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Leathersellers’ Review 2024–2025
“The price tag often blocks students from using leather, but it’s also not knowing the right kind to get.”
Birmingham City University – another of the UK’s premier creative hubs – also benefitted from this year’s Surplus Leather allocation, some of which found its way to a series of specialist leather working masterclasses that form part of the Fashion Design BA. The masterclasses aim to bridge the gap between traditional skills and commercial design, providing students with access to leather and hands-on experience of crafting techniques to foster a deeper understanding of its properties and sustainability. The classes were the brainchild of Senior Lecturer Joseph Turvey – a seasoned menswear designer who established his own namesake label – and Visiting Lecturer and leather goods designer Lauren Broxton, who was raised in nearby Walsall, a place with a rich history of leather crafting stretching back four centuries. “The price tag often blocks students from using leather, but it’s also not knowing the right kind to get. With the Surplus donation we could take it to the Technology Office, get it under the microscope to look at its properties, identify it and understand what each one would do [to use it effectively],” explains Broxton, who also had the support of leather designer and Leatherseller Yusuf Osman with planning the masterclass curriculum and delivering lectures. “Gaining that understanding of the processes and how it got there has made the students actually respect it more,” she adds. “We started this course because many students outside of London would never have the chance to be exposed to these qualities and the level of finishing finesse of luxury leather. It’s about what it means to make something with purpose and intention for that,” says Turvey. ‘The New Heritage’, the brief given to students, encouraged them to explore their own background and identity through their leatherwork. For Kasey Cornwell the resilience of leather fitted the concept of the brief by expressing her trans identity and experience. “I wanted to make something that shows the strength of the community, which is why I chose to make armour,” she explains of her project called ‘Borrowed Heritage’. “Leather is tough. It deals with what you put against it. You actively have to hammer down the seams – I’ve always felt a bit hammered down. I relate to the idea that matter how much you batter it, something beautiful can come out of it.” Like Broxton, Ahmed Khider hails from the leather town
of Walsall, and it was his roots there that made him return to working with the material after studying psychology and biology. Khider’s exceptional collection of vegetable-tanned leather goods is crafted using laser cutting to create stencil- like perforations that reference traditional Arabic art. “I love the luxurious feel of leather – particularly suede and nubuck. I like how precise you have to be with it and it works well with laser-cutting, which is also very precise,” says Khider, who plans to use his skills to launch his own luxury leather goods brand informed by artisanal techniques. “Having access to this material and the specialist equipment has been a big opportunity.” Rohan Scott, from Wolverhampton, studied textiles and fine art before enrolling on the masterclass at BCU. His fascination with garment draping in Renaissance art informs the aesthetic of his jackets and corsets, while his leather bags feature braided handles in a reference to Scott’s Jamaican heritage. “I’ve always been drawn to the way leather looks and the way it ages and the fact that you can do so many things with it, by mixing up different weights, processes and types. I wanted to see how I could play around and manipulate it. The course taught me to be more explorative,” says Scott, who used a combination of Japanese split bovine leather, lambskin and vegetable-tanned leather from the Surplus donation to achieve the draped and sculptural forms in his pieces. Evolutionary inheritance was the stimulus for Sean Pajillero’s collection of architectural bags, which take inspiration from biped evolution and the movement of the human body in dance and sport. “I tried to correlate this to a bag design that incorporates a lot of movement,” explains Pajarillo. Having access to the donated leather took the pressure off the financial commitment to the material and allowed him to focus on experimenting and realise which specific leather he needed for his concept. “I initially worked with a veg-tan leather, but it was too hard for the bag I wanted to design – I needed something softer and gravitated towards nubuck and materials with a more natural drop,” he explains. Molly Waterfield, from Leicester, drew on her hometown’s industrial and multicultural heritage for her bags. Waterfield based the forms of her designs on the city’s industrial buildings and embellished them with handmade flowers
Left: Birmingham City University student Rohan Scott
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