Virgin wool, lambswool and what a coat label hides

Virgin wool means the fibre has never been anything else. The American rule that polices the word, 16 CFR 300.20, holds that "virgin" or "new" cannot describe a wool product unless the fibre has never been reclaimed from any spun, woven, knitted, felted, braided, bonded or otherwise manufactured or used product. Nothing in it concerns the breed, the fineness, the mill, the country or the price. Every rule here was read at source in August 2026.

So a coat can say 100% virgin wool and be coarse fibre spun loose, woven thin, finished to look full for one winter. The opposite of virgin wool is not bad wool but recycled wool, which the same rules define as wool woven or felted once and pulled back into a fibrous state.

The word is a fact about a fibre's past, not a grade.

The lanolin line is a sales line

Sellers' blogs will tell you real virgin wool carries a faint scent of lanolin. It does not; the grease is washed out on purpose. The Woolmark Company publishes the process: greasy wool arrives carrying roughly 35 to 40 percent of its fleece weight in grease, suint, dirt and sand, then runs through six to eight bowls of wash liquor, most of it gone in the first two or three. Woolmark's finishing specification holds what is left under 1.5 percent total fatty matter and warns that more than that oxidises and turns rancid. A new coat that smells of anything smells of finish, or a damp stockroom.

Lambswool and merino describe, cashmere is tested

Cashmere has a written test, which is the asymmetry nobody selling a coat mentions: 16 CFR 300.19 requires the fine undercoat of a cashmere goat, average fibre diameter no greater than 19 microns, no more than 3 percent by weight over 30 microns. Lambswool has no such test in those rules. Neither does merino, which names a breed rather than a standard, though the Woolmark Company puts merino generally under 22 microns against a human hair at 50 to 100.

That gap matters at the till. 100% lambswool is a description a seller chose; 100% cashmere is a claim they can be held to, which is why the cashmere piece works in microns and ply.

Mohair and alpaca are wool, as far as the label is concerned

Under 15 USC 68, wool is the fleece of a sheep or lamb and the hair of the Angora or Cashmere goat, and it may take in camel, alpaca, llama and vicuña. A line reading 80% wool is doing less work than it looks. Mohair and alpaca appear on a label because the seller wanted credit, not because a rule forced it.

The other soft edge is the floor. American rules and Canada's Competition Bureau both name any fibre at 5 percent or more with its percentage, sweep the rest into an aggregate line, and leave ornamentation under 5 percent out of the count. A composition line is precise in the middle and vague at both ends.

Three lines, read straight

100% virgin wool. New fibre, never recycled, and no promise beyond that. Ask what the cloth weighs and who milled it; those answers separate a good version of this label from a poor one.

80% wool, 20% polyamide. Polyamide is nylon, and at this ratio it buys abrasion resistance at the cuff and pocket mouth rather than saving money. A study in Polymers, 18 July 2024, measured abrasion loss of 0.42 micrometres per thousand metres for pure polyamide yarn against 2.08 for a yarn half wool, five times tougher, though that yarn was spun for car seats rather than coats. People read the ratio the other way round.

70% wool, 20% polyester, 10% viscose. Different animal. Polyester in that quantity fills cloth to a price, and this is the composition that pills at the seat and shines at the elbow by February. Twenty percent nylon is a decision; twenty percent polyester is a budget.

Boiled wool and melton are finishes, not fibres

Neither word is a fibre, so neither appears on a composition line. The Woolmark Company describes milling as a wash whose mechanical action consolidates the fabric's structure and migrates fibres out of the surface, after which the cloth is brushed and pressed. Boiled wool is that process run on a knit, so it holds a shape without lining and cuts without fraying. Melton is the same treatment run hard on a woven cloth until the weave vanishes under the nap, and it stops wind that goes through a flannel of the same fibre.

Two coats can both read 100% wool and behave nothing alike.

Weight is the number the label refuses to print

Composition is on the label by law. Weight, which decides how cold you get, is not, so you ask or feel for it. Cloth merchants publish theirs. Dugdale Bros & Co lists its British Coatings bunch at 620 grams, 22 ounces, on a 150 centimetre width, and its luxury lambswool overcoating at 580 grams. Croft Mill lists a British made melton at 500 to 520 grams per square metre.

Fibre tells you what the coat is made of; weight tells you what it does.

Mind the units. Tailoring merchants quote grams or ounces for a length of cloth at a stated width, fabric shops quote grams per square metre, and nobody says which. Croft Mill's other melton coating runs 280 grams in 80 percent wool and 20 percent cashmere, the finer composition and the one that gives up first in a north wind, which is the winter coat guide in one number.

The tell no label carries

Take a fistful of cloth low on the front panel, squeeze for five seconds, let go and watch. Good wool opens and the crease goes while you watch, because the crimp works like a spring. Cloth that holds the fold has been over milled, under twisted or filled. The test costs nothing and no composition line predicts it.

Four more, while the coat is in your hands. Look at the lining where it meets the armhole, the seam that goes first, and read the stitch length. Check whether the pattern runs through the back seam and across the collar, which costs cloth and gets skipped. Lift the coat off the rail on one finger. Then ask who milled it: a shop that buys twelve coats a season knows, and one that cannot is telling you how it buys. The rooms in the boutique guide answer that unasked.

Common questions

What does virgin wool mean?

Virgin wool is wool that has never been made into anything before, and that is all the term certifies. American labelling rules, at 16 CFR 300.20, allow the words virgin or new only when the fibre has never been reclaimed from a previously manufactured or used product. It says nothing about the sheep, the fineness, the weight or the quality.

What percentage wool should a coat be?

For a winter coat our floor is 80 percent wool, with the rest nylon rather than polyester. Nylon adds abrasion resistance where a coat wears through; polyester in quantity fills cloth to hit a price. No rule sets a minimum, so that floor is a house preference rather than a standard.

Is a wool blend coat warm?

A wool blend coat is warm if the cloth is heavy and dense enough, because warmth comes from the weight and construction of the cloth rather than the purity of the fibre. A milled melton stops wind that goes straight through an open weave of identical composition. Read the weight first and the composition second.

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Still choosing? What's your Toronto winter coat? reads your winter in seven questions, and within opens Toronto's boutique shelves on October 1.