Know your fibers
Wool
Wool is the fiber most people already read as a quality signal, which makes it the one most often faked. A coat labelled wool blend can be anywhere from 80 percent wool to 30 percent wool carried by acrylic, and the label rarely leads with the number that matters.
It holds roughly 30 percent of its weight in moisture before it feels wet, which is why it stays warm in damp cold where down collapses. It resists odour, so a coat worn daily needs cleaning two or three times a season rather than weekly. The crimp in the fiber recovers from compression, so tailoring keeps its shape across a day of sitting.
- Moisture held
- 30% of its weight
- Clean
- 2 to 3 times a season
- Weakness
- Slow to dry
The grades, briefly
- Merino, measured in microns. Under 19 is next-to-skin soft. 21 and above is a sweater over something, not against the skin.
- Lambswool, the first shearing. Softer and springier than the same sheep’s later clips.
- Shetland, coarser and drier, with more loft. Ages into something better than it starts as.
- Boiled and melton, felted after weaving. Dense, wind resistant, and the reason a good coat needs no lining to be warm.
- Virgin wool means never previously spun. Not a quality grade on its own, though it correlates.
Read the lining before the shell. A wool crepe dress with a polyester lining breathes like polyester.
The blends that are fine, and the one that is not
Five to fifteen percent nylon or polyamide in knitwear is added at cuffs and elbows for abrasion resistance and genuinely extends the life of the garment. Acrylic is different. It is there to cut cost, it pills within a season, and it does not recover from compression, so a coat with a quarter acrylic goes flat at the elbows and stays flat.
Care, which decides how long it lasts
- Air it rather than clean it. Overnight on a wide hanger removes most of what a wash would.
- Dry clean two or three times a season at most. The solvents strip lanolin and the fiber gets brittle.
- Hand wash knitwear cool, press water out against the basin, never wring, dry flat. Hanging wet wool stretches it permanently.
- Store folded, not hung. Clean before storing, since moths are drawn to body oils rather than the wool itself.
- De-pill with a comb after the first few wears. Early pilling on good wool is surface fiber shedding and it stops.
The honest trade-offs
Slow to dry, so a poor choice for sustained rain without a treated face. Some people cannot wear it against the skin regardless of micron count. It is most expensive exactly where the quality gap is narrowest, in mid-weight knitwear.