One unusual way, I have used a few times to make this material is to offset a few layers of geometry(4-5) to form a few millimeter layer of sort of a volume approximation and then use noise texture remapped to more appropriate range to make a volumetric mask. It requires 2 materials: 1 for the object and another for the "volume", but if sort of works OK for carpets and furniture sometimes. It seems to be easier and more efficient than displacement since you can have "volume" material slightly transparent/translucent and it's somewhat efficient in terms of resources:
