Plant leather and animal leather, compared honestly

We work only in plant leather, so we are not neutral. What follows is still the comparison as we would make it to a friend, not the version written to win an argument.

How each one feels in the hand

Animal leather is the reference point everyone carries in their memory: a certain grain, a certain give, a smell people associate with quality. Plant leather answers that in its own register. Our coffee leather is smooth with a soft matte depth, our bamboo leather is supple and structured. Neither is trying to pass as hide. Both are trying to be worth carrying.

Weight and structure

• Plant leather is light, which matters on a tote you carry all day
• It holds a silhouette cleanly, so a flap sits flat and a shoulder bag keeps its line
• It takes a croc texture and a fine grain well, which is how our pieces are finished
• Panels are cut, folded and stitched exactly as a leather bag would be

Upkeep

This is where the difference is practical rather than philosophical. Animal leather wants conditioning, and it patinas, which some people love. Plant leather wants a dry cloth and a cool cupboard, and no oils at all. If you would rather not maintain a bag, that is a genuine argument for plant leather.

The cost that cannot be felt in the hand

This is the part of the comparison the industry prefers to keep quiet, so we will set it out plainly, with sources at the end of this page.

The animals

A leather bag begins with an animal. FOUR PAWS estimates that more than five billion animals are used each year for materials in fashion, and leather is the largest of those streams. Hides are often described as a byproduct of meat, yet they are a revenue stream in their own right: by paying for skins, fashion helps fund the margins that keep industrial animal agriculture growing.

The water

Leather is one of the most water-intensive materials in fashion. Roughly seventeen thousand litres of water are associated with a single kilogram of bovine hide once the animal is counted, and the tanning industry alone is estimated to consume around four hundred billion litres of water a year. A peer-reviewed life cycle assessment of chrome-tanned cowhide found that the processing stage by itself uses about eighty-nine kilograms of water and emits about seven kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of finished leather, before farming is added.

The tanning waste

• Around ninety per cent of the world's leather is chrome tanned, a process built on chromium salts
• Tannery effluent carries chromium, sulphides, salts and organic load into local water systems, which is why the industry is regulated as a major polluter in the EU
• Trivalent chromium used in tanning can oxidise into hexavalent chromium in waste, sludge and finished goods
• Hexavalent chromium is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning carcinogenic to humans
• Tannery districts in Bangladesh, India and elsewhere carry documented burdens on water quality and on the health of the people who live and work there

The climate

Livestock accounts for roughly fourteen and a half per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and around a third of human-caused methane, the gas with the most immediate warming effect. Leather is not separate from that system. It is one of the things that system is paid for.

Where we stand

Ours begin with repurposed coffee grounds and with bamboo, a plant that regenerates in a season. We are not claiming a material with no footprint at all, because none exists. We are saying that no animal is killed for a VOGAYA bag, and that we would rather build on a waste stream and a fast-growing plant than on a hide and a chrome bath. That is the difference the house was built around, and it is the one we are least willing to trade away.

The question is not whether a material can imitate leather. It is whether it deserves to replace it.

Our material study sets out both of our leathers in detail, and the pieces themselves settle the argument faster than any page can: Bambote in bamboo leather at AED 1,750, and Espressa in coffee leather at AED 1,450.