Allies in authenticity
The Portuguese leather industry is willing to share the working document that led to the country’s 2022 law for protecting the authenticity of leather. Colleagues around the globe will be able to adapt the text to the needs of the industry in their own parts of the world.
Scientific studies to support leather’s circular-economy credentials are critical. As we have seen with the paper that German research institution FILK published on the subject in 2021, there is widespread interest in this. Switzerland-based open-source coatings science journal MDPI published the paper, which offers a comparison between the performance characteristics of leather and those of nine prominent alternative materials.
By July 2023, the FILK paper had attracted more than 26,000 readers. It had also earned 25 formal citations in other academic papers through MDPI, and 37 citations in total, according to Google Scholar, a branch of the search engine’s site that is devoted to scholarly literature. It has also been referenced, with well earned name-checks for FILK, in mainstream media, including by business news outlet Forbes and UK newspaper The Guardian. Co-general manager of FILK, Dr Michael Meyer, has told Italian industry publication La Conceria that he and his team had not expected such a reaction but now think they appeared “with the right argument at the right time”. Dr Meyer says further studies and further papers are in the pipeline.
Top performer
Secretary-general of Portuguese tanning industry association APIC, Gonçalo Santos, is one of many industry figures to continue to pay tribute to the work FILK has done in this regard. In recent comments to colleagues at Portugal’s national footwear technology research CTCP, he described the tests FILK carried out for the paper as extensive and he celebrated leather’s emergence as “performing best in all the relevant parameters”.
Taking nothing away from the science, Mr Santos suggests that one reason why Dr Meyer and his team were able to come up with “the right argument at the right time” is that a message celebrating the authenticity of leather resonates with countless millions of consumers today. As the title FILK chose for the paper (‘Comparison of the Technical Performance of Leather and Trendy Alternatives’) suggests, there are alternative materials that can appear very attractive at first glance. Product names that highlight the presence of cactus, mushroom, kombucha and pineapple fibres appeal to many people. This is especially true as the manufacturers of these alternative materials play down (not to say hush up) the worrying and heavy presence of plastics in the same products.
Beyond the claims
Evidence, including the powerful evidence from FILK, suggests it is much harder actually to make a functional, scalable, affordable leather alternative than it is to make claims about such materials. Claims abound and, usually with the help of other people’s money, plenty of samples have emerged to great fanfare. Pushing on from there seems to be a much harder hurdle to clear. For example, in July, materials developer Bolt Threads announced that it would no longer continue with its efforts to bring to market its Mylo mycelium-based product.
Bolt Threads co-counder and chief executive, Dr Dan Widmaier, told Vogue Business: “We have paused Mylo to reassess what works and what will work in the future.” Asked if the production of Mylo could start up again at some point, possibly following the sale of the technology to another group, he said all options were on the table, but it seems we have heard the last of Mylo for the moment. Dr Widmaier explained that Bolt Threads had been unable to raise enough funding to take its plans for the material forward, in spite of high-profile projects with brands including adidas, Kering, Lululemon and, especially, Stella McCartney.
Historic moment
In 2022, Stella McCartney developed a handbag called the Frayme Mylo, putting it on sale for $3,500. The label’s eponymous designer said of the product: “This is a moment in fashion history, the world’s first-ever luxury bag crafted from mycelium.” Dr Widmaier must have hoped for large orders to flow from this, but his comments to Vogue Business make it clear that Bolt Threads was unable to scale up its production of Mylo before it ran out of money. He said: “Scale-up is the most expensive and hardest part, and there are no shortcuts.” He added that fundraising had been a challenge for all fashion start-ups for the last 18 months, explaining that those who had been able to raise funding “mostly deal with artificial intelligence”.
An investors’ information resource called Crunchbase, to which more than 3,700 global investment firms submit monthly portfolio updates, has published figures that suggest Bolt Threads had raised a total of $470 million from investors by mid-2022. This seems a far-from-small amount of money; at the same time, there seems to be little to show for it. It is unclear how many more millions of dollars might have been necessary to enable a project like the Frayme Mylo bag to make a longer-lasting impact. In truth, its “moment in fashion history” was over before it began.
Bags of experience
On the subject of bags, Gonçalo Santos has one that he particularly likes, a leather travel bag that used to belong to his father. “If I take care of it, it will be around for the next generation to use too,” he says. His belief is that most consumers would understand perfectly what he means by this. “It is the material itself that allows us to look after these products for years,” he explains. “Durability is one of the most important aspects in this discussion and we all know that products made from leather age well. You can repair them by restitching and recolouring them if you need to. If you buy a leather product, the chances are that 20 years from now, it will still have value as a vintage item. This is unlikely to happen with a similar-looking object made from synthetic material. That one won’t become a vintage item because it will not be around to tell its story.”
Because labelling does not always make it easy for consumers to distinguish between authentic and synthetic, Portugal joined Italy, Belgium, France, Germany and Spain in 2022 in bringing leather authenticity rules into law. The decree sets strict requirements for the use of the term ‘leather’ and it cannot be combined with qualifiers, prefixes or suffixes that contradict the intrinsic nature of the material tanners produce from animal hides and skins.
Forefront of the fight
“False descriptions are no longer allowed for products that come onto the market in Portugal,” the APIC secretary-general points out, “and we at APIC are working with national consumer safety authority ASAE and with our colleagues in the CTIC leather technology centre to train more than 20 new inspectors who will soon be going out into the field to make sure companies are keeping to the new law.” He adds that APIC will also work with the customs authorities in Portugal to work out the most effective way of sanctioning companies that insist on defying the leather law.
He describes the new law as being well constructed and pays tribute to António Oliveira, the head of the enterprise policy department at Portugal’s national agency for innovation and competitiveness (IAPMEI), calling him “the father of the law” because the technical detail that it includes is mostly the fruit of his labour. “It is a well constructed law,” Mr Santos concludes, “one that puts Portugal at the forefront of the fight for leather’s authenticity and we want to help the wider industry by making it available to other European Union member states that do not have a leather law yet. It would be good to harmonise this across the whole of Europe.”
What this means is that APIC will give its colleagues in other countries access to the working document that that Anto´nio Oliveira and his colleagues came up with. This document served as the basis for the new law, officially Portuguese Law Decree number 3/2022, published in the Official Journal of the Portuguese Republic on January 4, 2022.
Leather authenticity is an ongoing challenge and APIC’s view is that the work it has done can help others. The representative body for the industry in the European Union, COTANCE, has said national associations that have no legislation of their own could follow Portugal’s lead. Colleagues outside Portugal will be able to adapt the working document to the needs of the leather industry in their own countries and propose a similar law to their own governments. APIC has already translated the document into English and made it available to all COTANCE members. It has said it will extend the offer further and make the document available to tanning industry colleagues all over the world through COTANCE’s membership of International Council of Tanners. APIC is also willing to work directly with any representative organisation worldwide that wants to make progress on the defence of leather’s authenticity.
False descriptions are no longer allowed for products that come onto the market in Portugal.
Credit: Joaquim Francisco Inácio Sucrs SA
