Don’t Fall for Fake Leather Jackets

Outside of AI, Abercrombie & Fitch has been one of the biggest business success stories of the 2020s. In 2016 it scored a 65 out of 100, the lowest in the American Customer Satisfaction Index retail survey. Fran Horowitz became chief executive in February 2017, and by 2019 the company had overhauled its inventory, expanded its sizes, and ditched the loud music and perfume in its stores. In 2023 the stock gained 285 percent, ahead of Nvidia’s 239 percent. The company did this by aligning their quality and prices in a clever way and offering higher craftmanship and taste than brands like Zara — and significantly higher than Chinese e-commerce giants like Shein and Temu — at a pretty affordable price point. If you like Kith and Aimé Leon Dore but don’t like their prices, and don’t mind a lower-quality product, Abercrombie was a pretty good pick.Walking through their store near Covent Garden, London, it was impressive to see just how many stylish items there are, at relatively affordable prices — but then I noticed their leather jackets. Available in a range of cuts, heavily inspired by various brands stretching from Buck Mason to The Frankie Shop — which itself is a rip-off of Phoebe Philo and The Row — they offered a pretty cool look for about $180. Except that they weren’t actually made from leather. They were synthetic leather — “vegan leather” — which is just polyurethane-coated polyester. A few years ago, brands would use “apple leather” — apple waste mixed with polyurethane and layered onto a cloth backing — but now they don’t even feign to have any association with anything natural.This makes sense for Abercrombie — and the many other brands that sell faux-leather jackets for excessively high prices — but buying one of these jackets is a lesser form of madness. It means buying into a fantasy that leather is some rare, expensive resource, reserved for high-end jackets, when it is now actually a waste product of the modern food industry, available in such high quality that demand never meets supply. The Leather and Hide Council of America said 5.5 million cattle hides in America never made it into the leather supply chain in 2019, about 17 percent of that year’s slaughter, and that a large percentage of them were likely discarded.This is also why leather jackets — and other leather goods — have been highly democratized. If you want the best leather — full-grain, the outer surface left intact — you still have to pay a premium, but it’s not much. For example, I recently bought a Cafe Racer leather jacket from the British brand MKI. It’s a chic, well-made item with smooth cow leather and a polyester satin lining, and it is wearing well with daily use. And I bought it on sale for about $230.Just because something is leather, that doesn’t mean it’s high quality or worth buying. Nike’s Air Force 1 sneaker is ostensibly leather but that thin layer of batched together hide is under a thick polyurethane coating that creases with wear.But examining a jacket in person, you can find what’s worth buying — and it’s never worth spending on plastic fake leather.

Don’t Fall for Fake Leather Jackets

Don’t Fall for Fake Leather Jackets

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