Pleather or not

I’m not a vegan.

Although I mostly wear sneakers, I do wear leather shoes and boots. Although I do have plenty of non-leather bags, I do carry leather pocketbooks and wallets.

And, in the way, way, way back, I spent one summer working in a shoe factory. I was at the finishing (less skilled) end of the production line, but on occasion I got to walk through the upper floor on which the cutters worked. These were the men – and, yes, it was all men – who were highly skilled and, by shoe factory standards, highly paid to cut the hides into pieces that went in to making the shoes and boots “we” produced. The cowhides were big and, to my way of thinking, unwieldy. The goal for the cutters was the leave the least amount of waste. With my spatial reasoning, it’s hard to imagine a job for which I would have been more ill-suited. I was bad enough at finishing, let alone starting the production process.

Other than that experience, I haven’t given much thought to leather or leathermaking over the years. That is, until I saw a recent article in The Economist about a new way of producing leather that won’t involve the death of a cow, and is a lot closer to the real thing (because it kinda/sorta is the real thing) than pleather and other artificial leathers.

The new leather will be factory grown, and involves genetically engineered yeast, bovine collagen, amino acids, and triple-helices that get turned into fibers, which are layered and, voila, become raw leather. On with the tanning, the dyeing, the finishing, the combat-boot making…

The most advanced practitioner of the still-experimental art of growing leather is Modern Meadow, an American firm. This month it moved from Brooklyn, New York, where its 60 staff have been quietly developing the new material, to a laboratory in Nutley, New Jersey, where they will begin production trials. Modern Meadow, which has raised more than $50m from investors and is collaborating with a number of as-yet-unnamed other firms in the clothing, shoe, furniture and automotive industries, hopes to bring the new material to market within two years.

Factory-grown leather promises several advantages over skins taken from animals. One is that it can be made in convenient sheets with straight edges, rather than being constrained by the irregular shapes that animals come in. Another is that it is more consistent than the natural stuff. It is devoid of the scars, marks and other defects to which real skin is inevitably prone. Nor does it vary from animal to animal in the way that natural leather does. All these facts reduce waste and improve quality. They will also, presumably, please those who feel that animals should not have to die in order that people can have nice shoes and plush seat covers. (Source: The Economist)

Not that I do anything about it, frankly, other not thinking about what goes into the nice shoes that I do have. And my nice comfy reclining chair. But while it’s good to know that cows will no longer have to be dying to satisfy our greed for leather goods, I’m pretty sure that most leather is a by-product of animals slaughtered for meat. Not that this necessarily makes the story any better. Waste not, want not. (Just saying.)

Of course, the bio-engineers are also working on making artificial meat, which actually sounds more nauseating a process than the production of natural meat involving animal slaughter.

One of the more interesting, and gut-wrenching (wretching?) parts of The Economist article was a brief history of leathermaking.

In 18th-century London the soaking of putrefying hides in urine and lime, to loosen any remaining flesh and hair, and the subsequent pounding of dog faeces into those skins to soften and preserve them, caused such a stench that the business was outlawed from the City proper and forced downwind and across the river into Bermondsey. In countries such as India and Japan, the trade tainted people as well as places and was (and often still remains) the preserve of social outcasts such as Dalits and Burakumin.

Well, lime sounds okay, although I suspect they aren’t talking about lemon-lime. But urine and dog crap. Oh. My.

And people talk about the good old days…

Anyway, it’s not just cowhides that will be produced the new way. Come on down, ostrich and alligator.

What will the market say to all this? Will the rich folks glom onto the new bio-tech leather? Probably not. I’m guessing that fancy leather goods will, at least for a while (i.e., my lifetime) be made the old-fashioned way, with real, honest to goodness, formerly living cows, ostriches, and alligators. But for us mass-produced proles who consume mass-produced goods, I’m guessing we’ll get the pleather. Or whatever they’re going to call it.

Modern Meadow – quite a name in itself – is not just “reimaging leather”. They’re going to be doing some majorly major branding their product.

The chosen name will be revealed on October 1st at a fashion show in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

Pretty much what one might expect from a company based in Brooklyn. (Although why not BAM???)

Modern Meadow talks about their work being done in an atelier. (No doubt artisanally.) Beats the abattoir – or the cutting room at H.H. Brown – I guess.