Where Fashion’s Animal Materials Come From

Why the supply chain matters to a shopper

By the time a jumper reaches a shop, the animal it came from is several companies away. The brand buys from a spinner, which buys from a trader, which buys from farms the brand may never have heard of. That distance is why a label can say "wool" and nothing else, and why a welfare promise is only as good as the audits behind it.

This guide covers where fashion's main animal materials come from, what the "responsible" standards change, and what they leave out. It also explains why our own materials gate does not grade any of it.

Leather

Most leather comes from cattle, with sheep, goats and pigs behind them, and a smaller trade in exotic skins from reptiles and ostriches. It is often described as a by-product of meat. In practice it is a co-product. The hide is sold, it has a price, and that price is part of what makes rearing the animal pay.

Tanning turns a hide that would rot into a material that lasts. Most of the world's leather is chrome-tanned, which is fast and cheap but uses chromium salts that are hazardous to tannery workers and to rivers when waste is poorly handled. "Vegetable-tanned" leather avoids chromium, but it is still an animal hide.

Tannery certifications focus on what happens in the tannery. The animal's life happened on a farm, often in another country, several transactions earlier. So a well-audited tannery tells you about processing, not about the animal.

Wool

Sheep have been bred for fleece for thousands of years, and modern merino sheep grow far more wool than their ancestors did, often in wrinkled skin. Those folds trap moisture and dung and attract blowflies, whose larvae eat into living flesh. The condition is called flystrike.

Mulesing is the practice of cutting strips of skin from around a lamb's breech and tail so that the scar tissue grows smooth and woolless. New Zealand made it a criminal offence from 1 October 2018. In Australia, the largest producer of merino wool, it remains legal, and Victoria is the only state where pain relief is mandatory. In 2023 RSPCA Australia put the number of merino lambs affected at about ten million a year.

The Responsible Wool Standard (RWS), run by Textile Exchange, certifies farms against animal-welfare and land-management criteria, prohibits mulesing, and requires every site from farm to final seller to be certified, so that the claim follows the wool. It is a real improvement on uncertified wool. It is also a welfare standard, not an exemption from using animals. The sheep are still bred for fleece, and still sent to slaughter when their wool declines. Textile Exchange is folding RWS into a new Materials Matter Standard, effective from 31 December 2026.

We cover wool on its own in Is wool vegan?.

Cashmere, mohair, alpaca and angora

These are the luxury hairs, and each has its own record.

• Cashmere is the fine undercoat of goats, mostly from Mongolia and northern China. Rising demand has driven larger herds onto fragile grassland, and overgrazing there is now one of the industry's own stated problems.
• Mohair comes from Angora goats, largely in South Africa. After PETA Asia published undercover footage in 2018, many high-street retailers stopped selling it.
• Angora is the hair of Angora rabbits, not goats. PETA Asia's 2013 footage of rabbits in China having their fur torn out led many large retailers to drop it altogether.
• Alpaca comes from South American camelids and has had its own welfare investigations in Peru.

Textile Exchange runs parallel standards for mohair and alpaca, and there is a Good Cashmere Standard for goats. They raise the floor. None of them changes what the material is.

Down and feathers

Down is the soft layer under a bird's feathers, usually from ducks and geese raised for meat, and in some supply chains for foie gras. The worst practices are live-plucking, where down is pulled from conscious birds, and force-feeding.

The Responsible Down Standard (RDS) prohibits both, along with the removal of down or feathers from live birds by any method. It says it covers welfare from hatching to slaughter. It is the minimum worth accepting if you buy down at all. Recycled down, reclaimed from old duvets and jackets, avoids new harm. It is still down, and our gate still counts it. For warm alternatives, see vegan winter coats.

Silk

Silk is spun by silkworms as they build their cocoons. To keep the filament in one long thread, conventional production kills the pupae inside with heat before the moth can break out. A single silk shirt takes hundreds of cocoons.

"Peace silk", or ahimsa silk, lets the moth emerge first and spins the broken fibres. It is gentler, it is a tiny share of world production, and it is still an animal product. Stella McCartney uses peace silk openly, and it is one of the reasons the brand carries our animal-materials tag on this site.

Fur and shearling

Fur farming has been banned in England and Wales since the Fur Farming (Prohibition) Act 2000, and in Scotland and Northern Ireland since 2002. Importing and selling fur remains legal in the UK, with narrow exceptions such as cat, dog and most seal fur. The government's latest position, in December 2025, stopped short of an import ban. So a British shop can legally sell fur from animals farmed in ways that would be a crime here.

Shearling is sheepskin with the wool still attached: both a leather and a wool. Real fur is still sometimes mislabelled as faux. If a trim matters to you, part the hairs and look at the base. Fur grows from skin, and faux fur is knitted into a fabric backing.

What the "responsible" standards do, and do not do

• They do set rules for how animals are kept and handled on certified farms, audit those farms, and track the certified material through the supply chain so the claim on the label can be traced.
• They do not make a material animal-free. They do not cover animals on farms outside the scheme. They depend on audits at intervals rather than constant observation, and they cannot tell you what else a brand sells.

A brand that uses RWS wool or RDS down is doing better than one that uses neither, and deserves credit for saying so. We record those programmes where brands publish them.

Why our gate does not grade welfare

We draw one line and hold it: any animal-derived material in the current range means our animal-materials tag, whatever standard it was sourced to. That is not because welfare standards are worthless. It is because a rating has to answer one question clearly. "Does this brand use animals?" has a checkable answer. "Did it treat them well enough?" does not have one we could apply fairly across twenty kinds of material and hundreds of farms.

So Stella McCartney, which has never used leather, fur or feathers and publishes its wool and silk sourcing in detail, still carries the tag. We say what it does well on its page, and the tag tells you the rest.

If you want to avoid all of it

Start with the swaps in our beginner's guide, learn the trade names in how to read a clothing label, and check a brand's page on our brands list before you buy. If we have not rated a brand you care about, ask it the questions in what cruelty-free fashion actually means. A good brand can answer them.