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(Bloomberg) -- To be a consumer in the world today is to wear one’s politics and morals quite literally on one’s sleeves. 

Along with rejecting plastic straws, disposable coffee cups, and single-use shopping bags, the so-called conscious consumer can buy clothes that hark back to an unethical past, and then delight friends and followers by informing them: “This may look like dead animals, but it’s actually vegan.” 

This is one of the joys of fashion brand Apparis, which bills itself as vegan and “100% cruelty-free” and offers shoppers bold, social media-worthy designs that reinforce their commitment to doing good things through their purchases. In addition to producing pieces from fabrics made of leftover and recycled materials, Apparis says on its website that it employs “boutique factories in both China and Italy,” where “staff is paid fairly and treated with the utmost respect.” (Often, brands that market themselves as “sustainable” still ignore their factory workers.) Apparis began as a line of faux furs in 2016, and has since grown to include pajamas, pillows, dog leash covers, and miniature faux fur jackets for children. It has also sprung from online to brick and mortar via a pop-up shop at 27 Prince St. in Manhattan’s SoHo.

Faux fur is in the midst of a boom. According to data from the retail tracking firm Edited, retail sales of genuine fur styles fell 44% from 2020 to 2021 while sales of luxury faux fur items increased 72%. The shift is probably driven by the kinds of Generation Z consumers Apparis hopes to reach; Boston Consulting Group reported in 2019 that Gen Z shoppers care more about animal welfare than any other sustainability issue. This means that if a brand aims to market around sustainability, the most resonant messaging for young people is likely to concern not harming animals. 

Apparis had been advertised to me on Instagram for months before it found me on TikTok, where I am served a constant stream of videos of people styling outfits under the #GRWM (get ready with me) hashtag. This is when people show off, say, a new shirt, and try on different pants, jackets, and accessories with it to decide how to best put their outfits together before leaving the house (or perhaps, before simply moving on to filming their next TikTok entry). A friend who makes popular style #GRWM TikToks recently finished a look with a hot pink faux fur Apparis coat.  I told her I had been wondering about the company’s products, and she told me the stuff is great. 

So I visit the pop-up on a recent weekday afternoon. It’s been there for around a year. When I ask the sales person when it will pop down, she says, “Confidentially, when the pizza store next door takes over the space.” An Apparis spokesperson later said in an email that the company hopes to keep the store open through this month, with no closing date set.

The store is designed to remind shoppers that fashion—which has been flaunting its embrace of “sustainability” with the same enthusiasm as the latest “It” bags for years—is actually all right. It doesn’t have to kill animals or ruin the planet; at least, Apparis says it won’t. 

The Apparis store is not subtle in avowing this. In big, blocky capitals, a sign reads “THE FUTURE OF FASHION IS VEGAN” above the store’s lone window, along with “FAUX CEO” on black mugs below the cash register. The pink, green, and orange cardigans—part of the “SILLY SEASON” spring collection—come in loud, highlighter-bright shades, as do swishy pants and tops made from shiny “ALT-SILK” fabric. (Remember that silk comes from, as Google tells us, “not really a worm, but the larval form of the silk moth.”)

I head straight for the black faux furs hanging in the back of the store. I find a hip-length style in my size and threw it on over my T-shirt. The fabric feels as soft as any fur, if not exactly real; genuine pelts bear a certain weightiness that’s absent here, though not unpleasantly so. The faux furs in Apparis are comparable in price to puffer jackets from Lululemon; a long one sells around $400 and a short one around $250, a small fraction of the tens of thousands of dollars one could spend on real fur. 

The label seems attuned to its customers, perhaps aided by the human interface in the physical store. When I tell the sales person that the sleeves are too short, she says, “We’ve been getting that feedback. They’re going to fix it.” 

A practically flawless fit is found in a vegan leather puffer jacket with a trendy convex back, kind of like a turtle shell. With a stand collar and longish sleeves, it’s one of the best-fitting, most flattering puffer jackets I’ve tried, as well as really warm—perfect, I guess, for throwing over one of the knit bra-tops laying on a table in the middle of the store and then going clubbing. The material, being vegan leather, seems as if it would easily wipe clean should it be met by an airborne espresso martini.

“What’s in it? Is it down?” I ask before my eye settles on the wall shouting VEGAN. “Oh wait, no—because you’re vegan.”

“It’s like a polyester,” the sales woman says. The filling doesn’t quite feel like down, more like wiry cotton balls, but even at its $385 price, there is a luxuriousness to this particular jacket, which the woman informs me is named “JEMMA.” The same vegan leather was also used for headbands thrown on a shelf near the cash register, along with a smattering of faux fur scrunchies. 

Faux fur can also be had at a luxury price point. With the exception of the LVMH group, such luxury brands as Balenciaga and Dolce & Gabbana can’t seem to swear off real fur off fast enough. The Humane Society’s P.J. Smith tells me he thinks real fur will phase entirely out of fashion within 10 to 15 years. 

Last year, former GQ fashion director and stylist Madeline Weeks launched First by Madeline, a unisex line of faux fur (she calls it “fir”) and faux shearling outerwear, which debuted at retail in Bergdorf Goodman’s B. Shop in early November. (Since this is spring, the pieces are not currently on the floor but are available upon request.) She envisions her line, with prices ranging from around $1,000 for a vest to around $5,000 for a knee-length coat, eventually being sold in faux fur salons within luxury retail establishments. Those might not be far off, with Saks and Bergdorf parent company Neiman Marcus Group both set to stop selling fur soon. In a recent release about the progress it’s made toward a commitment to being fur-free by 2023, NMG reported that its fur inventory has gone down by more than half.

Weeks, who manufactures her First by Madeline line in California because it was the first state in the U.S. to outlaw sales of new fur (the law will take effect in 2023), says she gets as many inquiries from men as from women. “That blew my mind,” she says. Often, “Somebody orders one for themselves and then for their wife, their husband, or their kids.”  She adds, “People do come up to me and say, like, ‘Oh, I still love fur.’” 

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