Fleece Ain't Even Fleece Anymore — It's Better
The humble fleece, a vision in polyester, is no more. Bye bye, corporate swag! Fashion is out to do you one better.
Right now, all of the best fleeces in the biz are barely fleeces. Most of them aren't even made of fleece.
We'll never truly be rid of polyester and acrylic fleece, to be sure. Literally! That stuff's never gonna decompose.
But it's all too cheap and too readily available and we all consume too darn much to ever entirely cut reliance on our worst tendencies and textiles.
Still, there is hope.
A handful of designers have dared to challenge ye olde fleece hierarchy over the past few years and the Fall/Winter 2025 season looks to be a satisfying crystallization of the anti-fleece fleece, which will hopefully one day be simply referred to as "fleece."
You can thank indie makers like Rier and AURALEE for doing their part to normalize stylish fleeces of the organic sort, with Rier's all-wool half-zip a certified menswear sleeper hit and AURALEE, well, basically just doing everything better than anyone else. Camiel Fortgens, meanwhile, created a weirdo buttoned and zipped cardigan that's so wild you may not even realize it's made of sumptuous wool and alpaca fleece.
It's ingenuity like this that's moved the fleece needle enough that luxury labels have come around.
Consider Ferragamo's ferociously furry collarless zip-up jacket, which is a spiritual fleece at most.
Miu Miu, master of the monied mousy look, has taken charge on the fleece front, redeeming the Silicon Valley staple as normcore cool. Admittedly, Miu Miu's perpetually sold-out $2,500 fleece jacket is still made of polyester — only 20 percent recycled! — so on its face it's just the same ol' fleece but with two extra zeroes on its price tag.
But that the Prada sibling line is transforming dad's favorite layering piece into a fabulously fashionable flex is a good sign that ample fleece innovation is on the horizon. Here, a fleece isn't a fleece not because it isn't literally a fleece but because it's being presented as something more, something special.
Only by pedestaling the ordinary can we reconsider it as something special. Baby steps!
This sort of stylistic reclamation is how we get to things like Greg Laboratory's dropped-shoulder mockneck fleece which redeems its utilitarian textile with a dramatic space-age cut.
This is the kind of energy we need to get to the next level of plush, insulating excellence: Textural experimentation that engenders a new form of no-brainer toss-on-and-go easy-does-it cold weather layer.
Fleeces are so excellent because they're so many things. They're warm, they're breathable (well, sometimes), they're sporty, they're soft, they're high-necked or no-necked, breaking up staid layers. They really are a darn good mid-layer.
And so, we need fleeces to get better, just like we need all clothes to get better. We need them to be cut loose, like all fleeces ought to be, and made of inventive new materials that're better, durable, longer-lasting, and more eco-conscious than the man-made fleeces of year's past.
Thank god for makers like Ranra and Evan Kinori, pushing the boundaries of what a fleece can be. We all benefit in the end.
