Shearling, Sheepskin and Lambskin: What the Labels Actually Mean

Shearling, sheepskin and lambskin turn up on the same rail, often on the same jacket, and the labels get used as if they meant the same thing. They do not. Two of them are the same animal at different ages, one of them is not a separate leather at all, and the difference decides how warm the jacket is, how heavy it is, and what size you should buy.

Sheepskin and lambskin are the same animal

Lambskin comes off a young sheep. Sheepskin comes off a grown one. That is the whole distinction, and everything else follows from it.

A lamb hide is thin, usually under a millimeter. It drapes rather than standing away from the body, the grain is fine enough to read as smooth, and it is soft the first time you wear it instead of after a month. The cost is abrasion: lambskin marks where a thicker hide would not. That matters on a motorcycle and barely matters on the way to work.

Sheepskin is thicker and a little firmer. You lose some drape and gain some structure, so the jacket holds its line through the shoulder. It is the most common shell in this range, on twenty-six jackets, and it sits under most of the flight and aviator patterns.

Fifteen jackets here name lambskin, mostly bikers, cafe racers and bombers.

Shearling is sheepskin with the wool left on

This is the part people get wrong. Shearling is not another animal and it is not a fabric. It is a sheep hide tanned with the fleece still attached, so one face is leather and the other is wool.

Which means a shearling jacket has no lining, because the lining grew there. It also means two things you should plan for.

It is the warmest thing in the range, by a distance. A B-3 in full shearling is a winter coat shaped like a jacket, not something to wear in October.

It is also the heaviest, and it changes your size. The wool takes up room inside. Buy for the shoulders and leave space rather than sizing down for a close fit. Twenty-seven jackets here are shearling, across men’s shearling jackets and women’s shearling jackets.

Real shearling against the faux kind

Faux shearling is fabric sewn to the inside of a jacket. Real shearling is one piece of skin, so there is no seam where the wool meets the leather, and the wool sits in a hide rather than on a backing cloth.

Two things give it away. Part the wool: on the real thing you reach leather, on the faux you reach woven backing. And look at the edge of a cuff or collar, where a genuine hide shows the leather and the fleece as one continuous piece.

Everything called shearling on this site is real sheepskin. One jacket in the whole range is not leather at all, the Vegan Leather Bubble Hem Bomber, and it says so in its name.

Cowhide, goatskin and suede

Cowhide is the heaviest and the toughest. It is stiff out of the box and stays that way for a while, and what you get for the wait is a jacket that takes a decade and keeps the creases you put in it. This is the traditional motorcycle leather. Four jackets here name it, including the light brown biker.

Goatskin has a pebbled grain you can see and feel, and it is light in the hand but hard to tear, which is why goatskin and horsehide were the usual choices for military flight jackets. One jacket here names it, the women’s mocha suede biker. Worth saying plainly: our own A-2 is cut in cowhide rather than goatskin, even though the pattern is usually associated with the latter.

Suede is not a hide at all. It is what you get when a skin is buffed to raise a nap, and it can be made from lamb, sheep, goat or cow. It is softer than smooth leather and much less forgiving of water, because there is no sealed grain surface keeping it out.

Which one to buy

• Cold weather, no lining needed, heavy: shearling.
• Soft with some structure, wears all year: sheepskin.
• Soft and light, close to the body: lambskin.
• Hard wear and a long life, if you do not mind breaking it in: cowhide.
• Light, strong, visibly textured: goatskin.

Weight is what people underestimate. A shearling B-3 and a lambskin bomber are not the same garment in two finishes, and a jacket that feels substantial in the first five minutes can feel like work by the evening.

When a listing does not name the hide

About half our own specifications say “black leather” or “dark brown leather” without naming the animal. We are working through the catalog to fix that, because the hide is the thing that decides how a jacket behaves. Until it is done, ask: the workshop knows what went into any jacket here.

Nothing is cut before someone orders it, so the hide, the size and the pattern are all settled after the order, over five to seven days. That is also why made to measure costs nothing here: send eight measurements at checkout and the pattern is drawn to your numbers instead of a standard size.