Long a Holdout, Louis Vuitton Moves Away From Conventional Fur

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Louis Vuitton is the first in the LVMH group to use BioFluff’s Savian — a plant-based faux fur — in a runway collection, marking a quiet but significant shift for the luxury titan.

Louis Vuitton’s Fall/Winter 2026 women’s wear collection at Paris Fashion Week marked something new for the house: a vest made from Savian, a plant-based faux fur developed by BioFluff, a fashion-tech company with offices in New York and Paris. The vest, styled in BioFluff’s Wolfy texture, represents LVMH’s first foray into plant-based faux fur — a notably close partnership, given that Louis Vuitton’s parent company runs the Paris incubator where BioFluff has developed its material. The garment also incorporates polyester fur.

La Maison des Start-ups, LVMH’s innovation hub for luxury sector start-ups, has been home to BioFluff since the company’s early days. BioFluff was co-founded in 2023 by Roni Gamzon, now its chief commercial officer, alongside bioengineer Martin Stübler and textile recycler Steven Usdan. Gamzon, who was 24 at the time, had been building a fashion-tech start-up aimed at engaging Gen Z with luxury fashion when she met Stübler at a sustainability conference in Paris. He showed her handmade swatches of prototype plant fur, and the impression held. “This needs to be in the world,” she told The New York Times.

The vest represents a meaningful break from LVMH’s group-wide position as the conglomerate has been, conspicuously, one of the last major holdouts in luxury’s fur reckoning. While rival Kering committed to going fur-free across its portfolio in 2022 (Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and the rest), LVMH has made no such group pledge, and, in 2024, it sent €300,000 to the International Fur Federation to help prop up a struggling industry. Fendi, the LVMH house that literally started as a Rome furrier in 1925, has never abandoned the material and remains one of the most prominent holdouts in fashion. Within the family, individual brands have moved at their own pace — Celine, for instance, has quietly phased out fur — but there’s been no top-down directive, and Louis Vuitton has continued to feature animal fur in its collections without a formal policy change.

The plant behind the pile

Savian — named after the Hebrew word for the fluffy white seed head of dandelions and groundsels — is made from natural fibers like hemp, flax, nettle, and silk, backed on viscose. BioFluff currently offers two lines: Savian Naturals, from plant fibers sometimes blended with lyocell; and Savian Silks, from silk fibers. Its textures — Wolfy, Dalmatian, Cheetah, Bambi, Pony, and Beaver among them — are animal-inspired but not intended to replicate actual pelts. Gamzon has described the material as “its own thing,” she said, “like a veggie burger.”

On the environmental side, BioFluff says a preliminary third-party life-cycle assessment found that Savian’s carbon emissions are at least 75 percent below those of plastic fur. In a landfill, it can biodegrade within a few years, versus centuries for polyester and acrylic; it can also be industrially composted in 12 weeks, according to The New York Times.

A season of momentum

Collina Strada, the New York-based vegan label, was the first runway brand to sell Savian pieces, incorporating the Wolfy texture into its Fall/Winter 2026 collection at New York Fashion Week in February. Designer Hillary Taymour said she received swatches at Christmas and placed an order in early January. “We sewed it up roughly, gathered it, put it to a test — it sews up like normal material,” Taymour told The Times. “It’s super soft. It hits all the check marks.” Menswear designer Martine Rose also incorporated Savian across her Fall/Winter 2026 collection, noting she loved it “for its aesthetic.”

BioFluff opened its first Paris showroom this month, and Gamzon acknowledged the road to that point included plenty of setbacks — noting that “all the creative director changes” at major design houses “have made the process very difficult.” She told The Times she expects “that next Fall/Winter is going to be even stronger.”

“We’ve had our heart broken a lot,” she said.

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