#some reasons related to why cotton is The Fiber everywhere are: this one guy in the 30s who made propaganda against hemp

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As someone who is currently processing wool from fleece and spinning it (merino wool, if that matters): it is not itchy at all. The lanolin makes it greasy, but there is a whole process of selection for wool that used to be mandatory, and still is in some places, but many others, who knows.

If you select the wool right after the shearing, and keep improving selection throughout the whole process, it may be light and soft and not itchy at all.

Carding and combing the wool with my own hands I am learning how different fibers from different parts of the sheep (and even of sheep of different ages and sexes) are. My first threads broke easily, were hard to the touch and now that I select it much more, it's like a caress. And as others have pointed out, if I spin it too hard, it will be hard (and maybe itchy), but I can just spin it softer.

As an extra note: wool is hypoallergenic, meaning if you experience some allergy reaction to wool, it's not the wool causing it. So is linen, by the way. Cotton isn't the only one, and reading about the virtues of other fibers, one wonders why is cotton the main one (see more in the tags).

And going back to the evils of capitalism, as OP mentioned "the money isn't going to people who sew either": in Spain (I know this is not the case in other countries), paying the person for the shearing does not cover selling the wool later. And where I live, it's 2€ per sheep (you get about 2 kg of raw fleece from each sheep), while you make less than 1€ (sometimes even half) per kilo of wool. People shear because you have to if you care for your cattle, but most don't even use the wool for anything because there is nothing they could do with it so it ends up, best case scenario, as compost.

I am also learning about linen and flax, and here is the thing: cotton requires about 10 times more pesticides and fertilisers than flax and hemp (which require almost none, particularly hemp). How do you think the fiber of cotton is going to turn out if every treatment the plant receives is cheap and careless? If they use more pesticides than necessary? If the soil where it grows is almost dead from chemicals? The money doesn't go to the seamstresses, but I doubt it goes to the farmers.

If the chain is broken from the beginning, you cannot expect quality at any step of the way.

Idk exactly how to explain this but the softness of real wool and real linen is very different from the artificial softness of polyester “sherpa”, fuzzy faux-fur, spongey acrylic knits and people have gotten too used to the soft plastics and now associate wool with “itchy” and linen with rough and cotton with “too heavy” and then go and wear 100% polyester fleecy sweatshirts and say it’s so warm and cozy but actually they’re just staticky cooking in their sweat locked inside a plastic membrane and you are paying too much to be wearing filaments of petroleum products and the money isn’t going to the people sewing them either. I’m saying you all need to touch grass and the grass in this situation is good quality textiles made of natural fibres.