woah

yeah

also they love love LOVE to try and sell you "plant-based leather" that you then look at the details and it's "45% cactus" or whatever and there's no mention of what the rest of it is

it's plastic.

it's always plastic.

ALT

Let me tell you a story.

50 years ago or so a cow died. It died in a slaughterhouse after a life on a cattle ranch. It was butchered in a meat packing plant, and it's body was sent off to a grocery store where it then became an overdone steak or a dry hamburger or maybe dog food. It was the 70s and people had only recently realized that you could put food in things that were not jello. Cut them some slack.

But its skin went to a tannery. And that skin was processed in the hide and then leather. That leather was bought by a clothing company who made jackets out of it, long leather dusters for working men and ranchhands. Cowboy shit.

The dead cow that is now a leather jacket is not technically waterproof because if you stand out in the rain for 6 hours water will eventually work its way through the seams at the shoulders. But its pretty damn waterproof. It keeps off the rain and the snow and the dust and the mud and the brambles and it doesn't melt if it catches a spark. So 50 years ago a man bought one and he wore it pretty much until he died and his wife shoved it in a closet. Decades of use, from the deserts in the southwest to the arctic, because it turns out that cowboys are wildly adaptable.

Anyway, I pulled grandad's jacket out of the closet a while back and there is nothing wrong with that coat. It does have some distinctly non-modern vibes, but more importantly it is cool as hell and looks almost new. I have seen faux distressed leather that looks worse.

The cow is still dead. There will be another cow that dies tomorrow for the same reason. But there's no market for leather these days. Its skin won't be a garment that lasts 50 years. Its gonna rot in a pile with all the others. Someone will sell a "vintage" cowboycore Americana aesthetic dark academia plastic peice of shit that will be garbage in a year. And then they'll sell another one.

Leather artisan here, for what it's worth...there *is* a market for leather these days, but only if we're willing to have this conversation 1-on-1 with people as they shop in our boutiques/shoppes. I get approached/guilted/lectured about "vegan leather alternatives" 2 or 300 times a year. only about 2% of those conversations end with the anti-leather sentiment persisting. Most folx just don't know any better, and have been caught up in the misapprehension that "newer is better," thus vegan leather is somehow inherently an improvement upon the tanned hides that have clothed and served our species for thousands of years.
My favourite capper for these conversations is to explain the Areni-1 expedition, and specifically, the shoe found in the cave complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areni-1_shoe
Hardly anyone knows what to do with the idea that a well made, well cared for, properly stored leather shoe could survive 5,500 years in a cave. Frequently serves to wipe away any remaining ideas of plastic as a superior fabric in the minds of those I've spoken with.

ALT

putting just one of these jokes in the tags instead of main reblog is a bold choice but all three?! get peer reviewed about it!