The Shock of Bad Design and Leather
Ive been blown away how many people are camping on the words "vintage leather jacket". If you google it you end up with about a hundred different sites that make crappy jackets or insufficient jackets. FACT NUMERO UNO: VINTAGE MEANS A JACKET BUILT IN THE PAST, SPECIFICALLY ONE THAT HAS SOME HISTORICAL VALUE DUE TO ITS SUPERIOR CONSTRUCTION, OR HISTORICAL RELEVANCE IN THE PANTHEON OF FASHION. These jackets do not meet my standards of design, wearability, and ecological production. I am sure the people who make these would disagree with me but they don't care one crap about what I blog about.
FACT NUMERO DUO: YOU CANNOT BUY A REAL LEATHER JACKET FOR LESS THAN 500 BUCKS!!! There is a perfectly good reason for this. If you are buying a real leather jacket, the leather alone which should be veg tanned or chrome/veg tanned or at least full grain naked, steer, horse or serious goat, is 2 to 6 dollars a square foot. It takes a minimum of 45 square feet to make a jacket that is two full sides or a whole cow. Given that, and that your jacket must be hand cut, and hand sewn not machine cut, it is not possible to sell for 100 or 199 unless a small exploited child is being forced to do the work on an i.v. drip for food. If you want your jacket to have resale value or last to hand down to your kids, or grandkids, if you want it to protect your ass, get better with age, than you cannot be cheap. In fact a jacket should be priced at around 800.00 and up to be realistically in the running as a quality garment, if it is not, you should not read any further and not pass go, do not collect any more information from my blog. Now there are mass produced crap sites trying to imitate winning jacket makers like Lost Worlds, Aero Leathers, Langlitz, Lewis Leathers and others. Shame on them, especially if they are not meeting these minimum standards.
I have found a link showing how not to make a leather jacket: If you wanted to open a company and produce a quality garment this is the way to not do it:
http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Leather-Jacket.html
here is another link to how not to make leather jackets, you too can dress like a clown
http://www.horseshoes.com/supplies/alphabet/customleather/homepage.htm
Hello!
ReplyDeleteI found your thread here to be a brilliant read, I am about to launch my own fashion line, just in the sample making stages mind, and how true your statements about pricing of true leather jackets.
Having worked at Danier Leather (the true massacre of genuine leather might I add !), I felt a lacking quality and often wondered how they managed to produced jackets and sell them at $149 and make a profit when it is so-claimed they are top quality?!
I see you are a designer here in Toronto also I would love to contact you further as I am from England and getting to know the Canadian market. :)
Best wishes,
Carrie
carrie.ohanlon@yahoo.co.uk
Danier is truly on the cheap side of leather..I have no idea how they can make what they do at that price point...our jackets take a full day to one and a half days to make one piece. It is real bench craft...I suppose I could whip off one an hour if i used different "speed" techniques but they wouldn't be beautiful when I was done.
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David.
Sorry to pester you about a competitor on the comment section of an old post, but would you include Gibson Barnes in with Lost Worlds, Aero Leathers, etc. specifically, their Mark 31 in veg goat? Have you handled one? Having a hard time finding impartial opinions of it.
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