Footwear brand makes strange suede claims
02/03/2011
Footwear brand Beyond Skin says it aims to use “eco-friendly materials as they come onto the market to try and make our range as eco-friendly as we can”, and has won awards from fashion publications including Drapers and Grazia for its efforts.
Its use of the new Miko material, Dinamica, is in its autumn-winter 2011–2012 collection. In a series of announcements to introduce the collection to the market, Beyond Skin referred to Dinamica as suede. Challenged on this use of the term, the brand told leatherbiz that the material is in fact made of microfibre from 100% recycled PET plastics.
Beyond Skin apologised for giving the impression its shoes contained suede, but only because it wanted no one to think there was any type of leather in its material mix. “Beyond Skin is a cruelty-free label, so we don’t use any animal products at all,” a spokesperson said.
This represents another example of the work the leather industry has to do collectively to defend its good name. One implication of the Beyond Skin statement is that animals slaughtered for meat suffer cruelty when tanners make leather from the hides, a by-product. Another implication is that materials deriving from the petrochemical industry are somehow more sustainable than leather.
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