MINK INC.

A few years ago, Ervin Rosenfeld was asked to make a mink jacket for the Bronx rapper Fat Joe. This would not be just any mink jacket; it had to be the pale blue of a Tiffany box, light as champagne fizz, and flattering to a man who was said to weigh three hundred and seventy pounds. Equipped with Fat Joe's favorite North Face parka as a template, Rosenfeld set to work on the garment, for a video called "We Thuggin'." He tracked down a skin, a white ranched female mink, and had it dyed the requested hue; after stitching the pieces together, he cut up pillows and stuffed the material between the fur and the lining, to get a quilted effect. The resulting creation, a size-XXXXXL bomber jacket, was ready for delivery in three days. But there was a problem. Fat Joe was indeed so fat that Rosenfeld didn't have enough blue mink left to fulfill the other half of the commission. Never mind that the video was set on Memorial Day, in Miami; the R. & B. singer R. Kelly was meant to appear alongside Fat Joe in an identical coat.

Rosenfeld decided to go for what passes in his oeuvre for minimalism. He snipped the sleeves off the pattern, leaving the armholes huge and gaping, and attached a pouch of mink at the back of the collar. Voila. He had invented the sleeveless fur hoodie. It's a look still spoken of reverentially in certain quarters ("Nobody was doing those before he was," a former music executive told me recently), but that was only the beginning. Rosenfeld still had to figure out how to handle the part of the video in which Fat Joe, having just rapped that he's "got the mink on / same color [as] the Range," belly flops into a swimming pool. "I did a little trick," he said the other day, in his Manhattan shop. "Instead of destroying the mink, I made a rabbit coat of the same color, and Fat Joe jumped in wearing that."

Asked why he didn't just make a rabbit coat in the first place, Rosenfeld scoffed. "These guys don't want to be caught dead in rabbit," he said.

His assistant chimed in, "It's like a Volkswagen, or a Pinto."

Possessed equally of Old World trade skills and a new-school appreciation for the preposterously extravagant, Rosenfeld is the hip-hop world's preferred furrier, having made pieces for Sean (Diddy) Combs (formerly known as Puffy), Usher, and Nas. He is fifty-five, with a downy bouffant and a kingly air. He manages to be both macho (gold chain, bellicose phone manner, lots of "sweetheart"s) and puckish (short legs, barrel chest, girly tote bag). For now, his official base of operations is a dingy rented storefront on West Twenty-ninth Street. He used to have a nicer showroom across the street, but he sold the building after September 11, 2001. The shabbiness of the new place doesn't seem to bother him much, in part because fur is just one of his domains. On any given day, he moves between the Fur District, the two restaurants that he co-owns in Brooklyn and SoHo, and his house on Staten Island, leaving a trail of reverberating ring tones--Hello, Moto!

Even back in the eighties, when neighboring furriers would spread alarm down the block, Paul Revere style, if a black person showed up, Rosenfeld welcomed shoppers of all colors and creeds. (His other main constituency is Orthodox Jewish women.) "Some customers, a black couple with a child, thought they weren't being taken care of one day," he said recently. "So I took a blade and I said, 'Cut me. The color of the blood's the same.' The guy bought pieces for himself and his wife and became one of my best customers." Aundray Hill, a hair stylist in Queens, used to patronize James McQuay, a well-known black furrier, but Rosenfeld won him over with his solicitousness. "The first time I went in, he treated me with respect," Hill said. "I've dealt with some Caucasian people where I feel they have their eyebrow up, looking at me like, 'What you really about?' "

Rosenfeld first got involved with the hip-hop world in the late nineties, when stylists for rap videos started coming around to borrow clothes for shoots. The stylist Misa Hylton-Brim, for instance, introduced him to Combs, her boyfriend at the time, and to Lil' Kim (for ...