November 27 2025, 08:15 
A super cute fashion show hit a Paris runway last week, featuring designs made exclusively from gay wool.
Gay wool, you ask?
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Yes, there is such a thing, when the wool you’re working with comes from gay sheep.
And there are lots of those.
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About one in 12 rams shows no interest in mating with ewes, and on farms dedicated to producing the wool that supplies the fashion industry, that means the “male-oriented” sheep are expendable and likely sent to the slaughterhouse.
In other words, “the sheep are killed for being gay,” LA designer Michael Schmidt told The New York Times.
So Schmidt got together with Rainbow Wool, a German nonprofit created by a farmer who rescues the non-mating sheep and cultivates them for their wool, and Grindr, the gay dating app, to produce a collection bringing attention to the gay sheep’s plight and a show featuring some gay male archetypes to model it.
The result: “I Wool Survive,” a fashion show that Tristan Pineiro, senior VP for brand marketing and comms at Grindr, calls “a metaphor for how gay people are treated across the world.”
“The gay sheep get discarded, get forgotten, are seen as not valuable,” he said. “But through them, two people who would never otherwise have met, a German sheep farmer and a Los Angeles designer, got connected and together created something beautiful.”
“People tend to notice things that are sexy,” said Schmidt, who counts Cher, Doja Cat, and Lady Gaga as clients. “They gravitate toward that, especially if there is humor involved. So I thought, ‘Well, that’s a good way to draw the eyeball, which gets you to the story.’”
The designer leaned in on gay clichés: the pool boy, the gym teacher, the cowboy, the Navy sailor. Schmidt and Suss Cousins, author of Hollywood Knits, knitted every piece from 30 boxes of thread provided by Rainbow Wool, including red, white, and blue Speedo briefs; a Bike jock; and a pair of pink Converse high tops.
But Schmidt calls the show more than fashion.
“I view it as an art project. It’s selling an idea more than a collection of clothing, and the idea it’s selling is that homosexuality is not only part of the human condition, but of the animal world. That puts the lie to this concept that being gay is a choice. It’s part of nature.”
Or as Grindr’s Pineiro put it, “You can’t say the sheep were corrupted by woke culture.”
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