The faux leather revolutionaries
Leather is fashionable as ever before and more people can afford to buy it and throw it away. As animal skin has become a part of fast fashion, high demand has slashed prices at the expense of local communities, the environment and the cattle used in production. This fact has created a growing army of vegan-designers and faux leather revolutionaries. I went to London to speak with one of them.
Famished cattle dragged for miles to end their lives in filthy slaughterhouses. A toxic cocktail of chemicals pouring into the Ganges River from which locals fetch their water. Meager men and women with skin diseases caused by working long hours in polluted tanneries. Plenty of horror stories and stomach-turning footage emerge on the internet and reveal an increasingly dirty leather industry.
However, a leather counter-movement is on the rise led by a number of brands pioneering alternatives to leather. Most prominently, fashion designer and icon Stella McCartney uses no animal-based products in her collections and advocates strongly against the leather industry. But while McCartney’s products are quite heavy on the pocket, fashion brands such as Beyond Skin, Angela Roi, Wills and NAK Fashion produce vegan wear that competes with the price and quality of real leather. NAK (No Animals Killed) Fashion makes award-winning shoes and boots out of faux leather. I went to London to have a chat with them about their products and to have a close look at the footwear myself.
Pioneering conscious footwear one boot at a time
Located right next to an Ermenegildo Zegna store, the door leading to NAK Fashion’s 3rd floor HQ is easy to miss. NAK Fashion has no physical store and only sells its footwear online. Office Manager Jackie Palmer greets me in the door and invites me into a small office space. Mint green shoeboxes sprawl a corner table and black boots, shoes and heels stand lined up on top.
“Everyone says it’s like having your slippers on,” Jackie explains as she hands me an incredibly light men’s shoe. “It’s a very high-spec microfiber material, which is as breathable as leather. They are so light and you never have to polish them.” The material does look and feel like leather, but Jackie ensures me that no part of the shoe — not even the glue holding it together — has animal DNA in it.
NAK Fashion was launched last year at London Fashion Week and is the tentative start-up of a global corporate service company named SRI Group. It has taken years to develop the kind of 3D structured high quality material that makes NAK Fashion’s footwear resemble real leather. The shoes are artisan made in Italy with locally sourced materials. Not exactly a cheap method.
“NAK Fashion is a very expensive start-up. The problem is the production. It’s so costly because you can’t use the same machines as you can with real leather shoes. You have to start small and grow very slowly,” Jackie explains, which elucidates the modest display area. She envisions the day NAK Fashion will be able to make its shoes more cost-efficient and add more colors to its all-black collection. However, she does see a trend that goes beyond animal welfare:
“First it was the animal rights that were the most important, but what we’re finding out is that just as many people who are interested in animal welfare, and if not more, are concerned about environmental issues. That is actually just as important today, I think” Jackie elaborates.
Real leather certainly takes its toll on the environment. The Guardian recently reported that skin from a staggering 430M cattle will be needed annually to meet leather demands in 2025–50 percent more than today. This demand will contribute to increasing CO2 emissions from livestock and thus rising temperatures and desertification — a good reason to reevaluate leather’s role in fast fashion.
Vegan wear everywhere
NAK Fashion shoes sell for £250–400 making it the more expensive and exclusive of the new generation of vegan leather brands. Wills, also London-based, sells more modestly priced animal-friendly shoes, and American vegan brand Angela Roi cheats the eye with fashionable leather-like bags that have no cows on their conscience. Add to that an increase in faux leather products from fashion giants such as H&M and Urban Outfitters, and you get a sense of a steadily rising trend.
NAK Fashion and the other new faux leather pioneers certainly prove that you can easily buy leather-free without compromising on quality and price. With less costly production and more awareness among buyers, who knows what the future holds for vegan leather?
