Bags that free hides from purgatory
Designer and developer of leather collections Moore & Giles has released a capsule collection of bags called Reclaimed. What sets it apart is that, on this occasion, the Virginia-based company has chosen hides with more natural flaws than it usually uses. The material had long lain unfinished, waiting for someone to recognise its beauty and value.
The highest-quality leather it can source from its partner tanneries in Europe, Asia and South America is the key focus for Moore & Giles and this will not change. This is the material that its main customers, manufacturers of high-end furniture, require. Furniture became the main market for the Virginia-based designer and developer of leather collections at the end of the 1990s, following decades of service to the footwear sector. However, in 2007, it launched an accessories division too.
Its director of design, Thomas Brennan, says the company has always looked to use A-grade hides for all of its collections because the naturalness of the leathers it offers is of great importance to Moore & Giles. Hides that need correcting through buffing, filling, coating and other methods may have their visible flaws covered up or removed, he argues, but they will typically also lose some of the grain and wrinkles that give its each piece its unique character.
From a designer’s point of view, Thomas Brennan says part of the value of this strategy is that it can help educate the market about what leather ought to look like. “There is a lack of understanding of what quality leather is,” he says. His view is that, in some ways, this lack of understanding is understandable in a world that accepts uniformity and flawlessness as marks of quality. Consumers have come to expect high-quality products to be uniform.
The price of perfection
“This is being driven by some of the biggest global luxury brands,” Mr Brennan continues, “who want customers in Hong Kong to be able to buy exactly the same bag that customers in New York can buy. This is not the customers’ fault. Uniformity is important to those brands, but it pulls leather away from its natural state. Everything has a price, including perfection and uniformity. Leather is great as a raw material the way it is and it’s a little misguided to think it would be better to try to achieve the exact same grain on every hide on an assembly line. Real luxury objects should be rare, special, unique.”
One-of-a-kind leather objects are, generally, easier to offer if you use A-grade hides and this, as noted, is the long-standing policy of Moore & Giles. However, last year, it took the decision to use some C-grade hides to develop a new range of leathers called Heirloom. Mr Brennan then used Heirloom to create a collection of bags that he named Reclaimed. Moore & Giles names the company producing Heirloom as Conceria Adelaide, a leather manufacturer based in Bassano del Grappa in the province of Vicenza that has been in operation for 150 years. It has been supplying the US company for 25 years and the relationship is strong.
Wet-blue build-up
According to Mr Brennan, the real driving force behind the Heirloom and Reclaimed projects was Moore & Giles vice-president, Tray Petty. The leather manufacturer’s trust in Mr Petty gave it the confidence to open up to him about how large a stock of C-grade hides had built up at the site, stored in one of the warehouses as wet blue. The team at the tannery asked if he could think of a customer in the furniture market in the US who might be able to make use of this material.
Discerning furniture customers who have understood that these hides offer naturalness, longevity, breathability and beauty the same as all other hides are using Heirloom in forthcoming collections. And, in parallel, after discussions with company president, Sackett Wood, Mr Petty eventually said that Moore & Giles would use some of the hides itself in its own accessories range. This is what led to the launch of Reclaimed.
Sackett Wood is of the view that there is value in all hides and that the grading system that divides them into As, Bs and Cs is subjective. “Leather is about authenticity,” he says, “and we want to celebrate leather for everything it has, everything it is.” He says that the qualities that made hides a central part of human existence millennia ago are the same qualities that make it a luxury material today.
At the same time, there has been what Mr Brennan calls “a significant rise in synthetics taking the place of lower-grade hides” in many finished products. Manufacturers have decided that it was not worth the effort of giving lower-grade hides all the love and attention required to make them fit into their particular manufacturing set-ups. Inventory has, therefore, continued to build up.
Alarm-bells
“The tanner in Italy probably hoped that the market for those C-grade hides would come back,” Mr Brennan continues. “But customers stayed away and the volume just kept accumulating. The scale of this probably only became clear over a decent amount of time and it was when they eventually pulled the alarm-bell that they began to have those conversations with Tray and Sackett.” Fittingly, considering the Italian connection and 2021 marking 700 years since the death of the author of The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, Thomas Brennan refers to these hides as having been “languishing in storage purgatory”; but they have now emerged from there to be, as Dante put it, “made young again and ready to rise towards the stars”. Or at least towards the tannery’s finishing plant.
This partnership has yielded some of the favourites in the wider Moore & Giles leather range, including Brompton Brown and Titan Milled, the director of design reveals. Taking confidence from this, he was sure the Heirloom and Reclaimed ideas would work too and made no special request of the tannery for taking the C-grade hides from wet blue to finished. He explains: “We looked at what had worked in the past and picked colours, such as oak, that we knew would still look good years from now. We knew we were creating products with an eye towards them being heirloom pieces, as the name of the leather range suggests. Yes, we keep track of trends, too, but we don’t want our products to look outdated five years from now. We want people to enjoy products, like the backpack, tote and duffel in the Reclaimed collection, for 25 years.”
Start from scratch
Asked what difference buyers might notice between Reclaimed and the rest of the company’s accessories collection, Thomas Brennan says that, apart from a lower price than usual, there are “superficial imperfections”, that these vary from bag to bag and that this variation is broad. “We wanted a natural look and to keep things simple,” he says. “This too is part of our efforts at education with regard to the beauty of leather’s natural look.” Precisely because buyers will use the bags for a long time, he says that it is only a matter of time before they make their own mark on the products they have bought: a scratch from a key, a blot from a pen and so on. “We’ve just given the bags a head-start in that process,” he says.The first six months since launch have been enough, in spite of the pandemic, to provide Moore & Giles with feedback that confirms that there is an appetite in the market for these products. The Reclaimed range has saved hides from going to waste, rescuing them from purgatory. The project has proved that there are consumers who are willing to accept that scratches and marks on hides do not necessarily make leather less beautiful. In the right hands, these characteristics can help make leather and leather products such as the Reclaimed collection even more beautiful, with each bag helping owners set themselves apart from the crowd.
Moore & Giles director of design, Thomas Brennan.
All credits: Moore & Giles
