The Leather Forecast

Recently, a lot of designers have been presenting animal-cruelty-free collections to appeal to the growing market of vegetarian fashionistas.

So what.

Sounds pretty foolproof, if you’d ask me.

But is it really? Whereas animals are getting the good end of the deal on this environmental movement, are the costs beginning to outweigh the benefits?

First let’s look at some of the different types of vegan leather:

Pleather- This term was coined by Amy Bach of Mills Clothing, who needed a way to market a new form of plastic-based faux leather. Though the material is much lighter than leather, it won’t be able to decompose as quickly.

Poromeric Leather- This describes a type of synthetic leather created by layering polyurethane or other plastic coating on top of a polyester fiber base.

Koskin- Translated from Swedish, Koskinn literally means “cow skin”. Koskin is a form of fake leather, usually put on laptop and phone cases, that is made to look and feel authentic.

Leatherette- This textile is created by covering a fabric layer with a thin layer of PVC. Leatherette is often found in clothing, books, and car seat covers. This fabric is more durable, but not very breathable and can be extremely flammable.

Pretty dry stuff. But all those long “poly” words are significant. These synthetic substances could be even less eco-friendly than real leather in the grand scheme of things. They go through extensive factory processing with loads of chemicals that probably aren’t helping our smog-ridden cities.

The future of humanity?

It’s a choice we have to make as trend connoisseurs. Does one buy the faux leather motorcycle jacket to save the animals, the real leather motorcycle jacket to save the atmosphere, or no jacket at all? Because what’s the point of wearing a motorcycle jacket if it’s not leather? Or what’s the point in wearing any jacket that’s not leather? I should just start a leather/faux leather revolution and we’ll all just walk around looking like Trinity from The Matrix. That or I should teleport back to the fifties and join a motorcycle gang. Decisions, decisions. 

Documentary Reflection

Documentary Reflection

            After going back and forth between several ideas, my documentary group decided to make a film about thrift stores. Over the past few years, more young people have taken an interest in thrift store clothing. At the local Value Village, where shirts are sold anywhere from $1.99 to $9.99, the low prices aren’t always the main appeal among the younger audiences. Of course, students on a tight budget are known to be shameless bargain-seekers, but people are also drawn into “thrifting” because of the unique styles and high quality garments. Even people in the upper middle financial bracket are skipping designer stores and going instead to scour the racks at the thrift store to find trendy vintage clothing. Our group was curious to seek out the appeal of shopping at the thrift store by interviewing students, customers, and fashion bloggers. I think it was a solid idea to start with this broad scope and narrow down our topic as we learned more from filming. I know Mr. Mayo was very skeptical of our idea to begin with, but it worked out well to have a lot of freedom in the planning process.

            We started out the filming process by sending small groups to Value Village to collect B-roll footage. We ended up trying on outfits and interviewing customers as well while we were there. I learned that we probably should have planned our filming schedule a little bit better because all of our clips were really disorganized and hard to put together. During the production, we found out about a site called Thrift Store Runway, a fashion contest sites that judges the best thrifted outfits under $50. Mr. Mayo gave us the idea to sumbit a few of our looks to the website. We didn’t win any of the prizes for the month, but we were still able to feature our experience in the documentary as well as interview a couple of expert judges from the site. In addition to that footage, we did a lot of interviews with students at Blair.

            By the time we finished uploading all of our footage, we had 90 minutes of film to go through. That was probably the most challenging part of this project for our group because the computers were slow and it took a long enough time to watch each clip and erase what we weren’t going to use. It took a few weeks, but we were eventually able to cut down our footage to fit within the time constraints. If I went back to remake the documentary, I would make a better storyboard and stick to it. Our group got really off track and we ended up with a good product, but we should have started out with a stronger foundation. For next year, I think the documentaries should be slightly longer, maybe 5-7 minutes. Three minutes was only enough to scratch the surface of our topic and there was so much more that could have been developed if the time frame was expanded. I think we should have had more checkpoints during the process at well so we could meet with Mr. Mayo and discuss where we were in the process and get feedback.

            Overall, I was really pleased with the final product. It was a really long process and I feel relieved to be done. It was really stressful especially towards the end when we were trying to make the due date with our final film. I hope that MCPS improves the computer system for next year because that was the stem of a lot of our technical problems. I didn’t know much about interviewing people or editing in final cut before this project and this was a really important milestone in my CAP career.