It is Sunday. I made a coffee for myself and one for the questions I have never answered.
Today I am not practising silence as personal hygiene. I don't want plans yet. Just the slow coffee, clear thoughts, and a day large enough to hold some daydreaming too.
I look at a pack of vacuum-sealed meat, bought in one of those polished shops, and I think of the living, warm material that passes through my hands every day. Then, scrolling, I come across an article about vegan alternatives. And I let a simple question settle next to the cup: where does this enormous dissonance come from?
We all buy vacuum-sealed meat at the supermarket. Me first. And yet many of those same people are outraged at the sight of a natural leather bag, convinced the animal was killed for fashion.
The truth is far less hypocritical than we like to believe.
The uncomfortable truth on the supermarket shelf
The fashion industry does not raise cattle to take their hides. The real economy works the other way round. The animal is raised for the meat that ends up in the counter. The hide is what is left afterwards.
Nobody says: I slaughtered the cow to make an embossed handbag, and now I am left with all this meat, what do I do with it?
Cowhide is a by-product of the food industry. If it were not turned into bags and shoes, it would go to landfill or to the incinerator. Tanning is, at bottom, the oldest act of recycling in history.
I am not saying it comes free. Tanning uses water, and chrome tanning leaves behind substances nobody boasts about. That is exactly why I choose vegetable-tanned leather. But between a hide that exists anyway and a plastic manufactured from scratch, the choice seems clear to me.
What hides behind the words vegan leather
The industry sells us, smiling, so-called eco leather or vegan leather. A lie in pretty packaging.
Behind the word there is, most of the time, plastic. Polyurethane or PVC poured over a textile backing. Oil, spread on cloth.
It is a summer love. You buy it, you wear it for a while, then it starts to crack, to peel, to fall apart. You throw it away and buy another. That is not a green economy, it is slow pollution dressed up as moral goodness. Like a person who, instead of giving you a story, gives you a lesson.
To be fair to the end: there are real alternatives, made from pineapple fibre, from mushroom mycelium, from cactus. Those are serious attempts. But they are not what sits on the label of the sixty-euro bag in the window. There it says eco, and inside it is plastic.
And the word eco on a bag label guarantees you, legally, nothing at all.
What natural leather actually is
A whole back of vegetable-tanned hide, as it comes into the workshop. Everything starts here.
Natural leather, especially vegetable-tanned, with tannins from tree bark and leaves, is something else entirely.
It has an earthy smell. A noble stiffness at the start. It softens in your hands. And it has memory.
Real leather does not die. It lives beside you. It takes on a patina over time, if you don't keep it in a wardrobe, from friction and from your touch. It collects the marks of your hands. It ages with dignity.
It is the difference between an embrace and some pretty words.
The layers of a hide: grain, corrected grain, split
A hide splits into layers.
The same leather, turned over. The soft side above, the cut edge below. The edge is where you read everything.
At the top is the grain, the layer with the natural pores and the densest fibre. That is full grain leather. It is the only one an embossing bites into and stays in, precisely because the fibre is tight there.
The cut edge, close up. The thin dense line is the grain. The rest, fibrous, is what lies beneath it.
The second is not really another layer. It is still the grain, but sanded until the scars disappear, then covered with pigment and a film. It is called top grain, or corrected grain. This is the leather of the fashion houses and of upholstery. It looks perfectly uniform because it is sealed chemically. It is not bad, it is something else. It no longer breathes the same and it does not patinate, because what you see is no longer the leather, it is the finish on top of it.
The third is the split, what is left underneath once the grain has been taken off. Loose fibre, with no real skin at the surface. Cheap suede is made from it. And from ground-up scraps glued together comes bonded leather. That one really is rubbish.
The two textures, side by side. A couple of millimetres apart, and two completely different materials.
I work almost only with the first layer. Not out of snobbery, but because only it lets me do what I do. Only on the grain can I emboss, carve, paint, press with heat. The rest will not hold the techniques.
Genuine leather does not mean good leather
The word sounds like a guarantee. It is not.
Genuine leather is a label that, in practice, marks a lower grade, below full grain and below top grain. People pay more for the word genuine, believing they have bought something safe.
If you keep one thing from all of this, keep that one.
What to do with all this
Next time you choose something for yourself, ask only this: do you want the plastic that lies to you for a moment, or a living material that stays?
My pieces are here, each one made only once.
And still, some conversations go better without words.
