If I were forced to name a vice, meaning a habit I maintain despite feeling shame about it, I’d have to say, “Leather.” Yes, I buy items secondhand, or I’m given things as a gift, or I buy something on a trip from small artisans that performs double duty as function and keepsake—these are my loopholes. But I also love leather that is derived from animals; I find it irreplaceable in many ways: the durability and the feel, the stretch of a shoe and suppleness of a belt worn over time and the way a bag only looks better the more you use it. 

When I’ve purchased or been given alternatives, they’ve not stood up to regular use: they’ve flaked off; they’ve straight-up broken; they’ve looked obviously cheap. That is because most alternatives are simply plastic. Leather derived from animals is a product of animal agriculture, whether industrial or small-scale, and it is durable, so ideally one does not replace items made from it as frequently. 

I don’t know that I’d necessarily connect the labels “vegan” or “vegetarian” to this: Most human beings are omnivores to various degrees of consumption, and leather is a way of making something lasting from this consumption—for thousands of years—as much as most of us would prefer industrial animal agriculture to end. How we decide to relate to this reality is the question. (“How do we decide to relate to it?” is the question of everything we don’t have the immediate power to change, I suppose.)

Gabrielle Soltis, a bespoke shoemaker based in Detroit who also happens to be a vegetarian, and I talked about our common discomfort with this reality. “In the process of shoemaking, you subject the leather to stretching and compressing,” she tells me, “and all of these forces that, in my experience, vegan leather can't handle because it's plastic.” While she also tries to source vegetable-tanned leather with a transparent supply chain from Europe, it’s not always financially possible.

“I feel like I’m trying to do harm reduction,” she says. “In my process, I am trying to not waste any leather if I can avoid it. My goal is not to waste this and to make things that aren't going to go into a landfill. I try to really hammer home to my students, ‘This was a living creature. Let's not waste it. Let's not treat it with insensitivity.’”