Is a $910 Fleece Actually Worth It?

This month Jonah Weiner made a purchase that was a cry for help. Or at least a new financial adviser.

He spent $910 on a fleece pullover.

“My wallet wept,” Mr. Weiner said.

But, as Mr. Weiner, 43, the co-writer of the ur-cool guy fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, pleaded, this was no prosaic Polartec. It was an all-wool, Austrian-made fleece from the 5-year-old French brand Rier. With its gleaming Riri zippers and monochromatic scheme, it is like Dieter Rams’s vision of a Patagonia pullover.

“What really leaped out was the cut,” Mr. Weiner said. He tossed out adjectives: balloony, droopy, malleable. What he meant was that this wool fleece, which he purchased in a tangy yellow, draped unlike any other fleece he had tried on. His credit card didn’t stand a chance.

If Mr. Weiner is a mark for dropping the equivalent of more than six Patagonia Snap-T jackets on a single fleece, he is a mark among many.

At the Canadian retailer Ssense, Rier’s pullover is out of stock in a number of sizes and colors. Highsnobiety, the hypey blog turned hypey retailer, is nearly out of the fleece in brown. At Outline, a women’s boutique in Brooklyn, the jacket in a Tweety Bird yellow has flown off its shelves.

And Rier’s is not the only upscale fleece crowding the market.

The buzzy New York designer Colleen Allen offers a fitted $1,200 poly-fleece in a Victorian-inflected hourglass silhouette. It’s the fleece that stumbled into “The Gilded Age.” Drake’s in London sells a $530 bouclé fleece as nubby and vibrant as a stuffed Elmo. The princeliest fleece of all comes from the Milanese fashion house Miu Miu: a mouse-gray full-zip that frankly could be a $46 Colombia coat, save for the teensy Miu Miu logo on the left chest. For that it fetches $2,350.