Beyond What You Eat: Vegan Leather as Part of Your Sustainable Lifestyle
by Ollie Cox
Renoon reached out to Annick from Immaculate Vegan, to discuss what alternatives to animal leather are available to us as consumers and how a cruelty-free lifestyle does not mean a sacrifice in your style. Immaculate Vegan is leading the ‘vegan revolution’, making sure vegan fashion can be ‘as sophisticated, on-trend and desirable as its non-vegan counterpart’ through ‘making use of innovative alternatives to leather, wool, silk, fur, down and other animal products’.
What do you think of when you think of leather? Do durability and luxury come to mind? The process of making leather durable comes from the way that it is treated with harmful chemicals and not the actual animal skin itself. The leather industry has had thousands of years to implant these misconceptions into the consumer’s mind and is one of the reasons that leather goods are so popular today.
The most harmful type of vegan leather and the one that is often used as a way of showing it to be a lesser material than animal leather is polyvinyl chloride or PVC. However, animal leather is twice as harmful as this, and with this shocking fact in mind, I encourage you to take a look at the alternatives that are available to us now as a sustainable consumer.
Annick from Immaculate Vegan told Renoon of the promising alternatives that are becoming available to us, these included apple skin leather, mango leather and cactus leather (an exciting new addition to the market). Apple skin leather is more durable than animal leather and offers more robust resistance to scratching and water and embodies the very idea of plant-based sustainable living; taking what we consume to fuel our bodies and using the waste in the construction of our clothes.
One of the problems that everyone who has tried to find a plant-based leather shoe alternative will have come across is the dilemma of finding shoes that excite you and you enjoy adding to your wardrobe. This is where platforms such as Renoon and Immaculate Vegan can help you to search from a pool of brands to find options so suit your style.
The demand for this kind of new kind of leather has been brought to the attention of many bigger brands, notably Adidas. If you are a lover of the three stripes they have made many of their classic silhouettes vegan such as the Samba, Superstar and Stan Smith.
Vegan leather is here to stay and finding an alternative has never been easier.
#renoon #reambassador
