Faircraft Leather Is Trying to Make Leather a Little Less Tough to Make
Well-worn.
It takes 10,000 hours to get good at something, we’re told. What about 7,000 years? That’s about how long humans have been tanning, stretching, crafting, and stitching leather into all manner of things. And it’s easy to see why: leather is tough, durable, abundant, and infinitely variable—anything from car seats to “too-cool-for-you” jackets to fist-hardened punching bags can be made out of the stuff.
While we may have become good at making leather, we haven’t done much to make it good for the planet. Despite 7,000 years of history, leather remains a remarkably dirty business: growing and harvesting the cattle that supply it takes a good deal of land, water, and feed. Cleaning, tanning, and processing it requires a huge amount of labour (often low-paid and exploited), uses an inordinate amount of chemicals (including slaked lime, chromium salts, formaldehyde, and various solvents), and produces a regrettable amount of effluent and organic waste.
Paris-based Faircraft believes there’s a better way. Since its founding in 2021, the startup has been working on what it calls “in-vitro leather”: a version grown from a biopsy of living skin cells, placed in a custom-built cell replicator (essentially an industrial-sized petri dish) where they grow on a silicon-based scaffold. Over time, those cells divide and redivide, multiplying into a leather “skin” that is then tanned, dried, and finished. The result is a fabric that’s synthetically grown yet organically structured, with a look and feel about as close to the real thing as science (or science fiction) can get—cutting 90 per cent of CO2 emissions, 80 per cent less water, and generating 95 per cent less waste.
We’ll have to wait another year or two to see if Faircraft’s products are on-trend—the company is currently scaling its production facilities to handle commercial volumes. But that hasn’t stopped ateliers from taking notice of similar fabric innovations. Over the past several years, a number of brands have experimented with various forms of bio-synthetic fashion, making everything from handbags (Hermès) to long coats (Balenciaga) to bustiers (Stella McCartney) to high-top sneakers (Gucci) from custom-designed animal and plant proteins.
Given the trendsetting influence and attention such high-end brands have in the industry, such take-up is a positive sign for the future of eco-couture. As numerous documentaries have exposed the environmental costs of fashion’s throwaway culture, most consumers say they look forward to fashion that’s friendly to the Earth. After 7,000 years, it’s about time.
