Leather jewellery, an alternate to mainstream
Leather makes for an interesting option of material for jewellery. Leather can be colourful, flexible and easily formed into a variety of shapes. It’s also light and easy to wear. So it makes for an ideal material to create a diverse set of looks and moods that can appeal to a variety of women.
One of the things that our forefathers learnt early on was to create leather from the skins of animals. So leather jewellery has been around for thousands of years. The oldest found jewellery goes back to over 1300 years BC from Egypt. Leather does degrade so it is an achievement to discover such ancient jewellery made from this material. But what we know about ancient times is that all the various civilisations – ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and the Incas have created and used leather.
Leather primarily comes from cattle, goats and pigskins. But more exotic leather is from kangaroos, crocodiles and alligators and snakes. Many of these are either banned or rejected by different parts of the world.
Today, leather jewellery makers tend to be artisans and so you mostly find them in quirky market stalls and online stores. Some of the interesting leather jewellery we have come across include:
- Novica – connects artisans to socially conscious customers and have an interesting variety of leather jewellery.
- Tanya Igic – We’ve profiled her jewellery, so take a look at that article
Artisans on Etsy who do leather jewellery we find distinctive are
It would be easy to write off leather jewellery as something for teenagers and young women, but take a look at some of the jewellery we’ve featured and you realise that leather can be beautiful with it’s variety of colours and shapes and styles. Do you know of interesting leather jewellery that we should feature here? Drop us a line at editor [at]zayah.co.uk.