Furrier Has Master’s Touch For Craft

For 68 years, Karl Kiszely Jr. has been making fur coats for the rich and famous, and at times, the infamous.

He once made a fur coat for the queen of Greece.

The top playmate at the Lake Geneva, Wis., Playboy Club looked chic in the white mink bunny suit he made for the club opening.

When Kiszely lived in Chicago, mobsters’ girlfriends were strutting about in his creations.

Possibly his most unusual creation was made for an apparent drug dealer, who ordered a dark mink coat with a white stripe down the back, and paid in cash.

He may be 80 years old, but Kiszely isn’t ready to retire. He still works seven days a week.

“I’d rather be building a fur than anything else,” he said.

Furs are in his blood. It’s a craft he learned from his father and grandmother, who came to the Midwest from Hungary after the turn of the century.

Kiszely taught the skill to his two sons, who are also furriers.

One of the sons, Rik Kiszely, of Cheney, moved to Spokane and opened Exclusifurs at 101 N. Argonne Road in 1993 after the Spokane Fur Co. went out of business. He also owns a companion retail outlet in Newport Beach, Calif.

After the son opened Exclusifurs here, Karl Kiszley moved to Spokane from Chicago to team up with him.

Years ago, the Kiszley family lived in Spokane.

Rik Kiszley, 47, was born here. Karl Kiszely worked as a furrier. They moved to Chicago in 1959.

“We are the only full-service retail furrier between Billings and Seattle,” Rik Kiszley said.

In the late 1980s, the fur business went into the doldrums, partly as the result of changing styles, but also because of the national economic recession.

Animal rights activists pressured fur buyers and sellers with picketing in front of stores, and in some cities women’s fur garments were spray-painted in sidewalk attacks. Activists argue that wearing furs is tantamount to cruelty to animals.

The Kiszleys say fur-bearing animals are a natural resource like many others. The practice of wearing animal skins is as old as human culture, dating back to the caveman.

In fact, the first Caucasians to explore the Inland Northwest were trappers.

“For over 300 years here, beaver skin was money. It was the coin of the realm,” Rik Kiszely said. “Spokane’s heritage is steeped in the fur industry.

There is the grisly side in the hunting and trapping, and one type of fur, known as sharptail, is taken off unborn lambs.

Still, the fur industry is going through a rebound after the down years, the Kiszelys said. Wholesale prices for mink pelts have gone up 80 percent in the past few years.

“There is nothing warmer than a natural fur,” Rik Kiszely said.

Building a quality garment is laborious and time consuming.

“We put a lot of care into them,” said Karl Kiszely. “It’s not a fast process.”

That’s because the Kiszelys practice the art of “letting out” the fur.

Individual mink pelts, which are about 24 inches long, are too short to stretch from the collar to the garment bottom, so the furriers go through a process of “letting out” each pelt.

That involves cutting the fur into narrow diagonal slices and moving each piece downward before stitching them together.

“By letting out the fur you get this wonderful flow,” Rik Kiszely said, running his hand down the back of the coat like a good salesman.

A lesser quality of coat is made by sewing the pelts end-to-end vertically, but that doesn’t create the uniform look of the more expensive let-out fur.

Many of the pelts the Kiszelys use to make their garments come from domestic farms. Others are trapped or shot in the wild.

The Kiszleys have a bundle of wild sables harvested in Russia. They are so small and rare that a finished coat from the pelts would sell for $100,000 to $130,000.

Sable isn’t the softest fur. Chinchilla is.

“That’s like touching air,” Rik Kiszely said.

The two furriers not only build new coats; they also restyle old ones. Karl Kiszely restyled coats for the wife of assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Specialty products are available. A Chattaroy trapper recently had a bedspread made out of 22 coyote skins.

Over the years, Karl Kiszely has been a consultant. He once helped the government of Finland train the people of the far northern Lapland region to make furs.

Occasionally the Kiszelys will come across old furs and their customers.

Karl Kiszely recently restyled a coat that he made nearly two decades ago for the winner of the Alice in Dairyland competition in Wisconsin. The woman now lives in Spokane.

“There are other stores that have furs,” Rik Kiszely said. “But none of the others (in this region) have a master furrier on the premises.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo