The ultimate fabric for smooshing your fingers into, stroking and cuddling up in – soft as a favourite pet. We take a closer look at this sumptuous fabric.

Of course, people have been wearing fur since prehistoric man went out hunting woolly mammoths and made good use of their coats, but faux fur? The version where no animals were harmed in the making? In fact, that has been around for far longer than you might think, too. It first began appearing in 1929 and was originally made from alpaca hair. Yes, faux fur made from animal hair – but at least the alpacas gave it up more or less willingly.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the alpaca hair was replaced with manmade fibres: acrylic polymers. At first, they weren’t very good, but with real fur being extremely expensive and in limited supply, manufacturers set about making improvements. By the time animal rights charity PETA launched their famous ‘I’d rather go naked than wear fur’ campaign in 1990, where supermodels and celebrities posed nude to show their support, faux fur was becoming really rather impressive, and the real stuff became less acceptable.

Our faux fur is made from recycled materials – post-consumer plastics, such as bottles. It’s pretty incredible when you stroke one of our hot-water bottles to think that it might once have been a very different water bottle. Because we want our faux fur to be as realistic as possible, we use luxurious long, dense pile, which is why it feels so heavenly to scrunch between fingers.

Faux has several advantages over the kind that comes off animals’ backs. Firstly, it doesn’t shed like real fur does (with increasing rapidity the older it gets). Secondly, it’s much more versatile because it’s a fabric (not a skin), so we can create more intricate designs with it. There’s also the not-so-small matter of animals not being harmed, or killed. Of course, a product made from plastic will last much longer in the world than an animal skin, but that also means that, well-looked-after, it can last you a lifetime.