September 30, 2024

Look to Africa for leather inspiration

With luck, the latest Real Leather. Stay Different. (RLSD) design competition is making a difference with its outstanding African element. This competition, set up a few years ago by the Leather and Hide Council of America (LHCA), has been a big success and gets the leather message into fashion and design colleges throughout the world. As well as to self-trained and self-made young businesspeople, such as Ruth Girmay from Ethiopia, who won the African competition for 2024.

We need to keep leather democratic

Her work and a lot of the other entries from Africa bridge that divide for designers between making things to be sold as exclusive luxuries and for everyday use. Increasingly, the luxury trade has been capturing the leather industry and its output, but we need to keep leather more widely available and democratic.

If luxury becomes the only route to profit, then other raw material is diverted to a loss-making commodity, readily replaced by synthetic materials made from fossil fuels. With the petroleum extractors gearing up for a petrochemical push to offset the increasing loss of transportation fuel, there is a big battle ahead. It has already started badly, as U.S. Ambassador to the UK Jane Hartley stated at the RLSD event on September 23. Too many hides are routinely thrown out and not getting to the tannery.

The U.S. ambassador said that well-made leather is on the right side of sustainable fashion ethics and was good for our planet: “We have to change our habits, reclaiming hides for leather is a part of this.” She is correct. And a part of that involves tanners remembering that leather will only remain truly good when available and accessible to all, with the poor not being left with inferior leather types and poorly performing product.

Leather’s Andalusian soul

I am writing this from Andalusia. I do not think there are tanneries in this area of Spain, but it is the spiritual home of European leather as we know it today. There are so many leathers described as Cordoban or Spanish that it can be get confusing. It is also a leather colour and the origin of the term cordwainer in shoemaking that stretched into France and the United Kingdom.

The important period for leather here was in the 7^th to 11^th centuries of Moorish occupation, a time when the Caliphate allowed Jewish citizens to be involved in leather production and trading. Together, the Jews and Muslims pulled in technology and knowledge along North Africa from the Middle East and across into southern Iberian Peninsula and added to it indigenous skills from African locations, such as Ghadames and Fez, which evolved into amazing creativity and beauty in leather-making with all manner of raw material.

This leather knowledge spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula, over into Genoa and through Italy and into Northern Europe, accelerating in later centuries as Spain, especially cities such as Seville, became rich centres for trade based on the importation of gold and from Mexico and Latin America. Gilt leather or guadameci were made in Spain as early as the ninth century but, by the 16^th century, production of guadamecies is recorded in Cordoba, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Granada, Madrid, Valladolid, Lerida, Ciudad Real and Ciudad Rodrigo. At the start of the 1600s, they were spreading to the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and beyond.

Connections to Africa

That exciting four centuries of creative leather advancement was about skill in tanning and workmanship in leathers for everyday life, just as much as the amazing guadelmeci panels with their Arab text or imagery. From Fez and Marrakesh came advancements in Moroccan leather concepts with leather ubiquitous in everyday life. Historically, Africa has brought both technical and design elements to the leather industry.

In the RLSD competition, whether for garments, leather goods such as Ruth Girmay’s “overfishing” winner or footwear, the designers meticulously defined the target audience. Many bags were multipurpose and designed to shift from everyday use to an elegant evening item.

All described the evolving African advance into an aspiring, better educated and hopeful middle class. They were not the luxury style items that the African super-rich fly to Dubai or Paris to purchase. Eventually, we can expect an involvement here from African designers, but it will not be the defining characteristic of African leather.

Africa has a large raw material supply. The best has already been captured into the international industry and the remainder has a poorer reputation in terms of quality. But those who have travelled in Africa and purchased leather items, both traditional and modern, will have recognised some real quality. And there is an exceptionally long tradition of leather in Africa, 3,000 plus years in Ethiopia alone.

I have items as diverse as parchment and leather religious texts, luncheon “boxes” and paintings on leather and parchment, which all demonstrate how the exquisite can be produced from variable quality raw material. This was the same with the designers in the competition, where sustainability was a theme, and the sourcing and management of the leather was an important aspect in the judging.

Such planetary and environmental areas are obviously covered in the leather schools and fashion and craft colleges that many applicants had attended or were attending.

If African design thinking (often built out of their diverse cultures) or a new approach to story building like the Overfishing bag can work to free and democratise leather, everyone will benefit. And the concept of ensuring hides and skins do get tanned in the future will be secure.

We should renew our vigour to bring African leather and associated designers into the global fold. Thanks to Kerry Brozyna, Beatrice Mwasi and of course Ruth Girmay and the other 14 finalists for their courage to drive this forward.

Michael Redwood

Leather chemist, writer, and advisor on responsible leather manufacturing and material strategy. This article was originally written for ILM.