A PETA supporter walked onto the Paul Smith catwalk at Milan Fashion Week this week carrying a sign with a simple demand: drop mohair. The disruption lasted seconds before security removed him. The message, however, will linger longer than the show itself.
At Rolf Skeldon, we think PETA deserves credit for that. Not because we agree with every position the organisation holds, and not because we think the fashion industry is irredeemably cruel. But because the footage that prompted this campaign, shot undercover on farms certified as responsible, showed goats being struck with brooms and poles, dragged by their horns, and pinned to the ground in clear distress. That is not acceptable, and it needed to be seen. Organisations like PETA exist precisely to surface things that the industry would prefer stayed behind closed doors. When they do that job well, it matters.
But there is more to say. And saying it is not a defence of abuse. It is an attempt at an honest picture.
A Goat That Cannot Shed Its Own Coat
The Angora goat is not a wild animal. It has not been a wild animal for a very long time. Centuries of selective breeding have produced a creature with one of the most extraordinary natural fibres on earth, a long, lustrous coat that grows continuously and does not shed naturally on its own. That is not a side effect of farming. It is the entire point of the breed, and it has consequences.
An Angora goat that is not sheared does not return to some uncomplicated natural state. It carries an increasingly heavy fleece that mats, collects debris, retains moisture, and can cause serious skin problems beneath the surface. In warmer months, the weight and density of an unmanaged fleece creates a genuine welfare problem in itself. Shearing, done correctly and at the right time of year, is not an act of exploitation. It is an act of husbandry. The goat needs it.
This is not an argument invented by the mohair industry to justify its existence. It is a straightforward consequence of what selective breeding does to an animal over generations. Domesticated Angora goats and their unsheared coats are not compatible with good health. The shearer with skilled hands and a calm approach is providing something the animal genuinely requires.
That is a very different conversation from the footage PETA captured. The problem in that footage is not that the goats were being shorn. The problem is how.
The Gap Between Standard and Practice
The Responsible Mohair Standard, administered by Textile Exchange, exists for good reason. It requires certification at every point in the supply chain from farm to final seller, mandates third-party audits, and builds its animal welfare criteria around the internationally recognised Five Freedoms: freedom from hunger and thirst, from discomfort, from pain and injury, from fear and distress, and the freedom to express normal behaviour. These are not vague aspirations. They are specific, auditable requirements.
The uncomfortable truth that PETA’s investigation exposed is that certification and reality do not always match. Farms that carried the RMS label were among those where the footage was taken. That is a serious problem with enforcement, not a reason to conclude that welfare standards in farming are theatre. It is a reason to demand better auditing, more rigorous spot checks, and real consequences for farms that fail to meet the standard they signed up for.
When a building fails a fire safety inspection, the answer is not to conclude that fire safety standards are meaningless. The answer is to fix the inspection process and hold those responsible to account. The same logic applies here.
The Fibre Itself
There is an environmental dimension to this conversation that often gets lost when the focus narrows entirely to animal welfare, and it is worth stating plainly.
Mohair is a natural, renewable fibre. It is biodegradable. It does not shed microplastics into rivers and oceans when it is washed. A well made mohair garment, cared for properly, will last decades. On each of these counts, it compares favourably to the synthetic alternatives that would replace it if the industry were abandoned entirely.
This does not resolve the welfare question. A fibre can be environmentally positive and still be sourced irresponsibly. Both things can be true at the same time. But the idea that walking away from natural animal fibres and towards synthetics is automatically the ethical choice is not as straightforward as it appears. The ocean does not benefit from more polyester. The atmosphere does not benefit from the energy cost of producing acrylic at scale.
The honest position is that material choices carry trade offs in multiple directions, and the goal should be to source responsibly, not to eliminate entire categories of natural fibre because some producers within them behave badly.
What Mankind and Animals Have Always Done
Human beings have kept animals for thousands of years. Not always well, not always wisely, but the relationship between people and domesticated livestock is not simply a story of exploitation. It is also a story of mutual dependency, of animals that exist in the numbers they do precisely because humans valued and cared for them, of farming communities whose livelihoods and identities are built around the welfare of their flocks.
The vast majority of people who keep Angora goats are not the people in that footage. They are smallholders and farmers who know their animals individually, who understand that a stressed or mistreated goat produces inferior fibre, and who take pride in the quality of what their land and their flock produce. That version of the mohair industry exists. It is not a marketing invention.
The footage that PETA captured is real. The farms in it exist. The suffering shown is genuine. But it does not represent every farm, every shearer, or every producer in an industry that spans multiple continents and thousands of individual operations. Allowing the worst examples to define the whole is not honest scrutiny. It is a different kind of distortion.
What We Should Be Asking For
The Paul Smith protest at Milan Fashion Week will almost certainly accelerate a conversation that was already happening inside the brand. That is probably the point. Public pressure, applied at the right moment in the right setting, has a track record of producing real change. Burberry, Victoria Beckham, Chanel and Mulberry have all moved away from exotic skins in recent years, and campaigning pressure was part of what drove those decisions.
Whether Paul Smith drops mohair entirely or commits to stricter sourcing requirements remains to be seen. But the conversation the protest opened is a legitimate one, and it deserves a response that goes beyond a press statement.
The industry needs better enforcement of existing standards. It needs supply chains that are genuinely traceable rather than theoretically traceable. It needs brands to take meaningful responsibility for conditions at farm level rather than outsourcing that responsibility to a certification logo. And it needs consumers who are willing to ask the right questions and pay the price that responsible production actually costs.
PETA brought something important to light this week. The response to that should not be to dismiss the protest as a stunt, nor to conclude that there is no place for a fibre that goats genuinely need to produce. It should be to look clearly at what the footage showed, to hold the right people to account, and to demand that the standard the industry sets for itself is the standard it actually keeps.
That is not a soft position. It is the only honest one available.
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