Why luxury brands bet on bags made of everything from apples to cacti
Would you pay £350 for a bag made from scraps of leather swept up from a factory floor?
The American fashion house Coach is betting on it as a new concept to lure the next generation of luxury consumers. This week it launched Coachtopia, a sub-brand that focuses on circular craft and features a variety of bags made from leather that was originally destined for landfill.
Twenty years ago, the most desirable “it bags” were made from rare and exotic animal skins such as a crocodile Hermès Birkin, which fetched six-figure sums. Fast forward to 2023 and there’s been a sharp paradigm shift with a plethora of leather alternatives and a trend for recycling and upcycling existing animal leather. Price points have also dropped with the sweet spot hovering around the £200 mark.
Telfar’s vegan shopping bag dubbed the “Bushwick Birkin”,thanks to its popularity in New York kickstarted the trend. While still expensive, they aren’t extortionate. These “it bags” are less about flaunting about how much money you’ve got and more about humble bragging that IYKYK.
Last week, Ganni launched a bag made from the waste of orange and cacti farms, and Hermès has experimented with mushroom leather. “Every time you eat an apple, you’re basically eating a handbag,” quipped Stella McCartney after showcasing her latest collection in March, which included bags made from the waste of apples (pictured below) originally grown for juice and jam in northern Italy.
Volkan Yilmaz, a leather expert who deconstructs luxury leather goods to access their quality on his viral TikTok channel under the name Tanner Leatherstein, says the idea of animals such as cows, goats, pigs and sheep being bred just for their leather is a regularly misquoted fact. “It’s a byproduct of
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