Why is leather so expensive?

My reaction was wetting my pants laughing. :smiley:

I don’t need a warning to not do it again.

Almost every assertion in this post is inaccurate. Care to try again?

How could you say something so stupid and ignorant.

It’s actually the Jews fault pigskin is so expensive. :slight_smile:

Besides the expense of processing leather, tanned leather is both a joy and an extreme trial to work with. One wrong punch or cut is enough to ruin that piece enough that it has to be replaced.

You can’t fudge with the darts and pleats to cover the mistake like you can with fabric. Leather requires stronger tools than fabric does. Industrial sewing machines are mostly designed with fabric in mind.

You can’t pile 50 hides together and cut them with a bandsaw like you can with fabric, each piece of leather has a slightly different grain and fabric always has the same weave.

There is also the part about how well leather lasts. I buy new jeans on a regular basis because I’ve worn them out. My chaps are almost 20 years old and they look scuffed, but they are still very serviceable.

I can sure see why more investors would want to put their money into selling me 4 pair of jeans every year than for into the chance of selling me 1 pair of chaps every 10 years.

Quite simply, there are so many applications wherein it is considered superior to any synthetic material. But usually the preparation of the leather, and even the preparation of the final item, requires either a tedious industrial process or skilled manual labor.

I’d say a big contributor is that we now have stricter environmental controls, so the release of e.g. chromium compounds into the biosphere is a leeeetle frowned upon. So controlling that drives up the price.

I think he’s trying to imply that some men make wearing a leather jackets look hot and that some women make leather boots the hottest fashion statement since lace underwear. I think he’s confused though, thinking that this only happens across religious lines.
spinning a truly horrible slander elsewhere just as fast as I can

What a horrifying thought if the cow would know it’s fate by the way it’s hide was shaping up as it grew.

Vegan leather is outrageously pricey due to medical costs inherent in keeping the donor cow alive and comfortable after removal of its hide.

Foreskin’s pretty cheap though.

I thought it was because of the cost of transporting all the way from Vega.

I know some posts are made in jest, but let’s take the jokes against ethnic or religious jokes out of this thread. Feel free to start a joke thread if you wish, but this thread has nothing to do with it.

Manufacturing costs, of course. And there are different grades of leather, especially for furniture, where the difference between full grain, top grain, corrected grain and split grain can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Also, if you’ve got an end product that utilizes large pieces of leather - like a couch - it becomes more difficult to find pieces of leather that big that don’t contain any visible flaws. That’s not the case for, say, a pair of leather gloves.

Where is it all going? Try to find a nice, sturdy pair of leather dress boots without paying a small fortune. Nearly all the other leather footwear the hide is split paper thin. Why are they doing that?

Another thing is the slapdash workmanship. An unfortunate (for consumers) side effect of increasing the standard of living in countries which used to make fine leather products?

Or is it a reflection of the increasingly wide divide between what the common folk can buy vs. what the elites can buy?

Why does leather smell so good today? I don’t even want to know what it use to smell like :frowning:

Leather is expensive because it takes a lot of work to turn cow skin into leather.

Where was the gross part?