November 5, 2025

Many truths in one hide

While marketing is a thing of ancient history, this quote from Adam Smith – written in the year of American Independence, 1776 – does explain a core foundation of marketing; the way to succeed involves a careful consideration of the customer’s needs. It is a simple thing, but one made complicated by the vast changes in society, economics and communication in the 250 years since it was written.

In recent years, how we go about the exchange of products for mutual benefit has greatly impacted the leather industry, not helped by being an industry of family businesses squeezed between much larger operators. For the last half century, as this situation developed, the leather industry retreated into seeing marketing as merely colour cards and trade fairs and then failed to unite to create the critical mass needed to be effective in supporting the industry globally.

One product, many stories

To better understand what is happening with leather today, we must accept that opinions about leather depend entirely upon whom you ask. It means that, for every argument the leather industry makes in support of leather, there is an equally firm argument against. This existence of multiple narratives in the leather supply chain can be examined in terms of The Rashomon Effect, named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film about how different people interpret the same event (a murder in a wood in the film) in contradictory yet equally plausible ways. Applied to leather it is a reminder that:

Just as in Rashomon, the leather industry has become surrounded by divergent perspectives among stakeholders:

The cattle farmer sees hides as a byproduct of food production – waste turned into value
The tanner sees an ancient craft becoming cleaner and more traceable
The luxury brand frames leather as timeless, long-lasting and “natural”
The activist sees suffering, environmental harm, and greenwashing
The regulator sees fragmented compliance and rising risk
The consumer is confused – leather can be both “eco” and “exploitative,” depending on who they listen to.

Each account contains elements of truth, but none is complete. We cannot simply say they reflect a failure of communication – it’s an inherent feature of a world where people bring different values, experiences, and assumptions to bear. But they do evidence that to prosper the leather industry has to be fully aware of how to make their special product fit into this new world. The Rashomon Effect is frequently used because it provides a powerful way to understand disagreement, bias, and interpretation. Instead of dismissing contradictions as lies or errors, it helps frame them as natural consequences of human subjectivity.

Imagine a well-made leather bag. Is it a sign of sustainable craftsmanship, an outdated product of animal exploitation, or a waste-saving byproduct of the food system?

Applied to the leather world, one product or one process – even one environmental claim – can produce multiple, seemingly incompatible narratives, each of which feels completely true to the person telling it. The consumer tries to understand all these contested views, and ends up conflicted: “Leather lasts – but is it cruel? Are alternatives any better?”

Each view is coherent in its own world, but together, they form a patchwork of contradictory claims, misunderstandings and rising tension. The more global and complex the supply chain, the harder it becomes to align these perspectives – or even hold a common conversation.

Facts alone do not settle conflicts

Much of the debate around leather’s future has been framed as a battle of facts. But Rashomon shows us that facts alone do not settle conflicts when values and worldviews differ. When posting an article on kangaroo being removed from sports footwear, I framed my comments on leather’s unassailable facts against emotion but was immediately taken to task by a marketing professor I taught with at the University of Bath. I put my approach down to conviction but he thought it equally loaded with emotion. I was failing to recognise these multiple “truths”.

What is already difficult is made worse by the power of social media to lead and mislead. The lack of a common narrative about how the whole world works that we used to get from trusted print, radio and TV bodies has been lost. In a world where people already believe the deadly floods in Texas were caused by secret chemical seeding of clouds or the assertion that OPV, the vaccine used to eradicate polio, is designed to sterilise children, the integrity of communications have clearly deteriorated. The battle to retain profits from social media tools make this worse: not been helped by the recent failed deployment of the AI chatbot Grok supposedly intended to give X a “truth-seeking AI companion for unfiltered answers with advanced capabilities in reasoning, coding, and visual processing”.

That modern society regularly blurs the line between reality and representation was explained by the influential ideas of the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) who looked at the mix of media, consumer society and postmodern culture. We increasingly consume signs and symbols rather than real things. His key ideas include:

Simulacra: Copies such as “faux leather” that imitate leather, which once represented status or durability.
Hyperreality: A state where the symbol becomes more “real” than the reality – marketing replaces material substance

The concept of simulacra is complex: starting with faithful copies of an original followed by a second order which masks or distorts the original and begins to detach the consumer from the original. In Baudrillard’s view, simulacra ultimately do not hide the original; they erase the distinction between original and copy. At the highest stage, the simulacrum is not a mask but a replacement: it is a “copy without an original,” and the concept of the original becomes irrelevant.

Luxury goods made of leather are often marketed as authentic and artisanal, but this curated narrative, as tanners know, is not always grounded in how the item was made or sourced. Meanwhile “vegan” leather” has been introduced as a simulacrum – marketed as more ethical, but not necessarily more sustainable or durable; and certainly not more ethical. Sometimes brands are hedging their position with the consumer. Nowadays consumers are buying stories, not substance – guided by brand mythology and the status they offer rather than material facts.

Truth is no longer a fixed object; it is fragmented and shaped by power, narrative, and desire. As a consequence, leather has become a contested symbol:

Is it a sustainable circular material?
Is it a cruel legacy of animal exploitation?
Is it a premium mark of style and tradition?
Or just another material in a sea of greenwashing?

If a tannery publishes a transparent life cycle assessment it must expect more than one activist to dismiss it as industry spin and a journalist to reduce it to a headline. The consumer will still be left confused. Similarly, a synthetic material branded as “vegan” leather might use less water and produce fewer emissions – but will rely on fossil fuels and break down into microplastics. Is that better, or worse?

These are value judgments, not just technical comparisons. Understanding this helps explain why communication around leather often feels frustrating: the audience is not simply “uninformed” – they’re seeing the world through a different narrative lens. With the concept of capitalism to only benefit shareholders ending a wider stakeholder capitalism shifts the question from “What’s best for shareholders?” to “What’s best for everyone involved?” But who defines that “everyone”?

As we move through 2025, the U.S. administration has added stakeholder objectives to do with supporting America’s new loosely defined geopolitical agenda for those who want to trade with the U.S.

The Rashomon Effect shows us how easily this can create fractures:

Investors want stable returns and low risk
Local communities want jobs and clean water
Workers want fair wages and safety
NGOs want transparency and accountability
Future generations, though silent, are represented by climate models and ethical debates.

Each stakeholder sees a different “leather story” as most valid. Stakeholder capitalism, in theory, values them all – but in practice, some voices dominate, and others are silenced. So, what should a modern, thoughtful leather business – or supply chain – do with this? Narrative-aware approaches might include:

Remember that unlike in the time of Adam Smith there are multiple influential audiences for the leather trade (and the least important is the industry itself). This is often forgotten. The press and politicians are each likely to contain those with many of the varied views discussed. They are routinely overlooked, and not all audiences use social media
Accept multiple realities. Avoid claiming there is one truth about leather. Acknowledge that the same material will be viewed differently by different people – and design messaging accordingly. Leave the absolutes and the egos to politics. Do not shut down critics – engage them with openness
Work on transparent, contextual storytelling. Rather than just sharing facts, explain the context – how leather is sourced, what happens to byproducts, how chemicals are managed and how labour is treated. Stories grounded in place, people and process often resonate more than spreadsheets. Leather has more good stories than bad ones, but as leather is everywhere the bad ones cannot be ignored
To bridge opposing narratives, it is necessary to seek out new terms and stories that hold both ecological and ethical value – like “whole-animal use,” or “natural performance” and use terms like biophilic, patina and organoleptic. These can create common ground between craftsmanship and sustainability. (sports marketing made great use of difficult terms in advertising, by first explaining their meaning in simple terms and then their features and benefits – “titanium” in golf is a good example).
Reclaim the symbolism of leather: articulate what it means in the 21st century – tradition, durability, repairability, material honesty. Avoid becoming a simulacrum through over-branding without substance, or greenwashing. Ensure claims are traceable, provable and humanised.

This is a shift in mindset as much as in operations but amid the complex lies routes for a united leather industry to move forward.

Michael Redwood

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