The true cost of leather
In Lalbagh, Dhaka, a leather dealer presents his freshly cleaned and sorted hides to potential customers from local tanneries. Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2015. Christian Faesecke / We Animals Media. Due to strict prohibitions against killing cattle in India, a black market cattle trade between India and Bangladesh has emerged. Indian cattle used for leather are transported from the Ganges River via regional Indian cattle markets to the border.
Last year, the Guardian published an article titled “We are creating a material monster: the false logic of faux leather” on the perils of synthetic leathers [1]. They are great indeed. Almost all faux leather is made of plastic or, in the case of vegetable-based options, are coated in plastic. The article, by ethical fashion consultant Tamsin Blanchard, is clear and considering, raising a multitude of valid issues including the compostability of synthetic leathers (currently nil) and the way emerging nations struggle when synthetics are dumped on their shores.
Of concern, however, to campaigners for climate, nature and animals was the article’s impact. Leather groups loved it; so, too, did those who saw it as a license to embrace animal-derived leather even more enthusiastically. What follows here is not a defence of faux. Rather, it makes the argument that both fibres are awful and pitting one against the other drains energy from core issues.
Leather is really bad for people and planet
Few fibres claim such iconic status as leather. Sub-cultures from cowboys and punks to Hells Angels and rockers, figures such as James Dean and Elvis, staple accessories such as wallets and shoes are linked to the fibre. When Sandy dons a leather jacket in Grease, it is a symbol of social and sexual liberation. “Leather is prehistoric, ancestral,” wrote cultural historian Matthew Sweet. “It is torn from the flanks of beasts and laid over ours, as if we hoped to inherit their toughness, their hunting magic. It is formed by the filth of nature. That long, stinking backstory must be the reason why leather stirs something so deep in us, why it’s the stuff of both freedom and restraint.” [2]
But the iconography comes at a cost. PETA’s Sascha Camilli wrote a robust response to the article, reminding readers of leather’s source industry, beef [3]. Topline data: grazing cattle is responsible for 80% of Amazonian deforestation. Farming animals is responsible for up to 18% of all carbon emissions, of which cattle alone represent 65%. When the University of Oxford discovered that current agricultural systems make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5°C, animal agriculture was responsible for most of that [4]. Arguing over whether leather is a by-product or a co-product as many fashionistas do (it’s a co-product) does not begin to address this.
The list of harms goes on. Leather is not hardy by accident. A cocktail of chemicals including chromium and arsenic are required to turn soft, dead skin into something that lasts. Much production is shifted onto vulnerable countries with minimal protection for waterways and people. Plus, it takes 17,127 litres to create one animal-derived tote [5]. Meanwhile, in the Horn of Africa, 100,000 people have died due to prolonged drought in the past year. Set alongside the use of water in leather, and in fashion in general, this is an outrage of climate justice.
The industry claims that leather is ‘natural’, but, as even The Guardian points out, much leather is coated with plastic to make it last longer. But if taking down the planet for a tote wasn’t enough, there are the mass of social harms. From farm workers to slaughterhouse workers, leather leads to occupational cancers, mental anguish and PTSD [6]. Children as young as seven have been found slaving in Bangladesh’s leather sector, knee deep in toxic chemicals [7]. That is well known. What is less discussed is that animal agriculture is also linked to more killings of indigenous land defenders than any other industry. [8]. By providing additional revenue streams, leather supports and enables that.
It’s awful for animals too
Then, there are the animals. China - the world’s largest leather producer [9] - is notably free from animal welfare laws. Live skinning of partially stunned animals is widely documented. One doesn’t easily forget the sight of a conscious animal being relieved of their skin - and those who advocate for leather should ask themselves whether that degree of suffering is really worth a new pair of shoes.
In an 2016 article for the Guardian, Lucy Siegle reviewed PETA’s campaign video, Hell for Leather. “[In the film], Manfred Karremann, a seasoned campaigner, tracks a pathetic caravan of cattle between India and Bangladesh as they are driven along dusty roads for hours and hours, abused and tortured with every mile,” she said. “Finally the animals are skinned (in front of each other) in the back streets of Dhaka” [10].
And yet, despite their central role to the industry, cows are so forgotten that leather certifications do not even refer to animal protection.
In any other system, leather would be summarily ousted as the blight that it is. Not this one. For an industry that sells itself on creativity and freedom, fashion has an odd way of adhering to old practices. Part of this is due to history; another to the sheer inadequacy (more on this) of viable alternatives. Mostly, it is due to money. “To fans, leather is the ultimate heritage material in which the patina only becomes more interesting during its long life,” followed Siegle. “That’s the trade off, if you like, for killing an animal. But the leather handbag is no longer a bag for life. To luxury fashion houses, leather goods are the rocket fuel of their huge expansion over the past decade. To high street fashion brands, they represent an unrivalled cash cow. To consumers they’re just another disposable fashion product. The fact that they are made from the skin of a beast is incidental.”
Money, money, money
No wonder so many have developed an elective blindness to the impact of leather. In an industry that rolls over almost $2 trillion a year, the global leather goods market is expected to reach a hefty USD552.9 billion by 2033, up from USD282.7 billion this year [11]. That’s a lot of cash - and cows - and certainly enough for those profiting from both to obfuscate reality, such as peddling the myth that, despite those plasticky varnishes, leather breaks down into soil after use. Articles citing the problems of synthetic leathers must feel like a gift.
Efforts are being made to make animal leather more ‘sustainable’; to produce locally, without child labour; to take the poison out of the tanning agents; to turn leather offcuts into materials in their own rights; to graze the cattle on regenerative farmland. Blanchard refers to a book titled “Field Fork Fashion: Bullock 374 and a designer’s journey to find a future for leather” in which RCA alumni Alice V Robinson buys a Longhorn-Limousin cross bullock and meticulously charts his journey from local regeneratively grazed farm to abattoir, to the collection of accessories he is eventually turned into.
A close up of cattle in a market in Bagachra in Bangladesh. Tobacco or chili is rubbed into the eyes of cattle to force them to get despite the exhaustion from the strenuous journey. Bagachra, Bangladesh, 2015. Christian Faesecke / We Animals Media. In the livestock markets of Bangladesh, these animals from India are re-certified and declared Bangladeshi cattle. In cramped conditions, the animals are then transported to the slaughterhouses of Dhaka, where an industrial process starts, creating river pollution, sick workers, and cheap leather for world markets.
Robinson’s openness is refreshing; rarely has a book on fashion featured so many pictures of flayed flesh. The book’s launch took place in Mulberry, on Regent Street, where Sarah Mower chaired a Q&A. The Victoria and Albert Museum hosted two dinners featuring meat made from Bullock 374; Robinson’s instagram is full of earnest people, trying to do their best.
Those worried about animal welfare will be reassured to hear that Bullock 374 was slowly driven to and neatly dispatched in a local slaughterhouse, excused from the churn of blood and panic that is the reality for most animals slaughtered for leather. What is not addressed are GHG emissions, water use and pollution, whether the land could have been used for something other than cows - or if Bullock 374 might have preferred to live out his years rather than being killed as an adolescent.
The future is plantbased
Ethical campaigners are working tirelessly to dispel myths about cow leather. “Are vegan leathers as harmful to the environment as leather?” muses Annick Ireland, founder of Immaculate Vegan. “The data shows that they aren’t. Even wholly PU based leathers use less water, less energy, and create fewer greenhouse gas emissions [in production]. If you have to chose between animal leather and 100% or largely PU-based leather, even if you don’t care about animal welfare, from the point of view of the environment, the matter is still preferable.”
Emma Hakannson, founder of formidable advocacy group Collective Fashion Justice, comes back to the plastic on leather: “When I unpack the false dichotomy of plastic versus leather, I spend time noting that leather is also not effectively biodegradable and can legally be coated with plastic without proper labelling in many countries. If we can make clear that while plastic is clearly bad, leather is no solution as it has a more impactful production impact (even if end of life is different), it makes it easier for us to point to plastic-free and animal-free next-gen materials.”
And what beautiful materials there are. “The reality is that consumers often face a much better choice, as many new-gen vegan leathers (including the ones we have at Immaculate Vegan, such as apple, cactus, corn and grape leather) are largely plant-based,” says Ireland. “Very excitingly, there are now 100% plastic-free vegan leathers too, such Mirum, which several of our brands are using.”
When Ganni launched its iconic Bou Bag in orange and cacti waste, it was in response to findings that virgin leather was the brand’s single biggest polluter, despite only making up only 7 percent of its offering. Similar reasoning informed Apple’s decision to stop using leather in all products by 2030. Significantly, when Fabrica X curated its recent exhibition, Planet-Saving Innovations, all exhibitors - from Colorifix to Nanoloom to Natural Fibre Welding - worked on bio-based projects, not an animal material in sight, in recognition that this cannot be where a sustainable future lies. At the recent Future Fabrics Expo, the wealth of like-minded tech was heart-lifting.
Alternatives are necessary but they are not the whole answer. Fashion produces 100 billion pieces of clothing and 25 billion pairs of shoes a year; it throws away 90 percent after use, more in footwear. A full 40 percent of clothing produced never even makes it to store [12] and almost 70 percent of all of that is synthetic [13]. Sportswear, with its need for stretch and breathability, is probably the most culpable here, although we rarely see articles denouncing it.
The rates and mechanics of consumption are the problem here. Many of those who buy plastic leather do not do so because they care about animals or environment. They buy it because Kylie Jenner’s Khy collection offers a plastic trenchcoat or because leather featured in Pharrell Williams’s collection for Louis Vuitton (in a backward step, the singer also used fur) [14]. Plastic leather sits within the lexicon of synthetic alternatives once hailed as bringing about the democratisation of fashion; allowing ordinary people to experience textures akin to silk, wool or fur. Rich people buy the ‘real thing’; poor people buy the plastic imitation.
The reality is, if we want to curb the consumption of faux leather, we need to stop offering animal leather as something desirable. The cultural influence of Western systems has been ignored for too long. Focusing on faux allows us to dodge the wider systemic issues that plague the industry - and certainly does nothing to examine the cultural conditions which drive them. We need system change, not tweaks.
Finally, there is this most redical of ideas: that it’s simply not necessary to continue killing animals for clothes, no matter how ethically they are kept or efficiently they are dispatched. As Camilli points out, “contributing to the violent deaths of over one billion sentient individuals doesn't sit right with an increasing number of consumers”. Options are either established or emerging - or, in the case of secondhand clothing, already exist. Why not use them instead?
In Hazaribagh, a part of western Dhaka renowned for its tanneries, a worker bends over a cow hide. Using a specially formed knife, he removes the chemically dissolved layer of fat from the skin. Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2015. Christian Faesecke / We Animals Media
The fashion industry needs to take action - real action
The time has come to address the cognitive dissonances in fashion that are holding ethical movements in check. Investigations like PETA’s are not peripheral considerations, but core to the truths we need to act upon. In one scene, a cow, exhausted beyond endurance, is bashed over the head six times with a sledgehammer. Each time, as the sledgehammer drives into her forehead, she shuts her eyes - almond-shaped, infinitely gentle - tightly against the agony. She doesn’t make a sound and is still moving when they cut her throat and stab her in the chest. That this act of violence takes place, in some form or another, to approximately a billion animals a year -for fashion - should be of concern to everyone, not just animal rights campaigners. As German philosopher Hannah Arendt once said: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
Within the context of the polycrises, advocating for leather feels counter-intuitive to seeding the future with better. Activists around the world are interrogating the systems that have brought the planet to its knees. These systems have many things in common but the key one is their grounding in the exploitation of vulnerable beings. As systems thinker Nafeez Ahmed once said: “The ultimate hidden driver [of global systemic decline] is a way of living and being premised on self-maximisation through plunder of the ‘Other’: whether Others are different humans, different species, or the planet itself” [15].
Leather epitomises that plunder. In what truly ethical future will well-meaning people walk around, carrying the fragments of a once-sentient being under their arm, an intelligent individual grazed on deforested land; killed badly at less than a year old by a member of a traumatised minority; whose skin is treated by children wading in toxic chemicals? The hope is that one day, people will regard the use of cows for leather with the same distaste they currently regard the use of bulls for bullfighting. Or that those who advocate against fur, sit up and realize that leather is no kinder. In all cases, the suffering is the same.
Under Their Skin, a report series on the injustices of leather by Collective Fashion Justice, makes four recommendations for the future of leather: that terms like 'ethical', 'conscious' 'sustainable', 'natural', 'circular', and 'eco-friendly' should not be used in reference to animal-derived leather (because it’s none of those things); that brands should commit to reducing its use; that they should embrace fossil-free, animal-free alternatives; and finally, that large brands should invest in the research and development of those alternatives – “ensuring these materials consider the need for a just transition, and are ultimately open sourced” [16].
These are ‘significant asks’ that respond viscerally to the times. Meanwhile, hope lies on the horizon. Independent thinktank RethinkX estimates that by 2030, demand for some cow-based products will have fallen by up to 70% [17]. May the same be true for synthetics In 2023, the topic of animals barely surfaced at the prestigious Global Fashion Summit. This year, Kering’s sustainability director Geraldine Vallejo, Senior VP of biomaterials groups Modern Meadow Jeff Smith joined Hakansson on a panel hosted by journalist Aditi Mayer. The title: Leather, Luxury and Land.
Hakansson is also author of influential text Total Ethics Fashion. “We have a supply chain where, if I talked about what it looked like in great detail in a slaughterhouse, everyone would be so uncomfortable,” she told the Summit. “I think it’s worth considering if that belongs in the future of fashion.” In a later social media post, she links the panel to a clip of a calf struggling to get up from a kill floor. “If we think about the values we want the industry to hold - freedom from exploitation, from destruction, autonomy for everyone - I really believe that, if we deny those values for some, we perpetuate the denial of those for others.” The “material monster” we’re creating isn’t faux leather; it’s the values of the fashion industry itself. Time for better.
References
1. Blanchard, T. We are creating a material monster: the false logic of faux leather. Guardian, 22 Nov 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/nov/22/we-are-creating-a-material-monster-the-false-logic-of-faux-leather
2: Sweet, M. Why We All Submit to Leather. 1843 Magazine, 199 Feb 2020. https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/02/19/why-we-all-submit-to-leather
3: Camilli, S. The True “Material Monster” In Our Wardrobes. Species Unite, 8 Dec 2023. https://www.speciesunite.com/news-stories/the-true-material-monster-in-our-wardrobes-animal-leather
4: We must change what we eat to solve the climate crisis, shows research. Oxford Martin School, 5 November 2020.https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/change-what-we-eat-to-solve-the-climate-crisis
5: Hakansson E, Carter N, Coen L, LaBarbera N. Under Their Skin: Leather’s Impact on Planet, November 2022, p33. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f5f02dd9b510014eef4fc4f/t/64025b58f16f565c702635cf/1677876106157/Leather%27s+impact+on+the+planet+report.pdf
6: Hakansson E, Vance U. Under Their Skin: Leather’s Impact on People, October 22, https://www.collectivefashionjustice.org/under-their-skin
7: New study uncovers the scale of child labour in Bangladesh’s leather industry. Institute of Development Studies,16 July 2021. https://www.ids.ac.uk/news/new-study-uncovers-the-scale-of-child-labour-in-bangladeshs-leather-industry/
8: Front line defenders global analysis 2021. [Internet]. Dublin: Front Line Defenders; 2021 [cited 2022]. Available from: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/sites/default/files/2021_global_analysis_-_final.pd
9: Top countries that Produce most Leather in the World. Leathers Expert, 25 May 2022. https://leathersexpert.com/top-countries-that-produce-the-most-leather-in-the-world/
10: Siegle L. Is it time to give up leather? Guardian, 13 March 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/mar/13/is-it-time-to-give-up-leather-animal-welfare-ethical-lucy-siegle
11: Global Leather Goods Market, 2024-2033. Custom Market Insights. https://www.custommarketinsights.com/report/leather-goods-market/
12: Tonti L. ‘It’s the industry’s dirty secret.’ Why fashion’s oversupply problem is an environmental disaster. Guardian, 18 Jan 2024.
13: Synthetics Anonymous: fashion brands’ addiction to fossil fuels. Changing Markets Foundation, June 2021. https://changingmarkets.org/report/synthetics-anonymous-fashion-brands-addiction-to-fossil-fuels/
14: Cochrane, L. Pharrell Williams celebrates ‘human athletic prowess’ at Paris fashion week. Guardian, 19 June 2024.
15: Ahmed N. ‘White Supremacism and the Earth System’, Medium 5 June 2020,https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/white-supremacism-and-the-earth-system-fa14e0ea6147
16: Under Their Skin: Leather’s Impact, 2022, https://www.collectivefashionjustice.org/under-their-skin
17. Sixteen: Tubb C, Seba T. Rethinking food and agriculture 2020-2030.London: RethinkX; 2019 [cited 2022]. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585c3439be65942f022bbf9b/t/5d7fe0e 83d119516bfc0017e/1568661791363/RethinkX+Food+and+Agriculture+Report.pd
