Give leather the boot

Hannah Tattersall

Jun 30, 2015 – 12.15am

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When Heather Whittle co-founded British shoe company Beyond Skin she marketed the designer vegan shoes at, well, vegans. However, she soon realised that the shoes’ unique designs sold themselves. The fact that they were ethically made simply added a feel-good element.

“People used to say, ‘Oh, they’re vegetarian shoes. Can you eat them?’ … Now they’re not fazed at all,” says Whittle, whose products are hand-made in Spain from pleather and a faux suede called Dinamica, made from recycled plastic bottle tops.

Whittle, who is trialling a fake leather made from pineapple fibre, says using such products eliminates surplus. “When you use a faux leather or a manufactured material it comes on a sheet,” she says. “There are no parts that have to go to waste. You can’t use the armpits of an animal – they have to be discarded.”

Faux leather is being used increasingly by top designers.

If gluten-free is 2015’s culinary catch cry, vegan leather is its sartorial equivalent. Once contained to hippie festivals and sex shops, pleather is now commonplace in designer collections from Tom Ford to Sonia Rykiel. While Stella McCartney has shunned the use of leather in her $1000-plus handbags, clutches and clogs for more than a decade, there is a willingness now from other top designers to adopt “greener” fashion practices.

Debra Wasserman, a co-ordinator of US-based The Vegetarian Resource Group, says the list of retailers offering leather clothing alternatives has increased rapidly in the past 20 years. “In addition to online stores there are also many more storefronts that are completely vegan today,” she says.

One such store is popular boho brand Free People, which offers a vegan range alongside its leather options. Managing creative director Ana Hartl, whose Instagram bio reads “Farm to table, compost to couture”, says there is a growing sense of awareness in the fashion industry, which is the world’s biggest polluter after oil.“The more it’s spoken about, the more accepted greener alternatives will become.”

In Australia, JETS Swimwear is one brand committed to ethical and sustainable manufacturing. As well as scaling its business to meet demand, the company uses recycled fabric in its designs and its offcuts are passed on to another firm to be used in punching bags.

Operations and special projects manager Stephen Carter says what happened in Bangladesh in 2013 “really made people sit up and understand that buying a $5 T-shirt comes at a cost. People are starting to question where their garment came from, who manufactured it, how it was manufactured, and did everyone along the way get treated fairly and paid fairly.”

Another reason more designers are forgoing animal products in their designs is that the technology exists now to produce a much broader range of eco-friendly and ethically manufactured materials.

Global consultancy Material ConneXion maintains the world’s largest subscription-based material library, assisting designers to source everything from reflective fabric and dried algae to leather-like paper and discarded peacock feathers.

New York-based material scientist Sarah Hoit says material can be built from scratch to emulate naturally occurring patterns such as suede, snakeskin and crocodile skin. Farmed salmon skin is often used as an alternative to snakeskin, because the scales mimic the hide of the slithery reptile. Hoit says fashion designers enjoy seeking out new material because fashion thrives on innovation. If that material is sourced ethically, it’s a win-win situation.