The Best Natural Fibre for a Winter Coat: All Ten Compared

Ten animal fibres get compared for winter coats: llama, mohair, alpaca, angora, camel hair, lambswool, merino, qiviut, cashmere and vicuña. Three of them are not coat fibres at all, and one of the most famous “alpaca coats” in fashion contains less alpaca than a coat costing a tenth as much. Here is what separates them, what each costs, and which ones actually belong in outerwear.

The ranking, for coats specifically

This ranks suitability for a coat — not softness in a scarf, not warmth in a sock. Fibre diameter is measured in microns (µm); lower is finer and softer.

Rank	Fibre	Micron	Why it sits here
1	Vicuña	~12–13	The finest and rarest coat fibre made. Also the most delicate, and priced beyond almost everyone.
2	Cashmere	≤19 by law	The benchmark. Legally defined, genuinely soft, warm for its weight — and it pills.
3	Camel hair	19–24 (down)	Close to cashmere in the hand but harder wearing. Limited to natural and navy in most cloths.
4	Llama	~23–25 (undercoat)	As fine as superfine alpaca once dehaired, and almost impossible to buy new. See below.
5	Alpaca	15–32 by grade	Enormous quality range. Usually blended with wool for structure.
6	Merino / lambswool	merino <22	The default overcoating, and the most durable of the group.
7	Mohair	26–36	A suiting fibre. Reaches coats only as a brushed or blended novelty.
8	Angora (rabbit)	14–16	Very fine, but a knitwear fibre — it cannot be woven alone.
9	Qiviut	disputed	Extraordinary fibre, structurally incapable of making coat cloth.

Is a camel hair coat actually made of camel hair?

Usually yes — but the phrase does double duty, and that is the confusion. Camel hair is a real fibre: the fine undercoat of the Bactrian camel, roughly 19–24 microns, with baby camel down reaching about 16–19. It is combed or collected during the moult rather than shorn, and the best of it comes from Mongolia and Inner Mongolia.

But “camel” is also a colour. A tan wool coat is routinely called a camel coat while containing no camel hair at all, and the price gap is stark: a pure camel-hair coat runs roughly $3,600–5,500, while camel-coloured wool coats sit around $1,300–1,900. Read the composition label, not the name.

Which is warmest?

Warmth in a coat is decided by cloth weight and construction first, fibre second. Most overcoating starts around 500 g / 18 oz, and 600–700 g — what mills label 20–25 oz — is the standard weight for a proper winter coat in a temperate climate. A 22 oz cashmere coat and a 14 oz one are different garments regardless of the fibre on the label.

One caution: mills quote grams and ounces by trade convention rather than arithmetic conversion, so treat those pairings as labels, not maths.

Within that, the finer and more crimped the fibre, the more still air it traps per gram. Vicuña and qiviut sit at the top of that scale. You will also read that one fibre is “eight times warmer than wool” or similar — those multipliers circulate widely and we have not found a measurement behind any of them, so we do not repeat them.

What each actually costs

Finished-coat prices, observed August 2026. Raw fibre prices and coat prices are different worlds, and conflating them is the most common error written about this subject.

Fibre	Coat price band	A real listing
Vicuña	$13,000–39,500	Loro Piana Harlan Coat, 100% vicuña — $33,425
Cashmere	$1,300–2,000 high street; $3,000–7,500 pure designer	Max Mara Ludmilla, 100% cashmere — $7,250
Camel hair	$3,590–5,490 pure	Max Mara Manuela, 100% camelwool — $3,790
Mohair	$2,000–2,900, always blended	Ring Jacket, 70% wool / 30% mohair — $2,300
Sheep wool	$1,000–1,900 pure designer	Max Mara Wkdresina, pure wool — $1,340
Alpaca	$200–600 pure specialist	Quince, 100% alpaca — $400
Llama	essentially unavailable new	see below

The blend trap

This is the single most useful thing on this page. A fibre’s reputation is priced into coats that contain very little of it.

• Max Mara’s 101801, described almost everywhere as a cashmere coat, is labelled 90% virgin wool, 10% cashmere at $4,490. The house’s genuinely 100% cashmere coat costs $7,250.
• The famous Teddy Bear coat — the definitive “alpaca coat” — is 62% alpaca, 26% wool, 12% polyamide at $4,460. A $400 overcoat in 100% alpaca contains more alpaca than it does.
• Max Mara’s own “Mohair coats” page returns two coats, and neither contains any mohair.

None of this is deception — the compositions are printed honestly. It simply means the fibre name in the product title tells you what a coat is about, not what it is made of.

Softness, and why fibres itch

Itch is not an allergy in most cases. It is mechanical: coarse fibre ends push against the skin and register as prickle. The threshold sits around 30 microns, which is why merino at under 22 is comfortable while a 34-micron adult mohair is not.

Cashmere is legally required to average 19 microns or finer, with no more than 3% by weight over 30 microns. Alpaca spans 15 to 32 depending on grade, so “alpaca” alone tells you nothing about comfort — the grade does.

Two labels cause unnecessary worry. Baby alpaca and baby cashmere describe fibre diameter, not the age of the animal. They are grading terms.

Pilling and shedding are different problems

Cashmere pills for four stacked reasons: it is fine (13–16 microns), its staple is short so there are more fibre ends per centimetre, it has little crimp so ends do not spring back into the yarn, and it is spun softly with low twist. Every quality that makes cashmere feel wonderful also makes it pill. It is inherent, not a defect.

Mohair does the opposite. With a 10–15 cm staple and effectively no surface scales, fibres slide out whole instead of tangling into balls — so mohair sheds rather than pills, particularly when brushed and loosely spun.

How many seasons a coat lasts is not something anyone publishes credibly, and cloth weight, density and care matter more than fibre identity anyway.

Three fibres that are not coat fibres

Qiviut — the muskox undercoat — is one of the finest fibres on earth and cannot make a coat. It will not felt or full, and heavy overcoatings are milled precisely to shrink and close the cloth. Its staple is 3.5–7 cm, and a single animal yields 1.8–3.2 kg a year against roughly 2 kg of finished cloth per coat. The mills that process it run flat-bed knitting machines making hats and scarves.

Angora rabbit is a knitwear fibre for structural reasons: it is slippery with few scales and little crimp, so a 100% yarn is extremely difficult to weave. Standard practice is a merino warp with angora in the weft — even woven angora is a minority partner.

Mohair belongs to suits. Its cloths run 8–9 oz and typically carry 6–30% mohair against a wool warp. The fuzzy “mohair coat” of the fashion market is a brushed blend, not a mohair equivalent of a cashmere overcoating.

Llama: the one nobody sells

Llamas outnumber alpacas worldwide — about 3.2 million against 3.0 million — yet llama is commercially invisible. It is not a quality problem.

The llama is double-coated. Measured separately, a Bolivian llama’s inner coat runs about 25 microns while its outer guard hair reaches 87 — coarser than horsehair. Judge the fleece unsorted and llama looks crude; separate the two and the down is, in the words of one genetics review, “equivalent to… the alpaca fiber belonging to the superfine category.” Alpaca is single-coated and skips that separation entirely, which is most of the story.

The rest is history and marketing. The llama was bred as a pack animal, and its hair has traditionally gone to rope and sacking. Around 80% of llamas are the short-fleeced Kara type that yields little usable fibre. And the same review names the real obstacle plainly: a “low level of awareness among consumers and clothing industry about llama fiber quality, added to inadequate marketing strategies.” The international body that publishes fibre pages for alpaca, camel, cashmere, angora and mohair does not maintain one for llama at all.

The consequence is visible at retail. Two 98% llama designer coats surfaced in a search of current stock — both sold out, with no price shown. Cinzia Rocca, the house whose baby-llama coats fill the secondhand market, now lists alpaca, cashmere, cotton, silk and wool in its material filters, and no llama at all.

Which means a llama coat is now, in practice, a vintage proposition. We keep several — pure llama pieces from Calw, Adler and Sanwald 1894 among them.

Ethics, stated plainly

Angora. Footage published in 2013 led H&M, ASOS, M&S, Primark and Next to suspend angora within weeks; Inditex banned it worldwide in February 2015. Notably, Inditex said at the time that it had found no evidence of cruel practices at its own suppliers’ farms — and banned the fibre regardless. Roughly 90% of angora is produced in China.

Merino and mulesing. The published figures do not reconcile, because they count different things: 17% of wool volume is certified non-mulesed, around 10% of growers are, and one welfare organisation states 70% of sheep are still mulesed. All three can be true at once. Less widely reported: about 75% of mulesed lambs now receive registered pain relief.

Cashmere and grassland. That Mongolian rangeland has degraded is not disputed — roughly 65–70%, with the national herd doubling to around 70 million since 2000. The mechanism is genuinely contested: a 2025 paper found no evidence that goats uproot plants under continental grazing systems, citing satellite work in the Gobi where weather outweighed grazing pressure. Treat that as a serious challenge to the standard story rather than a settled reversal.

Vicuña. The conservation record is not in dispute — from roughly 10,000 animals in the 1960s to Least Concern today, under a CITES-regulated system where animals are herded, shorn alive and released. The documented criticism is economic rather than about the shearing: that the gains reaching Andean communities have been modest, and that legal trade has created channels for laundering poached fibre.

Qiviut is combed from moulting animals rather than shorn, though some also comes from the pelts of muskoxen taken for meat and hide.

So which should you buy?

For a coat you will wear hard for years, wool or a wool-heavy blend is the sensible answer, and camel hair is the upgrade that keeps the durability. Cashmere is the one to choose when you want the hand above all and accept that it will pill. Alpaca is excellent value if you check the grade rather than the name. Vicuña is a different category of object entirely.

And if you want the fibre almost nobody is selling — fine as superfine alpaca, and now essentially only found secondhand — that is llama.

Our overcoats run across most of these, with cashmere its own collection. The Cashmere Story goes deeper on that one fibre.