Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
It is perhaps a curious coincidence that the very moment in the mid-1980s when Madonna’s famous song Material Girl was released, Western business was busy copying the virtual corporation model of Nike and shipping the making of “things” overseas where labour was cheapest. It was seen as both a satire of and a celebration of 1980s consumer culture, and the growing preoccupation with wealth and status.
A virtual corporation owns the brand, design, and market access while managing coordination and standards. It outsources manufacturing and sometimes logistics, being “virtual” not because it is unreal, but because its core value is intangible, and its physical production is externalised.
Validated by the Chicago School of thinking that put shareholder value always first, the artisan maker and their geographical base are diminished, and the company places the object low in its signalling of perceived value. The virtual corporation relocated value itself, from the factory floor and workshop to the brand. As a result, this remarkable period allowed companies to add to all their physical assets such as bricks and mortar, machinery, stocks, and inventories, an often-huge financial figure for the intangible brand.
On reflection, this was nothing more than the theft of value from the makers and the materials, moving it to the fairytale of a brand name. I can remember at the time one employee of a major sports brand telling me during a price negotiation that he could replace my leather with any cheaper material and still sell his articles if he added their prominent logo.
Tensions and disruptions
Recent writing, partly by one of my favourite journalists, the anthropologist Gillian Tett, argues that geopolitical tensions and supply disruptions have brought products, their manufacturing, and the materials they consume back to the forefront. Economies which in the 1980s accelerated towards services, finance, and later digital systems now recognise that they need to reverse back to materials and making. Economies are out of balance and vulnerable.
Over recent decades, most advanced economies have created this cultural and economic bias towards services. Services are now treated as the primary engines of growth, with manufacturing, by contrast, regarded at best as residual or even obsolete. It is not a completely new phenomenon: there have been moments through history when global trading faded and there was a forced push back to making. At the end of the early medieval period, when the spread of the Black Death through Europe brought trade to a stop, and at the time of the Great Wars when supply chains were interrupted, access to materials and the skill in using them to make products reasserted their importance.
Leather needs to be revalued for a new transparency era
Nowhere is this more visible than in industries such as leather, where biological, chemical, and mechanical processes remain fundamental despite layers of branding, design, and retail abstraction. Leather sits at the intersection of this material reality and symbolic value. It was devalued in the brand era, both hidden and commodified, and it now needs to be revalued in a new transparency era. One in which having access to raw materials and the knowledge of how to use our hands to make them into useful and beautiful products is again recognised as important.
The leather sector provides a particularly clear illustration of how these dynamics need to work. Leather is the foundation of a technical system involving the organisation of tanning, manufacturing, and distribution. This shapes labour structures, regional economies, and patterns of trade. Leather clusters in places such as Santa Croce, Walsall, Igualada, Himeji, and León have functioned as integrated ecosystems. They combine shared infrastructure, local knowledge, and specialised skills. The products produced integrate production and design skills as they adjust for new markets and consumer trends.
These clusters demonstrate that material industries are not simply about production; they are about entire systems of capability. For leather is deeply embedded in what might be called the “soft” economy. Design, positioning, and retail experience are built on an irreducibly material system: raw hides and skins are biological inputs, tanning is a chemical process, and the cutting and stitching of making goods is a mechanical transformation.
This means there is now an opportunity not so much to reject branding, but to re-anchor brands in the material of which they are made. I touched upon this a little while ago when discussing how the economic climate was making consumers re-evaluate their purchasing and seek out brands that focus on quality materials and making.
So, however it is viewed, leather is about matter and molecules. It cannot be digitised or dematerialised. Its outputs depend on the availability and quality of raw materials, the control of complex chemical processes, and the management of environmental impacts.
A story for the upcoming World Leather Day
Some of my thinking might appear to drift too much to philosophy and away from reality, but I think there are useful concepts here which offer a fuller understanding of why consumers love leather. A story which could well start to be told on the upcoming World Leather Day (April 29, 2026).
Braudel’s notion of “material civilisation” offers a powerful big historical frame for how the leather industry, as a foundational material infrastructure, has long shaped everyday life, work, and economic organisation across societies. This material-civilisation lens gains a strongly cultural and micro-sociological dimension: the tannery, the workshop, and the supply chain appear not just as nodes of production, but as cultural fields inhabited by distinct “tribes” with their own tacit norms, rituals, and hidden codes about quality, skill, sustainability, and risk.
Leather, in this combined view, becomes a material focal point where deep-seated civilisational structures, patterns of consumption, urban-industrial organisation, and global trade, intersect with the everyday anthropological realities of how workers, designers, and consumers actually think, speak, and act around skins, chemistry, and ethics.
In times of economic turbulence, choke points, wars and material shortages, the “things” matter and our ability to make them. These “deep-seated civilisational structures” using hides and skins are imported again. And as Braudel would note, as a “manufacture,” leather is indeed foundational. It has been with us since the early humans, and its main processes, including mineral tanning, which started with alum, were all known before the Christian era and have not changed much. Hides, skins, and various forms of leather have always been part of the structures of everyday life. The basic, often unspoken, material realities that shape human existence. It is the world of food, where leather provided containers for liquids and solids; of clothing, where leather moved from basic protection to offering social status as well as military functionality; to shelter, where it was used from the earliest times and still serves many Arctic people today; to technology and industry, where leather provided roller covers, belting, and so much more.
Leather is the “ground floor” of history
Leather is the “ground floor” of history, upon which the more dramatic stories of markets and empires are built. Leather is not a luxury “add-on” but a material infrastructure that shaped how people moved, fought, travelled, and stored, and therefore how their economies and social organisation unfolded.
Given what we now know about synthetic alternatives, leather is no longer a sunset industry but a futuristic one. The Material Girl music video referenced Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The song became so culturally dominant that “Material Girl” became a lasting nickname for Madonna herself. But like many other materials that are important through history such as salt, diamonds are a commodity as opposed to a manufactured product that creates careers and communities, articles of everyday life that are used and cherished. Articles that last and can be repaired.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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