too. The emerging markets of Russia and China are the next frontiers for luxury goods, and fur is an integral part of both cultures. The prospective customers demand it. "Eastern Europeans are crazy about fur," observes Debaedker.

"Fur is never going to go away. Just as vinyl will never replace leather, fake fur can't replace real fur," says Owens, who has made a Revillon coat with fake fur on the outside and sable on the inside. "It will never become a staple, like leather. But there's something about high heels and perfume and fur. Like the right-hand diamond ring, it's something a woman now buys for herself." And there's the final reason for fur's resurgence: the sexual revolution. It's now also a sartorial one.