Leaving a sheep alone is the cruellest thing you can do to it, and there's a fleece in a museum in Canberra to prove it. On 13 September PETA protesters crashed the COS show at New York Fashion Week with placards against wool, and Steven Kolb, who runs American fashion's trade body, ended up wrestling them beside the catwalk while the models kept walking. The demand was simple: stop taking wool from sheep. One merino has already had that granted in full. In 2015 a personal trainer, Sue Dowling, was out with a client on the edge of Canberra when she noticed him standing in a paddock, not moving. He'd been living wild for about five years with nobody for company but the kangaroos. Nobody had sheared him. Nobody had done anything to him at all. She named him Chris, after the unhappy sheep in Father Ted, which was the right call. He could barely walk. His legs had started to bow under the weight of his own coat. The RSPCA put out an urgent appeal for a shearer, and within hours a four-time Australian champion, Ian Elkins, had put his hand up. They sedated Chris first, for fear of shock, and the job took about 45 minutes. The fleece weighed 41.1 kilos, a world record and enough for about 30 jumpers. Underneath it his skin was infected from years of urine and muck trapped in the wool. With it on, he'd been reckoned to have weeks left. That's what a merino does without a shearer. He doesn't shed. Thousands of years of breeding saw to that. The coat just keeps coming until it buries him. Chris took the record from Big Ben, shorn of 28.9 kilos in New Zealand in 2014, who'd taken it from Shrek, 27 kilos, in 2004. Every one of them a sheep that went years without a haircut, and every one saved by somebody with clippers. Several farmers came forward to claim Chris. None of their markings matched, so he went to a sanctuary instead and lived another four years. The RSPCA turned him into a children's book about animal welfare, and the welfare in question was a haircut. His fleece went to the National Museum of Australia, where it's the second most sought-after thing in the building, after the heart of the racehorse Phar Lap. Leave a merino alone for five years and what you get is Chris.

Britain has already tried a plant-based alternative to wool. It was called cotton, and it went about as well as you'd expect. For five hundred years this country ran on sheep. The Lord Speaker still sits on a sack of wool in the House of Lords, put there in the 1300s so the room would never forget where the money came from. Then the mills of Lancashire found a cheaper fibre. By the 1850s about three quarters of it came from the slave plantations of the American South, and every bale started the same way. The day began when it was light enough to see the plants and ended when it was too dark to see them. When the moon was full, it often went on till the middle of the night. Every basket was carried to the gin-house and weighed. Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped into twelve years of it, said nobody walked up to those scales without fear. Two hundred pounds was an ordinary day. Come in light and you were whipped. Come in heavy and tomorrow's quota went up to match. Manchester called it progress. When the American war cut the supply, Lancashire found out what it had built on. By the winter of 1862, in Stalybridge, five mills out of 39 were working full time. Families queued for relief. Some of the mill hands crossed the Pennines to find work in the Yorkshire woollen mills, which were still going, because the sheep hadn't gone anywhere. A century later the Soviet Union decided to grow its own. It took the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, then the fourth largest lake on earth, and poured them onto the cotton fields of Uzbekistan. Moynaq was a fishing port, with a cannery that turned out 21 million tins of fish in 1958. As the water went, the cannery kept going on fish trucked in from the Baltic and the Pacific, thousands of kilometres, to be canned in a port with no sea. It shut in 1990. The water is now more than 100 kilometres away, the fishing boats are rusting on the sand, and the wind lifts salt off the old seabed and drops it on the town. And somebody still had to pick it. Every autumn the Uzbek state marched teachers, doctors, nurses and schoolchildren into the fields, and it only stopped in 2020. As much as a fifth of the world's cotton comes from Xinjiang, and America has turned it away at the border since 2021, on the grounds that it was picked with forced labour. That's the plant fibre's CV. Slave plantations, a starving county, a dead sea and a ban at the border. The sheep's CV is a hillside, some rain and a haircut once a year.