Uses of Skins and Furs in Medieval Imagery and Rituals
The act of wearing clothes made from the body of another animal, which in the past was useful to humans to protect themselves from atmospheric agents, has symbolic connotations. Wearing skin or fur allows the individual to appropriate the animal’s body and to assimilate its symbolic essence by metonymy.
https://medren.columbia.edu/news/partial-hybridisations-and-pre-metamorphosis-uses-skins-and-furs-medieval-imagery-and-rituals