It is Wednesday. Or what is left of Wednesday.
This is the hour when I put some of my thoughts in the drawer. I have one where I fold the conversations of the day, in the same place as the dresses I keep for an occasion. The dresses have been waiting years. So have the conversations. That drawer is the only thing in this house that still believes in the right moment.
Every so often I take one out. Today it was the turn of the question about caring for leather.
I have to admit publicly that I am a person of extremes. The middle way bores me. It sounds like a cheap slogan, good for selling books. It looks like a kind of safety that blows precisely because it is safety.
I need the uncertainty of the current. I need to relearn what winter means so I can bring spring back. It amuses me, this wish people have to live inside walls insulated with ten centimetres of polystyrene, behind windows with I don't know how many chambers, where it stays a constant twenty degrees and no wind of change ever gets in. Those people keep very well. About as well as leather kept in a wardrobe.
So. How do we care for the things we love. We start with leather.
Something few people know: vegetable-tanned leather is made with tannins from oak, chestnut or mimosa bark. The same tannins that make wine astringent and tea bitter. Your bag spent months sitting in what is essentially very strong tea. It is also why it darkens in the sun, like a cup left out on the table.
What happens to a leather bag nobody looks after
The first two photographs are an extreme. This is what leather becomes when nobody touches it.
This is how it reached me. The leather was like parchment, and one wrong fold would have torn it.
What looked like colour was not colour. It was the dead layer.
I was told the bag went through two world wars. It did not come with a receipt, so I give you the story exactly as I received it. It reached me after a skilled craftsman had kept it packed in sheep tallow for a while. I do not know how long. That is where he stopped. That is where I began. Not because I am better. Because anything I have not done before looks like an invitation.
I said the leather was like parchment. That is not a metaphor. Parchment is animal skin, simply untanned. Leather that has lost its fats returns, chemically speaking, to exactly that place. It thins, it hardens, and at the first fold it cracks instead of bending. Conservators even have a name for the final stage, red rot, when leather turns to a reddish-brown powder under your finger. You have seen it on the spines of old books, even if you did not know what it was called.
It took three months.
I unpicked the stitching, put it to soak, and scraped the first layer off while it was still wet. One wrong move and it tore like paper. I had about three years of workshop behind me. Very little and quite a lot at once. I could see it could be saved. I was not at all sure I would get to the end.
The last two photographs are the same bag. I did not replace it, I peeled it. Under the dead layer was its real colour, the one nobody had seen in a hundred years. The fleur-de-lys I carved myself, at the end. It seemed right that something that old should go on carrying something that had never existed before.
After three months. The colour that had been waiting underneath, the stitching redone thread by thread, and the fleur-de-lys, carved at the end.
It gets carried. That was the whole point. Not a display piece, but a bag that goes on, on someone's shoulder.
One evening I looked at my fingers. They were frayed with the cracks needles leave. Even touching water hurt. I watched them recover from hand cream, and had a thought that sounds foolish said out loud: if my own skin repairs itself with cream, why am I putting chemicals on that dead one?
I stopped using them. I started with cream. It was too little. It wanted something oilier.
I thought baby oil might do. With all the studies behind it before every mother and every doctor accepted it, it could hardly kill a bag that had already died.
The first time I applied it I had a revelation. The leather drank it the way blotting paper takes the ink of an over-eager pen.
I repeated it for days, losing count, like Penelope. Except I was not undoing at night what I had done by day. Or perhaps I was, because every morning the leather was dry again.
Until one day it stopped drinking and the oil stayed on the surface. That was the first moment I knew I had a chance.
From there it was well-trodden ground. The work was long, the risk of destroying it never left. The safety did not blow, because I had found the courage to step out from between the insulated walls and into the uncertainty of winter.
The result is a bag you can carry every day, with an enormous emotional weight for the man who brought it to me. Older, and by that much wiser, than anyone who looked at it.
I don't give advice. Life taught me not to offer it unless it is asked for.
How to clean a leather bag
Most of the time, you don't. A dry, soft cloth over the surface is all a leather bag needs from one year to the next. Dust is not dirt.
If something has actually got onto it, use a cloth barely damp with water, then let it dry on its own, at room temperature. Nothing else. No soap, no washing-up liquid, no alcohol, no wet wipes, no solvents, none of the sprays sold for trainers. Every one of them pulls the fats out of the leather faster than ten years of wearing it ever would, and from there you arrive at the first photograph.
On undyed vegetable-tanned leather, some marks will never come out. A drop of oil, a fingerprint, a splash of coffee. They darken and become part of the patina. It sounds like a defect. After a year of carrying the piece, you stop reading it as one.
And if the bag gets properly wet, do not treat the spot. Dampen the whole panel evenly and let it dry flat. Otherwise a ring forms at the edge of the wet patch, and the ring stays.
What I do once a year
Here I have to be clear, because the subject starts real arguments among leatherworkers, and I am about to say something half of them will contest.
Baby oil is mineral oil. It is not what the manuals recommend. Book conservators avoid it on principle, and they are right: on a museum object an oil can never be removed again, and what you put on today decides what can be done in fifty years. The objectors also say it does not feed leather, only greases it, and that over time it can darken the colour. They are right about that too.
Except I am not conserving museum objects. I keep alive things that get carried. Those are two different trades, with two different sets of rules.
I clearly prefer Tokonole and professional products. Those are what I work with in the studio. But not everyone has Tokonole at home, and between leather left to dry out for ten years and baby oil applied sparingly once a year, I choose the second without blinking.
I am telling you what I do. Not what you must do.
So: once a year, with a cotton pad, clear baby oil. A little. There are a great many kinds of leather and some will stain. I test first somewhere that doesn't show, so I can stop in time. On suede and nubuck I never use it, there it ruins them for good.
The rest is experience, not books.
Keep leather away from radiators and direct sun. Those dry it faster than ten years of wearing it.
If it gets wet, let it dry on its own at room temperature. Never with a hairdryer. High heat makes the collagen contract, and the leather stays hard and misshapen, like a hand left too long in water that never quite comes back.
And wear it. Leather that sits in a wardrobe ages badly. Leather that is carried polishes itself, against the hand, against clothes, against dust. Patina cannot be bought. It is made of friction and time.
Any leatherworker can bring back a hide in the state of the first two photographs. With risks. A moment's inattention and it tears like paper. It has to be treated like the soul of someone you love, with the greatest delicacy. Like a plate filled with water, carried from one room to another, careful not to spill.
So much for the leather around us.
If you want to see what leaves my hands, the pieces are here, each one made only once.
What do we do about the soul?
