INNSBRUCK, Austria — The cloth is made the way it was made in the 16th century, give or take electricity: wool from mountain sheep is spun, woven loosely, then pounded in warm water for hours until the fibers lock into a felt so dense it sheds rain, blocks wind and, with the help of a brush, lasts for 40 years. It is called loden, from an Old High German word for coarse cloth, and for most of its history its wearers were shepherds, foresters and the Alpine gentry who wanted to look like them.
This autumn, it is on the runways of three Paris houses, in the windows of concept stores in Copenhagen and Seoul and, most improbably, on the shoulders of people under 30 in Berlin’s Neukölln district, who wear the classic hunter-green coat with its box pleat and horn buttons over sneakers and wide trousers, as if it were a varsity jacket.
“Our average customer three years ago was 61 years old and lived in Bavaria,” said Theresa Hölzl, the fourth-generation owner of a mill in the Stubai Valley that has made loden since 1887. “Now a third of our orders go to shops in cities where it does not snow. We have a nine-month waiting list for the heavyweight green. I have hired six people and I could hire 20.”
The appeal, retailers say, is a combination of things fashion has recently come to prize: natural fibers, a traceable origin, longevity and the kind of plainness that reads as expensive. A classic coat from one of the Tyrolean makers costs 600 to 900 euros, less than a comparable cashmere coat, and comes with the implicit promise that it will outlast its owner’s taste. It also has a story, which in the current market is worth as much as the cloth.
“It is the anti-trend trend,” said Jonas Brekke, who buys menswear for a department store in Copenhagen that began stocking loden in 2024 and now devotes a wall to it. “Our customers are tired of being sold something new every season. Loden is a thing that has been correct for 500 years. You cannot get it wrong, which for a 26-year-old is very reassuring.”
The surge has had effects up the chain. The mills, of which about a dozen remain in Austria, Bavaria and the South Tyrol region of Italy, depend on wool from a few thousand mountain sheep, much of it from flocks that were on the verge of being given up. The price of raw Tyrolean mountain wool has risen 70 percent in two years, according to the regional farmers’ association, and several farmers who had switched to dairy have kept sheep. “For 30 years the wool was worth less than the shearing,” said Georg Pfurtscheller, 54, who keeps 180 sheep above Neustift. “Now a man from Paris calls me.”
There are hazards. Luxury houses have begun selling garments labeled loden that are made of ordinary milled wool, and the Tyrolean makers are lobbying for a protected designation similar to those for Harris tweed or Parma ham. Fast-fashion versions in polyester blends appeared in September. And the makers themselves worry about the cycle. “Fashion found us. Fashion will leave,” Ms. Hölzl said. “The question is whether the people who bought a coat will keep wearing it. I think they will, because it is a good coat. That has always been the whole argument.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 16 of the European edition with the headline: Loden, the Coat of Tyrolean Shepherds, Finds a Following Among People Who Have Never Seen a Sheep.
