(FORTUNE Magazine) – Leather has long been the city slicker's armor of choice--it's lean, it's mean, it rarely needs to be cleaned. Problem is, everyone has a leather coat. It's just not special anymore.

Enter shearling. Or make that reenter shearling. Defined as sheepskin with the wool left on, shearling has been around forever but was so heavy it only really made sense to wear it if you were working outdoors in Idaho. "Probably the nicest wool comes from the American sheep," say Searle "Steve" Blatt, who has designed Searle shearling coats for the past 15 years. "You saw it 20 years ago on the Marlboro man. The wool is very dense, but it's also heavy. Nobody uses that today."

Instead, this year's shearling coats--from Etro, Canali, Holland & Holland--use lighter, less suffocating shearling from Europe and Australia. And they're as refined as any coats you'll see. Which is swell, except that what made shearling so great in the first place was its frontier look. Of all the coats we've seen, only this one, from John Varvatos, has that rugged American ranch-hand style. "We went back to what we thought was the Old World way of making a shearling coat," says Varvatos. "We raw-cut the edges. We exposed the seams. The only thing that we tried to change from the old coat was to lighten it."

--ERIK TORKELLS