Ermine, the height of fashion

Winter fashion is quite different from summer dress in the mountains. One of the more stylish coats seen on the slopes belongs to the ermine. The animal is a handsome, foot-long, slinky tube of luxurious fur skittering over the snow, pure white except for a stylish black tip to a short tail – and a common sight on quiet chairlift rides. If you see the above, but with a long tail, then it’s a long-tailed weasel and technically not an ermine. There’s also a least weasel that is white in winter but lacks a black tip to the tail.They’re all part of the family Mustelidae, which also covers otters, ferrets, badgers and wolverines. In summer, the ermine tones down its dress, wearing a two-tone brown and then it becomes “only” a stoat, or short tailed weasel. Clothes do make the man, or weasel in this case.There’s more to white than meets the eye for winter animals. White coats lack the pigment melanin. Instead of pigment, there are tiny air spaces, which makes the coat warmer. An ermine tail’s black tip is an eye-catching distraction to predators, which are likely to aim their strike at the fleeing black dot and miss the ermine’s body.A long, skinny body isn’t great for conserving heat. but it is useful for hunting small mammals in their burrows, dens and subnivean crawl space. To stay warm, the ermine cranks up its metabolism and eats 40 percent of its body weight a day. They’re ferocious predators and will kill animals several times their size.In some ways, our winter fashion parallels nature’s choices. Ermine look to belong to the Bauhaus movement’s “function is style” camp. Modern hi-tech clothing oozes function, but perhaps too much. How complicated should a jacket be? If it’s good enough for soloing the Himalayas, then it’s probably overkill for Mid-Vail. Excess is a waste of resources in the natural world.Occasionally, you’ll notice someone sporting a suit with the warmth and equivalent panache of an ermine’s white coat. There’s no black tail tip, but then our whole outfits are misleading. Snowsports provide a fantasy escape from daily drudgery. A little of the allure of ski fashion is to dress as something you’re normally aren’t, whether it’s a big mountain extreme skier, a budding albino gangster rapper, or glamorous snow queen. Holidays are a chance to ditch the dress code for a flashy winter ermine suit with some distracting bling to confuse those who’d try to peg you.Part of a family photo album’s charm is not only seeing how people mature and age but also what we chose to wear as we grew up. Fashion is not so much a circle as a series of displaced loops. Each generation rediscovers an old look and adds their own twist. Check out the new one-piece suits in the halfpipe, for instance. Originally laughed away by the cool rebels, their new mutant version sort of makes sense. If you choose a look that drops your belt to your thigh and crotch to your knees, then a deformed one piece achieves this without leaving a large gap for the snow to fall in. Walking and general mobility is still an issue, but historically style corrupts function.Ermine have a history of style and symbolism. Ermine furs became a must-have for British royalty, with rules on the number of black dots signifying status. At times only royalty could wear them. Ermine became a symbol of purity in the Renaissance period because of their white coat. People believed that if a hunter surrounded an ermine with a ring of mud, the honorable weasel would choose death to defilement; i.e, getting its coat muddy. The wearers of ermines must have hoped to bestow this moral quality of pure mind and spirit upon themselves. They were absolutely wrong about ermine behavior, and if the history books are true, almost all of its wearers ,too.Ermine later became a symbol of chastity, too. There’s a famous portrait of the first Queen Elizabeth with an ermine, which symbolizes her purity and chastity as she chooses to be married only to England the country, by choice as the ermine is unleashed. Style is never a simple matter, especially for something as eye-catching as an ermine. The brown stoat or short tailed weasel seems to have an easier time of it though. Being unnoticed has its advantages.Alan Braunholtz of Vail writes weekly.