Possum Fur-y Unfashionable

”I should break your other bloody arm.” At a Prada party Daily Telegraph fashion editor, Hilary Alexander, famously incurs the wrath of a PETA activist Dan Matthews for wearing a possum-fur sling. ”I was terrified,” says NZ-born Alexander. Not so terrified that she couldn’t muster indignance and a battery of facts in her next column. In NZ: “‘between 60 million and 90 million brush-tail possums nibble through more than 20 tonnes of new-growth vegetation across the country every night destroying native bush and bird life.’ Possums may be protected here, but they are loathed with a vengeance in the land of the long white cloud.”