Leather artisans take part in Burberry Makers’ House project
21/09/2016
Many of the artisans involved have worked with the luxury brand on its most recent collection, which derives its inspiration from a Virginia Woolf novel, Orlando. The brand’s chief executive and chief creative officer, Christopher Bailey, said at the launch of the new collection that it is “a love-letter to the past and to English history, and a kind of dressing-up box to visit and revisit”.
Burberry has invited visitors to go to see the Makers’ House in London’s Soho from September 21-27, promising “a daily changing programme of activities and installations”.
Several of the manufacturers involved work with leather.
Bespoke & Bound was set up by Gareth Hacker in 2010, blending time-honoured, artisan leather-working and bookbinding with contemporary design techniques. The company creates made-to-order leather-bound photo albums and notebooks, handcrafted in London.
Finally, The King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery is a ceremonial unit of the British Army, quartered at Woolwich in London. It is a horse-mounted unit and all of its soldiers are trained to care for teams of horses. The unit houses several saddlers, who take up to five years to specialise in the skill of military saddlery.
The New Craftsmen also includes Doe Leather, founded by Deborah Thomas and producing a range of contemporary leather bags and accessories, hand-crafted in one of the last remaining Black Country leathergoods workshops in the English Midlands.
Doe’s is an English Heritage story, beginning in 1908 with Deborah Thomas’s great-great-grandfather, who made leather linings for hats and shoes in Northampton. His company went on to specialise in embossing prints – such as snake, lizard, crocodile and ostrich – onto quality hides (now all the rage, of course) and eventually held the largest collection of embossing plates in the world.
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