Flair for repair
France’s Conseil National du Cuir believes specialist shoe repair professionals are fervent defenders of circular-economy values.
In April 2021, for the fourteenth time no less, France’s Institut National des Me´tiers d’Art (INMA), a national, state-run body for promoting the work of artisans, organised a festival called the Journées Européennes des Métiers d’Art. The event is a week-long celebration of arts, crafts and the skills of the thousands of people who still make beautiful, valuable products from traditional materials, using know-how that has passed from generation to generation.
Central to this event are public demonstrations of the skills that artisans still have today, allowing consumers to see up close the effort, the dexterity, the skill and the savoir-faire that goes into making products that many people may take for granted. This, the organisers of the Journées Européennes des Métiers d’Art hope, can help restore a connection between consumer products and people.
It was their intention to offer these demonstrations in person in 2021 at the Galerie des Gobelins, a tapestry workshop-turned museum in Paris. Covid-19 restrictions put an end to that idea but the festival went ahead anyway, online. A host of artisan activities featured, across 16 different categories (from glass and crystal to toys), each encompassing dozens of types of work that require craft skills.
Essential questions
Leather is, in its own right, one of the 16 categories and national industry body the Conseil National du Cuir (CNC) is a great supporter of the festival. This year CNC said that one of the aspects of the leather industry it wanted to draw particular attention to was the repairability of good footwear. Skilled shoe repairers, CNC says, are among the artisans who “make leather the essence of their footwear savoir-faire”. It believes they are also what it calls “fervent defenders of circular-economy values”.
It says that the work these people do represents important aspects of the ancient relationship between leather and footwear. “Repairability is the very essence of the work of the shoemaker,” CNC states. “Shoe repair is an essential link in the lifecycle of a shoe, one that makes it possible to prolong the life of the product and possible, even, to pass it on to a new owner.” Making products with repairability designed and built into them is also a perfect example of a commitment to the circular economy. In CNC’s eyes, leather is key to this because it is “an inherently circular material”.
Making products that customers can repair time and time again and keep for years is good for the transition away from the waste-filled ways of recent decades.
Part of everyday life
CNC explains that having the skills of shoe repair specialists on display in towns big and small helps to make the idea of prolonging the life and usefulness of shoes and other products made from leather “a part of everyday life”. It holds this to be true even if there are fewer shoe repairers now than in years gone by. Its calculation is that there were around 45,000 expert shoe repairers in France in the 1950s and 1960s but that, by the dawn of the twenty-first century, their number had fallen to around 6,000.
Its explanation of this is that mid-price and cheap imported shoes from Asia began flooding the French market in the 1980s. It says this was in response to the new demands of a changed society, one that was discovering “a mass consumerism made possible by globalisation”.
Symbols of resistance
However, the industry body says it believes that, for some consumers at least, crises such as the global financial crash of 2008 and the covid-19 pandemic have helped to reverse that trend.“Making an object last has become a strong symbol of resistance to overproduction and mass consumption,” it says. “Repairable products are now in demand and this is good news for products made from leather because leather is one of the few materials that make this possible. Consumers want products that will last and products that they will be able to mend and make new use of. They are finding that shoe repairers are people they can rely on for this, people who can make old products into something new and beautiful again.”
Skills match
There are still 3,400 shoe repair shops across the different regions of France and, according to CNC, they offer people across the country quick, easy and local access to the ancient art of fashioning leather into footwear. Shoe repairers are able to replace any part that requires maintenance or repair, even if much of their everyday work in on replacing soles and heels. The fact is that their skills in design, unstitching, preparing leather, cutting it and restitching, closely match those of the higher-profile artisans that create bespoke made-to-measure shoes for luxury end consumers.It could seem at first glance that the twenty-first-century trend of people wearing sneakers for every occasion from weddings to job interviews would present a new threat to skilled shoe repairers, but CNC has identified some benefits from this, too. Real sneaker-heads are approaching their local shoe repair shops to ask experts there to restore vintage athletic shoes or to personalise a favourite pair. This has even helped attract younger footwear professionals to the idea of setting themselves up in the repair business, with vibrant shop environments and a strong social media presence to boot, all of which helps raise the sector’s profile.
Its success in attracting young talent and passing on traditional skills is one of the aspects of the wider French leather sector that CNC is most proud of and most ready to point to in signalling the industry’s circular-economy credentials.
There is expansion among its big name luxury groups and an intense effort to recruit and train new generations of leather artisans. Most of the French industry’s 13,000 companies, though, are small; its total workforce in France is currently 130,000 people.
In a point that CNC made last year in a social media campaign, it said this workforce saves a combined total of 170,000 tonnes of by-product from the food industry from being thrown away in France every year, explaining that this would be equivalent in weight to 24 Eiffel Towers. The shoe repair specialists make an important contribution to that effort.
The skills of shoe repair specialists closely match those of the higher profile artisans that create bespoke made-to-measure shoes for high-end consumers. All Credits: CNC
