Sara Grady and Alice Robinson on making ethical leather.

Material Matters with Grant Gibson

Sara Grady and Alice Robinson co-founded British Pasture Leather in 2020. The duo aim in their own words ‘to link leather with exemplary farming and, in doing so, to redefine leather as an agricultural product’. All of which means creating a new network of systems within the industry. Essentially, the pair are attempting to make the material we buy traceable in the same way food is.

In 2022, they created an exhibition, entitled Leather from British Pastures, during the London Design Festival, which included collaborations with the likes of Mulberry and New Balance, as well as Material Matters favourites, Bill Amberg and Simon Hasan.

More recently, Alice has written a new book, Field Fork Fashion, which charts a bullock’s journey from a field to a series of finished products and dishes – creating her own supply chain in the process.

In this episode we talk about: how most leather is made; issues around the chrome tanning process; how British Pasture Leather is trying to make a difference; increased meat consumption across the globe and why it changes the value of a hide; building a new supply chain; the state of the British tanning industry; producing their material entirely in the UK; redefining quality and embracing imperfection; how leather brought them together; buying a bullock and writing a book.

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