The Future of Designer Clothing May Well Involve Fish Leather

An ancient practice finds its moment

A fish
There's nothing fishy about this.
Sara Kurfeß/Unsplash

The process of raising and slaughtering cattle for their meat is also how we get a lot of the leather currently sold today. Whether or not leather can be considered a byproduct of the meat industry is up for debate, but there’s clearly a connection between the two practices. But it turns out that cattle aren’t the only creatures where this kind of process applies, and a growing movement within the world of fashion has been exploring just what fish leather is capable of.

A new article by Gia Yetikyel at Smithsonian Magazine spotlights the work of designer Elisa Palomino-Perez. In 2002, she encountered fish leather for the first time, and was impressed with what she saw — something that has persisted in the years since then.

“It was kind of obscure and not many people knew about it, and it had an amazing texture,” she told Smithsonian. “It looked very much like an exotic leather, but it’s a food waste.”

Working with fish leather to create garments and tools might seem like a new practice, but it’s actually something that Indigenous groups across the world — including the Americas, Asia and Scandinavia — have practiced for centuries. It has led Palomino-Perez to create shoes and bags using fish leather as a material and to work to organize fish leather experts across the globe.

Could this initiative be the one that turns a historically-rooted practice into something cutting-edge? Right now, fish leather rests at the place where tradition, technology and sustainability converge — which is an excellent place to be.

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