Leathergoods designer and leather supplier Alice Robinson, has said the industry gains no benefit from being “inherently divorced from animal agriculture”. To address this, she has called for better connections between farms, abattoirs, tanneries, finished product manufacturers and the shoes, bags and other leather products brands offer consumers. By Leatherbiz.

Speaking on a BBC radio programme on November 4, Ms Robinson, co-founder of traceable leather resource British Pasture Leather, retold the story of ‘Bullock 374’, a collection she designed in 2019 using the hide of a single animal, which she traced all the way along the supply chain. She wrote about this in a book called ‘Field, Fork, Fashion’.

During the radio discussion, she argued that the wider leather industry would benefit from establishing clearer connections to the farming communities that produce the raw material. She said that it had been of no benefit to the industry for leather to be “predicated on being an anonymous by-product”.

She connected this anonymity with information that came out of a consumer survey that industry body Leather UK carried out in 2022. One of the findings was that many consumers had no idea that leather is a by-product of the food industry.

Ms Robinson went on to say that establishing the material’s connections to its origins more clearly would help emphasise that it is “inherently sustainable in terms of its durability, versatility and repairability”.

The programme is available at this link.