The collaboration aims to address growing conservation challenges linked to “modern leathers”, which refer to materials industrially produced from around the 1920s onwards using new processes, chemicals and surface finishes.
LCC are global experts in the conservation of traditional leather and skin-based heritage materials, but modern leathers are now arriving at the studio in increasing numbers. These materials span collections including transport, furniture, fashion, medicine and social history, and often incorporate unfamiliar tannages and surface finishes that behave and deteriorate differently from historic leathers.
Current approaches to preserving these materials rely heavily on research from the plastics conservation field, which has limited direct application. This means treatments are often dictated by collection type or available expertise, rather than a holistic understanding of the leather component, creating potential long-term risks.
As a first step, LCC and SLTC aim to establish a clearer record of developments that have shaped modern leather chemistry and manufacture, including new mineral, synthetic and combination tannages, shifts in raw materials and end uses, and changing surface finish formulations linked to issues such as blooming, tackiness, colour change and delamination.
Alongside this knowledge-gathering work, the collaboration will establish a material library of modern leather examples to support research into degradation and ageing, inform conservation treatments, and guide appropriate long-term preventive care, with any proprietary manufacturing information protected and used strictly for research and education.
Call for contributors
SLTC is convening a voluntary Working Group to support the collaboration and is inviting leather technologists, scientists, chemists, educators, manufacturers and others with relevant expertise, as well as tanneries willing to provide sample leathers and composition recipes, to get involved.
Those interested in joining or contributing should contact monika@sltc.org by December 31, 2025.
