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Leather, with Glenn Adamson
20 Plays2 years ago
This week host Benjamin Miller welcomes back an old friend: Glenn Adamson, ANTIQUES contributor and now editor of Material Intelligence, an online quarterly published by the Chipstone Foundation. The upcoming issue of the journal concerns leather, one of the oldest as well as the commonest human-worked materials. From its sartorial to industrial applications (machine belts—sorry American bison), and its prevalence in sadomasochistic paraphernalia, Ben and Glenn cover the gamut.
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Transcript
Introduction to Glenn Adamson and 'Material Intelligence'
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Curious Objects brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:13
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:15
Speaker
And you are in for a treat today.
00:00:17
Speaker
And so am I, because I'm welcoming back to the podcast one of my all time favorite guests, Glenn Adamson, to talk about something that, well, you probably use every day.
00:00:29
Speaker
And at the same time, it's one of the oldest crafts in the world.
00:00:32
Speaker
And it's also the medium for some of the most beautiful and intricate objects.
00:00:36
Speaker
And it's used in bookbinding, but also in bondage, which we are absolutely going to talk about later.
00:00:42
Speaker
But first, I want to introduce Glenn.
Exploration of Leather's Historical and Cultural Significance
00:00:44
Speaker
And if you haven't heard his past appearances on Curious Objects about the California woodworker, Art Carpenter, or about Glenn's fantastic book, Craft in American History, you should absolutely add those episodes to your queue.
00:00:58
Speaker
But Glenn Adamson is a curator and historian and writer whose resume is frankly too long for us to get into here.
00:01:05
Speaker
But vis-a-vis today's conversation, he's the editor of a new journal called Material Intelligence.
00:01:10
Speaker
It's a quarterly online magazine about materials and crafts and how they interact with culture and society and history.
00:01:18
Speaker
So right up my alley.
00:01:20
Speaker
And I hope yours too.
00:01:21
Speaker
And it's a fantastic premise because each issue is themed around a material like copper or linen or obsidian.
00:01:29
Speaker
And the new issue coming out just days after this podcast is all about leather.
00:01:34
Speaker
From its origins in prehistory and Norse mythology and the hidden wealth of Siberia to Indiana Jones and of course Michael Jackson.
00:01:44
Speaker
And I'm not kidding.
00:01:45
Speaker
One of your essays was actually written by the costume designer for Thriller.
00:01:49
Speaker
That's right.
00:01:50
Speaker
Deborah Landis, who I got to know when she curated the Hollywood costume exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
00:01:56
Speaker
And she did this fantastic short piece for us, kind of going through a gallop pace of cinematic references and ultimately music video as well, talking about how leather has been used in costume for screen.
00:02:09
Speaker
Okay, but before we get too deep into this, I just want to give a reminder to check out images of what we talked about today by going to themagazineantique.com slash podcast, or of course, by reading this issue of Material Intelligence when it's released on September 15th.
00:02:25
Speaker
Is that right?
00:02:26
Speaker
That's right.
00:02:26
Speaker
Right in the middle of the month.
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, so that's materialintelligencemag.org.
Leather in Fashion and Historical Contexts
00:02:31
Speaker
And if there's anything you want to tell me, you can email me at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com, as always.
00:02:39
Speaker
Now, I think leather is one of those materials that is so ubiquitous that paradoxically it's easy to completely overlook.
00:02:49
Speaker
So I want to start with what's maybe a trivial little exercise.
00:02:55
Speaker
Can we just list what you actually make out of leather?
00:02:58
Speaker
So, you know, for me off the bat, it's, it's, you know, shoes and belts and jackets and a lot of apparel, I guess.
00:03:06
Speaker
Help me out here, Glenn.
00:03:08
Speaker
That's right.
00:03:09
Speaker
So a lot of people will immediately associate it with what's on our bodies.
00:03:15
Speaker
And of course, that is very important, but it has many, many other applications, of course, as well.
00:03:20
Speaker
One that springs to mind for me that you might not think of initially is the belts, not that go around your waist, but that were used in machines for...
00:03:30
Speaker
greater part of the Industrial Revolution.
00:03:31
Speaker
So right from the late 18th century into the 19th.
00:03:35
Speaker
And the sourcing for those belts has a lot to do, for example, with the destruction of the buffalo herds that used to roam across the plains.
00:03:43
Speaker
That was one reason that they were slaughtered in such great numbers.
00:03:47
Speaker
And if you didn't have that animal resource, you wouldn't have had the Industrial Revolution.
00:03:51
Speaker
So it's a great example of the way that
00:03:54
Speaker
When you start looking into materials, the story that you think you know, story of steam and steel, turns out to be a story about hides and blood.
00:04:02
Speaker
Wow.
00:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, and well, and of course I mentioned bookbinding.
00:04:07
Speaker
There is also chagrin, a material that we think of in association with a lot of 18th, 19th century decorative arts, you know, in boxes and caddies and their weapons and armor, whips, but now we're getting back into bondage.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:28
Speaker
But it's an incredibly versatile and, as I said, ubiquitous material.
00:04:34
Speaker
But I wonder if for you there's a single iconic or paradigmatic leather object.
00:04:42
Speaker
Well, before I answer that question, maybe I should just say I'm glad you mentioned chagrin because it points to the flexibility of leather, not just as a material, but also as a piece of terminology, because basically what we mean by leather is tanned skins.
00:04:58
Speaker
But chagrin is a ray skin or a shark skin rather than, let's say, a cow skin or a sheep skin, which is something we might be more useful or more used to.
00:05:08
Speaker
And it just shows you what a gigantic universe leather is.
00:05:11
Speaker
It's not something that appears on the periodic table.
00:05:14
Speaker
Obviously, it's a very varied, very varied topic.
00:05:20
Speaker
It brings you into lots and lots of different areas.
00:05:23
Speaker
Yeah.
The Tanning Process and Ethical Considerations
00:05:26
Speaker
But at any rate, I think if I were to reach for just one particular point,
00:05:33
Speaker
sort of iconic object it would maybe be the patent leather shoe because it brings up so many different things to do with the material uh it's so called because there actually was a patent taken out for it again in the 19th century and i think most people will know this but what we're talking about is that very shiny uh almost mirror polished leather that seems to speak to a certain kind of refinement uh also a kind of denial of dirt and you know the
00:06:04
Speaker
whatever's going to be on the ground, you know, puddles, mud, all the rest of it.
00:06:07
Speaker
And the patent leather shoe seems to exemplify the idea of staying apart from all that, keeping yourself clean.
00:06:14
Speaker
So it's very much a class indicator, an indicator of wealth, of course.
00:06:19
Speaker
And what's also very interesting about it is that it's so different from the skin from which it's made, so highly processed.
00:06:28
Speaker
And what that points to for me is the way that
00:06:32
Speaker
Leather mediates between ourselves and the natural environment.
00:06:37
Speaker
You might compare it to the way that we buy meat in the store packaged in plastic.
00:06:43
Speaker
And leather does that, but in a more permanent and more sensuous way.
00:06:48
Speaker
And it does get into lots of
00:06:50
Speaker
questions about why we find leather so attractive, the hidden stories of leather and how it's processed, how noxious and disgusting that story really is.
00:07:01
Speaker
And just tells you a lot about the way that leather distances us from the world, not just conceptually, but also practically.
00:07:09
Speaker
Of course, that's one of the main reasons that we do wear it on our skin is to protect ourselves almost like a kind of armor.
00:07:14
Speaker
Now you've got me thinking about patent leather.
00:07:16
Speaker
What was the patent actually for?
00:07:19
Speaker
The patent was for the process of transmuting the leather into that black, shiny material.
00:07:25
Speaker
So it's a combination of linseed oil and other materials that would have been rubbed into the leather to make it reflective, to give it that kind of uncanny surface.
00:07:37
Speaker
Curiously enough, it also is a key material for the jazz age and for early black and white
00:07:44
Speaker
films.
00:07:44
Speaker
And so there's also a very interesting story to tell about the relationship between patent leather and let's say chrome or glass, other materials that are highly reflective and were powerful when you put them on black and white film.
00:07:57
Speaker
Okay.
00:07:58
Speaker
So I think it's clear enough by now that leather is everywhere.
00:08:03
Speaker
What makes it worth thinking about?
00:08:04
Speaker
Why did you want to do an issue of material intelligence all about it?
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, let me back up for just a second and say that the journal itself, which comes out, as you said, four times a year, and looks at one material each time, has been an incredible experience for us to edit, because it really brings you into these different, deep stories about whole universes that congregate around specific materials.
00:08:30
Speaker
And so, you know, oak brings you to the forest, but also to
00:08:34
Speaker
whiskey making, boat building.
00:08:37
Speaker
Obsidian brings you to the knowledge of early Americans, you know, who occupied the American continent centuries ago and used obsidian as their school stone, although it's technically not a stone.
00:08:51
Speaker
It's, of course, a volcanic glass.
00:08:54
Speaker
Leather is interesting for us because it was the first material we took up that is of animal origin rather than mineral or vegetal origin or indeed synthetic, as we have done one issue on nylon, which is our first synthetic material.
00:09:10
Speaker
So what's interesting to me about leather, and I think what will interest a lot of our listeners too, is the ethical considerations that swirl around it.
00:09:19
Speaker
So it's not inert.
00:09:22
Speaker
The origin of it isn't a living, breathing, feeling animal that must be slaughtered, perhaps for other reasons, for meat or for other resourcing purposes.
00:09:32
Speaker
But that skin has been on another level.
00:09:35
Speaker
being.
00:09:36
Speaker
And then when we place it on our own, we're, as I said earlier, creating some kind of implicit relationship that's not entirely acknowledged.
00:09:45
Speaker
So it's
Leather's Ancient History and Mythological Roles
00:09:46
Speaker
highly, highly charged.
00:09:48
Speaker
And that tends to inform a lot of the narratives that are laid over it, whether those are sexual in nature.
00:09:54
Speaker
You've mentioned bondage a couple of times.
00:09:56
Speaker
That's maybe a good way to approach that topic.
00:09:58
Speaker
But also when we think about the charisma of a film star like Harrison Ford or, you know, Michael Jackson and thriller, there's clearly a lot of energy going on that has to do with the origins of the leather in the skin of an animal.
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:13
Speaker
Well, so speaking of origins, I, I want us to sort of start at the beginning.
00:10:17
Speaker
Um, how, how old is leather?
00:10:21
Speaker
Well, leather would be one of the most ancient of all materials.
00:10:27
Speaker
And like most materials, the origin of its craftsmanship, its workmanship is lost to us.
00:10:35
Speaker
It's obviously biodegradable.
00:10:37
Speaker
So unlike ceramic, which is so amazing in providing information to us because it doesn't decay in the ground,
00:10:47
Speaker
Surely, leather objects were made for many, many centuries before we have access to information about them.
00:10:54
Speaker
But there are prehistoric examples of leather shoes, particularly, which are made of a fairly tough tan hide that come down to us from all different parts of the world.
00:11:04
Speaker
And even before there are shoes, you would have carrying containers, you know, thongs, you might call them.
00:11:10
Speaker
So straps and shoes.
00:11:13
Speaker
linear leather elements, which of course would also be used in many parts of the world today.
00:11:19
Speaker
So it's an amazing story of trans-historical continuity, again, like so many other material stories.
00:11:27
Speaker
So the oldest surviving examples of leather are shoes.
00:11:31
Speaker
You think because shoes were made to be tough, not necessarily because those are the first objects made in leather.
00:11:38
Speaker
Well, I think that and also the burial context that you would have.
00:11:41
Speaker
So people would have been buried in them.
00:11:43
Speaker
And so you would have a slightly more, a slightly higher chance of having them preserved than let's say in a trash heap.
00:11:50
Speaker
Right.
00:11:51
Speaker
So what, what is it that makes leather so good for making shoes?
00:11:55
Speaker
Well, it is its toughness.
00:11:56
Speaker
So the tanning process, and I'm not really enough of a chemist to give you a great breakdown of how this works, but essentially the tanning process involves subjecting the hide to various chemicals, which reorganize the proteins in the leather and thereby seal the surface of the hide.
00:12:18
Speaker
And what that means is that it's
00:12:20
Speaker
water, water, um, impermeable, which in turn means that it won't decay nearly as rapidly and also is very tough in use.
00:12:29
Speaker
So whether it is on your shoes or whether it's, you know, used on, um, the, on the, on the deck of a boat for various, um, purposes, you know, for,
00:12:40
Speaker
preserving food, what have you, it has a kind of, as I said earlier, it serves as a kind of armor for what's ever inside it, whether that's a human body or whether it's something else that you're storing.
00:12:51
Speaker
Does it have other properties that are useful as a craft material in other contexts?
00:12:58
Speaker
Yes, it does.
00:12:58
Speaker
If you think about leather upholstery, for example, leather stretches, much like some textiles do.
00:13:08
Speaker
And of course, this is also important for shoemakers.
00:13:11
Speaker
There's a certain kind of tension and tension.
00:13:14
Speaker
flexibility and combination that you get with leather that again is very unusual and to have that in combination with a very tough material that also can be made in many different ways in other words different thicknesses different types of finish for ornamental purposes it just gives you a huge range of options as a craftsperson almost no matter what application you're thinking about
00:13:41
Speaker
Okay, so I mentioned Norse mythology at the top, and I wonder if you could tell us how leather comes up in that realm.
00:13:50
Speaker
Yeah, this was one of the things that I most enjoyed when I was doing research for the issue.
00:13:56
Speaker
So it turns
Economic Impact of Leather in History
00:13:57
Speaker
out that the son of Thor...
00:14:00
Speaker
was supposedly a shoemaker.
00:14:03
Speaker
And at the end of the world, Ragnarok, this figure who is called Vidar the Silent, steps on the jaw of Fenrir, the great wolf, and rips the beast in two.
00:14:13
Speaker
And the quotation from the Prose Edda, which is a 13th century Icelandic Norse myth compilation, essentially, about the story says,
00:14:24
Speaker
Quote, he wears on that foot the shoe that has been assembled through the ages by collecting the extra pieces that people cut away from the toes and heels when fashioning their shoes.
00:14:33
Speaker
So in other words, he's somehow able to reach across time and space and gather together all those offcuts from all the different leather workers and cobblers.
00:14:42
Speaker
lived through time and put them into one shoe and that's what he uses to step on the jaw of the great wolf and tear it asunder so I thought that was an amazing story it's sort of like the leather version of the tooth fairy exactly although maybe a little bit more suitable for the next Marvel film yes I can't wait for that spinoff
00:15:04
Speaker
Sorry, I was just going to say that that also that story also gets to the idea of toughness that we've been talking about, talking about, you know, the fact that he places his shoe or boot right against the fangs of the wolf and it becomes almost fanized is very interesting to me.
00:15:19
Speaker
And it reminds you that, of course,
00:15:22
Speaker
Leather has been very important as a military material.
00:15:25
Speaker
You know, anybody who's played Dungeons and Dragons like I did when I was a kid will remember there's such a thing as leather armor.
00:15:31
Speaker
And that is, of course, a real historical thing.
00:15:34
Speaker
Leather scabbards and leather.
00:15:37
Speaker
It's a key material for, of course, horsemanship, saddles and bridles and so on.
00:15:44
Speaker
So leather is also, although you wouldn't necessarily think of it in the same way that you would with steel, leather has also been one of the most important wartime materials throughout history.
00:15:54
Speaker
So I want to stick around in the north for a little while and talk about Russia and the colonization of Siberia.
00:16:03
Speaker
Because this is the subject of one of the essays in this issue, that there's an indigenous population in Siberia that I think it's often overlooked amongst dialogue about Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians and Inuits and so on.
00:16:19
Speaker
What story does leather tell us about the history of Native Siberians?
00:16:24
Speaker
Yes, this I thought was absolutely fascinating.
00:16:26
Speaker
It's a contribution from Rose Kamara, who's actually at the Chipstone Foundation, which publishes material intelligence.
00:16:32
Speaker
And so she tells the story of the Russian conquest of Siberia, probably not a story of imperialism that most American readers are aware of.
00:16:41
Speaker
But one of the main economic tools that they used in that violent intercession into indigenous land was called the yasak, which is a fur tax or skin tax.
00:16:54
Speaker
And this was collected forcibly from indigenous peoples in the Siberian regions, such as the Chukchi and the Venkchi Kanti.
00:17:05
Speaker
And the money was, of course, important when they went on to sell those furs and skins.
00:17:12
Speaker
But it was also a means of purposefully disrupting the itinerant lifestyle of these peoples who were very dependent on the reindeer herds for their own livelihood.
00:17:22
Speaker
And what's fascinating is that Rose then connects this story to a famous discovery of a shipwreck that was filled with these hides, these Russia leather hides that were hand in Russia and then exported.
00:17:40
Speaker
In this case, the ship was on Russia.
00:17:42
Speaker
on its way from St.
00:17:43
Speaker
Petersburg to Genoa and sank in 1786.
00:17:45
Speaker
Those were discovered and excavated from Plymouth Sound.
00:17:53
Speaker
And then the leather was taken from the hold from the bottom of the ocean and actually used to reupholster a lot of 18th century
00:18:00
Speaker
chairs and other furniture, I first encountered one of these historic retro leather hides at the Yale University Art Gallery.
00:18:07
Speaker
This was years ago, but I still remember to this day, the intense smell of this material, which had been under the water and it's sealed out for 200 years and still had this kind of pepory smell from the tanning solutions that were used on it.
00:18:25
Speaker
at the end of the 18th century.
00:18:26
Speaker
So this is a kind of famous story in decorative art circles.
00:18:30
Speaker
But until Rose came along to do this research, nobody had ever connected it to the oppression of this indigenous population, which is very parallel, of course, to what's happening in America at the same time.
00:18:42
Speaker
Thank God for
Traditional Leatherworking vs. Modern Alternatives
00:18:43
Speaker
shipwrecks, right?
00:18:44
Speaker
Such a crucial tool for archaeology.
00:18:47
Speaker
Yeah, not so good for the original people involved, but for those of us who are historians and archaeologists, we can only be grateful whenever one of those ships went down.
00:18:56
Speaker
So we've talked about how ancient tanning and leatherworking is, but can you tell me how leather workers today might do things differently from, I don't know, say the Vikings?
00:19:09
Speaker
Well, sure.
00:19:10
Speaker
And maybe the most important thing there is the introduction of synthetic leather, of course.
00:19:14
Speaker
So that's not a possibility.
00:19:15
Speaker
It would have existed before the middle of the 20th century.
00:19:19
Speaker
And now you have the choice.
00:19:20
Speaker
Are you going to actually work with leather skin?
00:19:22
Speaker
Are you going to work with an approximation of it?
00:19:25
Speaker
And those
00:19:26
Speaker
Leather skins are getting more and more convincing all the time, of course.
00:19:28
Speaker
There's a lot of debates about the ecological impact of using what is essentially plastic as opposed to hide.
00:19:36
Speaker
You know, some would say some non-vegans, I guess, would say that despite the
00:19:42
Speaker
the suffering of the animal involved.
00:19:45
Speaker
It's
Leather's Cultural Significance in Modern Fashion
00:19:46
Speaker
actually more ecologically sustainable to use animal skins than it is to use plastic simulations.
00:19:51
Speaker
But there's also, of course, just the whole question of branding and style that has come up for leather designers, shoemakers,
00:20:01
Speaker
that's completely different from anything that would have existed before the 20th century.
00:20:06
Speaker
We have a wonderful contribution to the journal by Johans Lacour, who is a Chicago-based shoemaker.
00:20:15
Speaker
And he grew up with Air Jordans and leather jackets, very much part of the hip hop community in Chicago.
00:20:23
Speaker
uh actually learned his trade while imprisoned um and then has made a great career of being a shoe designer and shoemaker um since his release and he wrote this just beautiful um piece for us about the experiences he's had both as a consumer of leather and also a maker of leather and what you really get from that text i think is a sense of the um tremendous investment of imagination
00:20:49
Speaker
and stylistic identity that can reside in these objects.
00:20:55
Speaker
Well, and that's, so I want to talk about the intersection of leatherworking with other crafts because it's so often used in conjunction with other materials.
00:21:08
Speaker
And I mentioned at the top of the show, Shagreen, excuse me, I mentioned at the top of the show, Shagreen, which is,
00:21:17
Speaker
I'm familiar with finding in conjunction with silver, often in boxes or mounts, where it helps to potentially protect an object, but certainly to accentuate it in different aesthetic ways.
00:21:34
Speaker
What other kinds of intersection are there with other areas of craft?
00:21:40
Speaker
Well, sure.
00:21:40
Speaker
Chagrin, again, a great example.
00:21:42
Speaker
You might think about it in the context of a sword hilt, for example.
00:21:45
Speaker
I mean, people, if they had run into it outside the context of French Art Deco furniture, where it does appear quite frequently for boxes and mirrors, jewelry containers, you might have seen it on the hilt of a katana, Japanese katana, where arguably it looks particularly chic.
00:22:03
Speaker
Um, but I guess another, uh, context that I immediately think of would be again in the, um, ornamental trades where you're looking at the decoration of the whole room in leather.
00:22:16
Speaker
And again, we have a really interesting, um,
00:22:20
Speaker
in the issue by Ulinka Rube Black, who's a British-based historian of early modern material culture.
00:22:28
Speaker
And she talks about the use of this, the use of leather wall coverings, essentially, in the Renaissance period, an art form that's very closely related to bookbinding that you mentioned before, but in the context of a
00:22:43
Speaker
stately home would have been a decorative option that would have sat alongside mirrors and of course furniture and textiles and this very kind of rich immersive interior and was absolutely the height of fact in the 16th century.
00:22:59
Speaker
Again, mostly lost to us now because those fashions are long gone, but very, very intriguing and also an aspect of
00:23:08
Speaker
of those interiors that speak to the global tastes of the time, because many of those leather coverings would have had a kind of Ottoman or Eastern facing ornamental style.
00:23:20
Speaker
And of course, the disappearance of those leather wall coverings takes from those interiors something of their cosmopolitanism.
00:23:28
Speaker
So it's really great
Preservation of Leather Artifacts and Historical Context
00:23:29
Speaker
to be able to reinscribe that into the stories of these houses.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:33
Speaker
And I have to say, you have an image of one of these panels in the issue and it's really spectacular.
00:23:39
Speaker
I mean, we think of leather, I think by default as this sort of dull, earthy sepia tone, but it certainly doesn't have to be that way.
00:23:49
Speaker
And in the instance of this illustration, I mean, it's absolutely vivid and intricate and engrossing.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, that image for me just opened up all kinds of possibilities.
00:24:03
Speaker
And also, of course, covered with gold and paint.
00:24:06
Speaker
So that's another thing we need to remember is that the leather was a substrate.
00:24:09
Speaker
You know, it wasn't just cool.
00:24:10
Speaker
That was also given this extra surface and rather like the story of tapestry, which people might be more familiar with, you know,
00:24:19
Speaker
leather wall coverings were in fact more expensive than paintings and so now yeah yeah our tendency to value uh you know a renaissance painting as this priceless object and to think of the leather wall coverings as a sort of you know curiosity it was quite the other way around at the time
00:24:38
Speaker
You know, I've actually recently been looking into a process in the silversmithing world, which involves leather, which is equal parts fascinating and horrifying, which is the process of mercury gilding, which is when a gold wash is applied to a piece of silver.
00:24:59
Speaker
It's, you know, the French call it Vermeer.
00:25:02
Speaker
And historically, the way that this was accomplished was by bonding mercury to gold powder and then painting that bonded solution onto the surface of the silver and then firing it in a kiln.
00:25:18
Speaker
And the mercury, of course, vaporizes and is then presumably inhaled by the workers, by the guilders, whose life expectancy was fairly dire.
00:25:30
Speaker
But then the gold remains and bonds with the silver.
00:25:34
Speaker
But to get the mercury and the gold powder to form that bonded solution in the first place,
00:25:42
Speaker
those materials are actually poured into a leather bag, which is then squozing
00:25:50
Speaker
And what happens is that the unbonded mercury actually comes through the pores of the leather.
00:25:56
Speaker
And what remains inside the bag is the mercury that is bonded with the gold.
00:26:00
Speaker
And so that's what you can then paint onto the object.
00:26:05
Speaker
So not a process that I would recommend to listeners, but certainly an interesting use of leather in the metalworking area.
00:26:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's the days before health and safety, right?
00:26:17
Speaker
Exactly.
00:26:19
Speaker
This is just one of many stories that remind us of the hazards of working with leather.
00:26:25
Speaker
In fact, I used to live in an area of London called Southwark.
00:26:30
Speaker
So it's just south of the M, that's the name.
00:26:33
Speaker
And it was the area where all the noctus and dangerous industries would have been conducted.
00:26:38
Speaker
So tanning
00:26:39
Speaker
uh hat making which was also you know we also use mercury in that trade and then uh tanning of leathers tanning of skins and um the you know it was one of the phrase that was put down there you know downwind from the rest of the cities and nobody else would have to smell or think about it and it would have been a horrific experience to work in the 17th or 18th century
00:27:01
Speaker
uh, leather making, uh, facility.
00:27:04
Speaker
But of course that's still true today.
00:27:05
Speaker
You know, again, we easily forget the fact that you have, uh, not only tanneries, but also, uh, what are essentially sweatshops where leather goods are made like soccer balls, uh, spring to mind is an example of that.
00:27:17
Speaker
Um, in places like Bangladesh or elsewhere in the subcontinent, Indian subcontinent.
00:27:22
Speaker
And it does remain a really vital issue of, um, working conditions today.
00:27:31
Speaker
We talked a little about how leather survives through the ages or doesn't, but how many leather artifacts survive from ancient or medieval origins?
00:27:44
Speaker
Well, of course, it's hard to put numbers on it because we don't know what the original quantity was.
00:27:49
Speaker
So guessing the percentage is very difficult.
00:27:52
Speaker
But I'm going to say that it's one of the areas of material culture where we're unusually impoverished in terms of our information.
00:27:59
Speaker
So we do have archaeological remains, as I said, and people will be familiar not only with Viking leather remains, but also perhaps Anglo-Saxon, other English or early English
00:28:10
Speaker
remains.
00:28:12
Speaker
And there's that thing whenever you go to a historical society in Europe, you always see a shoe that's kind of squished flat into a pancake.
00:28:21
Speaker
But there's absolutely no doubt there was a whole universe of leather goods that is lost to us.
00:28:27
Speaker
And the same, of course, is true of other organic materials like wood would be another great example.
00:28:32
Speaker
You know, we can fool ourselves into thinking that people generally ate off ceramics in the medieval and Renaissance and early modern periods.
00:28:39
Speaker
But of course, that's not true.
00:28:40
Speaker
Most of them were eating off wood vessels.
00:28:42
Speaker
It's just that those are all gone.
00:28:44
Speaker
So we have to correct for that.
00:28:47
Speaker
And then even when it comes to the 18th and 19th century, a lot of that leather will be gone in the way that architecture or things made of more durable materials are not.
00:28:58
Speaker
So it is ephemeral, and given that it's, as I originally said, a living substance, the fact that it doesn't hang around that long seems perhaps symbolically poignant.
00:29:12
Speaker
Okay,
Leather in Popular Culture
00:29:13
Speaker
I promised listeners Michael Jackson, so let's give it to them.
00:29:17
Speaker
What did leather do for Thriller?
00:29:20
Speaker
Well, what didn't it do, right?
00:29:22
Speaker
So this is Deborah Landis' contribution that we mentioned earlier.
00:29:27
Speaker
So she was the costume designer for Thriller.
00:29:30
Speaker
The music video was directed by her husband, John Landis, a very prominent actor.
00:29:37
Speaker
prominent director, they had also worked together.
00:29:40
Speaker
John and Deborah had worked together on Blues Brothers and other projects of his.
00:29:44
Speaker
And so when it came time to design the costumes for Thriller,
00:29:49
Speaker
Deborah thought, well, here's this guy that I need to make into the most dynamic presence on screen as I possibly can.
00:29:58
Speaker
But he, you know, literally had the body of a teenager, you know, so slight, so small.
00:30:05
Speaker
And yet the theme of the
00:30:08
Speaker
the theme of the song really demanded something incredibly dramatic.
00:30:12
Speaker
So she basically designed him a superhero costume.
00:30:14
Speaker
And so if you think of that jacket, or if you can't picture it in your mind, just Google it, or go to our pages and you'll see the picture of it.
00:30:22
Speaker
You'll see it has this kind of V-shape with these super high shoulders.
00:30:25
Speaker
Obviously it was the 1980s, so that was the look.
00:30:28
Speaker
And this wonderful, vivid red and black color scheme, constructivist colors, graphic design 101, red and black,
00:30:36
Speaker
the most high impact possible.
00:30:38
Speaker
And it became, of course, immediately iconic in combination with the, you know, the white socks and the loafers and the glove on one hand is probably one, one of the three things that people will first think of when they think of Malcolm Jackson's image.
00:30:53
Speaker
And that all came from her long experience, not just as, as a making a,
00:30:59
Speaker
clothes, but also understanding how clothes would read on screen and sort of support the character arc that was being told in the story.
00:31:08
Speaker
And that, you know, was a huge, huge success.
00:31:11
Speaker
And of course, she also is the woman that designed the costume for Indiana Jones, who is also very leather intensive.
00:31:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:19
Speaker
So what is it that makes leather so sexy?
00:31:23
Speaker
Or I mean, why is it associated with sexual kink?
00:31:26
Speaker
Why is it just plain cool?
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's the kind of key question, right?
00:31:32
Speaker
And of course, it's not just those references.
00:31:34
Speaker
It's also, if you look back further in time, you think about Merlin Brando on the motorcycle and the bomber jackets of a generation before that.
00:31:45
Speaker
I think it's probably to do with the fact that it is a human wearing an animal.
00:31:52
Speaker
So it's a skin on skin.
00:31:54
Speaker
So there's a kind of analogy there to something...
00:31:58
Speaker
primordial or, you know, fundamental might be a good word, you know, body on body.
00:32:05
Speaker
That's true.
00:32:06
Speaker
And wearing fur, I suppose, carries some of the same connotations, or at least it can.
00:32:11
Speaker
Exactly.
00:32:11
Speaker
And there's, of course, a certain degree of fetishism built around that material as well.
00:32:16
Speaker
But I think I wouldn't know about that.
00:32:19
Speaker
But on an even deeper level, you just have to listen to Velvet Underground a little bit more, Ben.
00:32:24
Speaker
But on a deeper level, the relationship, as I said, right at the beginning between life and death seems to be...
00:32:35
Speaker
at stake there.
00:32:36
Speaker
So here I'm getting a little more speculative than we usually do with material intelligence.
00:32:41
Speaker
But I do wonder whether there's something about the preservation of a once living skin that gives us some sense of control or a kind of fantasy of immortality even or youth that might inform our subconscious psychological response to leather.
00:33:00
Speaker
There's certainly a possibility.
Future of 'Material Intelligence' and Episode Credits
00:33:04
Speaker
Well, thanks so much, Glenn.
00:33:05
Speaker
I'm always delighted to have an excuse to bring you on the show.
00:33:09
Speaker
Can you give us a hint about the materials you're going to have in upcoming issues?
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:33:14
Speaker
So this December, we're going to be releasing our issue on terracotta.
00:33:18
Speaker
That will be our first ceramic related issue.
00:33:22
Speaker
Fascinating look at the global phenomenon of basically simple earthenware and what it's used for from architecture to architecture.
00:33:35
Speaker
uh tabletops and then we're going to be looking at paper uh and then also next year we're looking at um sand at steel and at feathers and that takes us through the end of 2024 and after that we'll we'll have to let you know
00:33:52
Speaker
Again, the website is materialintelligencemag.org.
00:33:56
Speaker
The leather issue comes out on September 15th.
00:33:59
Speaker
And by the way, the design and illustration for these issues is really beautiful.
00:34:05
Speaker
So do go check that out.
00:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for mentioning that.
00:34:09
Speaker
That's our in-house artist, Wynne Patterson, who does all the design and all the illustrations by hand.
00:34:15
Speaker
And it really is a beautiful thing that she's made.
00:34:17
Speaker
We are looking into getting it printed up, by the way.
00:34:20
Speaker
You know, that's something we've always wanted to do, given it's called interior.
00:34:23
Speaker
Oh, that's exciting.
00:34:24
Speaker
Yeah, so that's another thing people can look out for.
00:34:26
Speaker
But for now, it's available all online for free.
00:34:29
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:34:30
Speaker
Well, thank you, Glenn.
00:34:31
Speaker
We'll have to get you back around here sometime soon.
00:34:34
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be my pleasure.
00:34:35
Speaker
Thanks, Ben.
00:34:38
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
00:34:44
Speaker
Our digital media and editorial associate is Sierra Holt.
00:34:48
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:34:50
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.