Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
Here is a deep thought for all those visiting Milan or thinking about what its outcome might tell us about the future. It is not original but I like it: “Reading is the mother of knowledge. Writing is the engine of thinking. The reader is the test of whether the thinking has value”. It explains why I have written this column every week since this magazine started in the summer of 2013.
So, the book I have brought to Milan for Lineapelle and Simac Tanning Tech is The Age of Alchemy by Kit Chapman. With this book and a smartphone, the leather executive and technician is both connected to the future and reminded where jobs in tanning came from.
For some centuries, leather has been thought a western thing, with an accompanying dialogue that the whole basis of modern chemistry arrived during the Enlightenment, discovering and isolating elements and putting accurate explanations around reactions.
The basis of Chapman’s book is to challenge this very lazy argument. It is subtitled How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry. He argues, and then demonstrates through extensive travels, that chemistry, including leather chemistry, grew out of the experimentation by craftspeople and makers over many thousands of years.
We already know that all the major tanning methods were widely known and practised well before the Christian era began. These included smoke and brain, various oil techniques, vegetable tanning and mineral tanning using alum. It is no wonder that little changed until the 19th century developments with the mineral chromium.
The book starts with a visit to Baku to explain the origin and control of fire which was essential for distillation, smelting and stimulating reactions. It then moves to northern Italy to look at Otzi the Iceman and his leather clothing, footwear and accoutrements, made with a variety of raw materials and processes. Otzi was a sophisticated fellow with a copper axe head, but he features to identify Stone Age leather workers making leather 5,300 years ago as among the earliest chemists.
Being a leather maker is #kindachic and early tanners shaped today’s industry
Indeed, it is fair to say that being a leather technician is not merely being an industrial chemist — but the latest generation of an ancient alchemical tradition. As tanners, we look at leather in a manufacturing sense: Beamhouse → tanning → retanning → dyeing → fatliquoring → finishing.
Let us change that to Chapman’s thinking:
Fire → water → minerals → plants → fermentation → observation → experiment → craft knowledge → chemistry.
Early knowledge was not originally divided into science, technology, craft, business and culture. It was simply knowledge of how to make something happen.
Craft is embedded intelligence, not nostalgia
This connects neatly with arguments I have set out before that craft is embedded intelligence, not nostalgia. So, if we start to think of leather technicians as 21st century alchemists, we are recognising that modern leather chemistry is the extraordinary accumulation of centuries of practical experimentation.
Whether our meeting point is Hong Kong, Paris, Shanghai or Milan itself, with every appearance of a very modern world of machines, chemicals, digital controls, automation and regulation, underneath it all lies an extraordinarily old human activity.
Because what all leather alchemists are tasked with is taking an unpredictable natural material and learning how to transform it, which since the beginning of humanity has essentially been the alchemist’s problem. According to Chapman, when chemistry was seen more as “knowledge”, it was discovered, collected, lost, rediscovered and refined rather than simply invented at a particular moment.
We must note that leather is not merely an agricultural byproduct that happens to be processed into a material. It is the product of an extraordinary, accumulated body of material knowledge. Craft was not the primitive predecessor of science. Craft was one of the ways in which science came into existence. It is too easy to think of historic smoke and brain processes as primitive craft with the post 1750s representing a straight line through science to industrialisation with a subsequent rush to high productivity through a variety of efficiencies. This now feels really sterile compared to his history of crafts leading to experimentation and the accumulated knowledge supporting scientific discovery which the same crafts then harness to develop new technologies.
Sir Humphry Davy
For leather, one of the first chemists was Sir Humphry Davy. He won the Copley Medal in 1805 in part for his work on vegetable tannins. The chemistry he developed fitted into a future of chromium tanning and plastics, showing that chemistry can produce extraordinary breakthroughs — but the breakthrough subsequently creates new problems and requires another generation of experimentation. While I argue that the time of chromium should be over, it is not simply “good” or “bad”. It is another chapter in the very long history of humans discovering how to manipulate matter, followed by the need to understand the consequences of what they have discovered. Plastics become an especially powerful parallel: an extraordinary chemical breakthrough whose consequences we are now having to rediscover.
#kindachic to be a tanner in Milan
So, #kindachic is perhaps the most appropriate way to describe an ancient profession reinvented as a modern science. Chapman’s book is also currently shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Science Book Prize, so it is more than a book I happen to like.
And it is undoubtedly #kindachic to be a tanner in Milan.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
Publication and Copyright of “Redwood Column” remains with the publishers of International Leather Maker. The articles cannot be reproduced in any way without the express permission of the publisher. The views are those of the author and not necessarily those of ILM.
