by SUSANNAH CONWAY, femail.co.uk

Fur is back in fashion. It's a trend which has been rapidly gaining momentum after seemingly fading away in the 1990s.

Top designers in New York, London, Milan, and this week no doubt Paris as well, have been showing real fur in their new autumn collections.

Supermodels, such as Cindy Crawford and Claudia Shiffer, who'd once said they would 'rather go naked than wear fur' in the infamous Peta advertisements of the 90s are now modelling it on the catwalk - and wearing it in real life - without a second thought.

Click on the links below to read Daily Mail writer Anne de Courcy's report on the rise of fur in fashion and read the case studies of four women who wear fur, and click on the links in the blue box, above, to see our picture gallery of celebrity and designer fur and tell us what YOU think on our message board.

In America the stars have taken to wearing fur much more quickly than their British counterparts and now the ladies who lunch in Manhattan and LA are donning real fur in their droves.

Recently Will Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith wore a chinchilla edged coat worth $10,500 to the LA premiere if her husband's latest film, Ali, while Kate Moss wore a fox-fur cape to the opening of the new Yves Saint Laurent store in London.

Yet Moss and other celebrity fur wearers such as Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Naomi Campbell and Joan Collins are all influential style icons.

So why has real fur become fashionable again when the fake versions look arguably just as good? For some fur smacks of cruelty and the unnecessary suffering of animals, for others it is all about status and wealth.