Our seventh D&T presentation was by Rachael Sleight, a GSA tutor and designer, who's talk mostly fosused on her current design endeavour, Burnbank Leather, a bespoke vegetable tanned leather bag company.
The talk reminded me of a video from a few years ago, by another american based bag company, Saddleback Leather, who promise to make extremely hard-wearing bags out of the best leather. Their video, How to Knock Off a Bag, is an interesting and sarcastic introduction into the efforts they go though to deliver high quality bags.
This is a very interesting insige into the world of leather goods design in general, but I was most taken by the section on 'cutting' leather so that small pieces make up a bigger part of the overall design, compared to the best leather goods which unapologetically have massive leather panels.
This maximising of leather area makes so much sense. And may be the most important bit of the video in thrms of design: Smaller leather panels and more seams make a product cheaper to produce, but the more seams, the more points of failure. The Nike Air Max 90 looks like this on one side:
The talk reminded me of a video from a few years ago, by another american based bag company, Saddleback Leather, who promise to make extremely hard-wearing bags out of the best leather. Their video, How to Knock Off a Bag, is an interesting and sarcastic introduction into the efforts they go though to deliver high quality bags.
This is a very interesting insige into the world of leather goods design in general, but I was most taken by the section on 'cutting' leather so that small pieces make up a bigger part of the overall design, compared to the best leather goods which unapologetically have massive leather panels.
This maximising of leather area makes so much sense. And may be the most important bit of the video in thrms of design: Smaller leather panels and more seams make a product cheaper to produce, but the more seams, the more points of failure. The Nike Air Max 90 looks like this on one side:
Nice, seamless 'functional' expression on one side, but on the other side:
On the 'inside' (where less people see) there is a conspicuous cut in the leather (just below the nike swoosh). This will save them costs in production because they can use smaller pieces of leather or other fabric. The fact that large patches of leather (or any material) cost more money than small, indiscriminately shaped pieces, and small pieces cost significantly more money than large, confident pieces of material is a massive factor in the design of everything.
Footware is the biggest expression of this, as shoes have to go though such an advanced level of stress and bending throughout their lives. This is why 'normal' caterpillar boots look like this:
Costing around the £100 mark, and the rest of the search results contain other unwieldy results:
Ugly.
And this isn't because they are just cheap, it is because, through reducing leather use they ignore both functional and aesthetic criteria at the same time.
Take the above. It is not that they are naturally ugly in any way that I can define, although I think they are. What they do do is reduce cost through certain functional compromises. They have many 'interesting' lines on them, which may look to express a certain masculine identity, but what they are really for is to reduce costs through reduces usage of leather.
My mum recently got a pair of 'good' walking boots from Altberg. Fitted perfectly to her feet by specification, and with good leather, these boots will mould to her feet over time and become good boots for years. The most important observation, however, is that they, as can be seen, are made from pretty much one peice of leather in all the regions that matter, This means that when she walks in them, they will crease and fold not on a seam line, but on a straight piece of leather, which is much more durable.
I think our finding here is that, in a lot of ways, that 'cheap' design is demonstratively worse than design which is appropriate to function. Rachel's bags do a good job of making proper bags that will stand the test of time. The real question is, are these bags a sign of a new awakening in 'proper' design, or are they just a re-opeing of a more expensive way to make things?
The other observation is that we should distrust the reintroduction of 'ornamentation' in our postmodern lives. Often, this ornamentation is not a liberation of aesthetic expression in homweares or fashion, but a new finding (and subsequent masking) of economic efficiency.
Clearly, we would all love a modernist black leather bag which has been cut, sewn and dyed in the right way, but do we care that much? If we do, we already have one.
The 90% of people don't realise. The rational argument for the longevity of leather bags, and here, shoes, had been heard. However, most people are still going to buy bad things from high-street stores. These are subject to many life-limiting processes, where one may be better off buying one bag for life. Who needs a leather bag? and can we high-quality our way into sustainability? Certain companies make such an argument, but it may be more of a marketing ploy.
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