The Mischievous Vegan: The Leather-Pleather Debate0

By Malloreigh

The leather dilemma is a contentious one for vegans. Many new vegans, upon “making the switch,” worry whether they’re expected to throw away their pre-vegan leather items – belts, shoes, jackets – and buy vegan alternatives. Many old vegans, myself included, break vegan belt after vegan belt and wonder whether we’re expected to keep buying crappy vinyl each year until the day we die.

Isn’t that wasteful? Doesn’t that go against the spirit of veganism? Yes, probably, and creating more trash is just the cherry on the top of the consumer culture cupcake. Furthermore, vinyl, as a synthetic substance, won’t – common sense informs us – biodegrade as easily as an organic like leather would. So if vegans are such environmentalists, what’s the solution?

This is a really difficult issue. I can’t make a blanket statement about how all vegans feel about this, because we all choose to adhere to a vegan lifestyle for different reasons; for example, for an animal rights vegan, the fact that leather is animal hide means it is not to be consumed. Period. One wants to avoid economically supporting the leather industry. As a response to this, some fashionable vegans choose to wear secondhand leather, while others feel that this is unacceptable.

For an environmental vegan, it would certainly be better to keep the leather you already owned and wear it until it is worn out, at which point a decision would have to be made about the lowest-impact product to use. However, wearing leather can be seen as promoting it – inspiring others to purchase it by how fashionably hot you are in it, for example – so even wearing leather you already own can be poo-pooed by some.

In that vein, however, wearing a jacket that looks like leather – a vinyl faux leather, for example – is just as bad. Another thing to consider, of course, is whether sweatshop labor was involved in the sewing of that $35 H&M pleather jacket – because human rights are important, too.

There is no easy answer. Also, the vegan community is so rife with “veganer-than-thou” high-horse riders that one can never really be doing enough.

Oh, and – in case you were under the impression that Western consumer culture had something in common with the mythical American Indians in that “we use every part of the cow” – cattle are purpose-bred. The cow that becomes meat is a different cow than the one whose skin becomes leather. But both of their bodies are probably used for the production of gelatin.

The more you know!