Beauty Is Skin From The Deep
Angling for attention on the beach? Don't turn your nose up at an itsy-bitsy,teeny-weeny,mellow,salmon-skin bikini, says Helen Stiles.
Question? How many Mackerel skins does it take to make a mini skirt? Answer: around twenty. Depending on the size of the bottom and the size of the catch. You may think this a crazy question but for a long as man has been catching fish he has been wearing it in one form or another.
Fish skin is far more versatile than cow leather. It can be made as strong as crocodile leather, plaited and layered like a fine yarn, flattened and rolled to look like tissue paper. Its versatility allows designers to capture it fragile, iridescent nature and yet it has the strength and durability of a man made fibre There is definitely something sensual. And beautiful about fish leather and our ancestors were well aware of its sartorial appeal. As Martin Raymond, lifestyle analyst at the London College of Fashion, explains, fishy fashion was big in the middle ages. "Fish leather was used to make accessories and jackets and salmon skin, in particular, was used to make the outer lining of shoes - they even had a kind of pop sock made of salmon skin.
Certainly no self-respecting 15th century man about town would be seen without a fine pair of fish skin gauntlets, while ladies who lunched would clutch a fish skin handbag.
But how would did smell ?Not very good. Now, however, tanning processes not only turn old fish into desirable material but they also remove that piscatorial pong that would make you unacceptable in polite society. But its not an easy process, John Fitzgerald of the Irish Salmon Skin Leather Company discovered when he embarked on a career in fish leather.
John was running a bar/restaurant in Caherdaniel, Co Kerry but had a keen interest in fish and fishing. Looking at all the salmon skins that ended up in the kitchen bin at the end of a day, he decided to find a way of curing them. He came over to the British school of leather technology at University College, Northampton, in a van worth £50, stuffed to the gills with 4500 fish skins, among them black sole, ray, skate, and salmon, to see if he could turn them into leather.
Wanting to learn how to tan fishskin was an unusual request, but the school rose to the challenge. " My mentors, Richard Graves an Kevin Macnamara, helped me throughout my project, demonstrating, what some would say was true care in the community, while others thought I was mad", he confessed. Mad or not, they told him it could be done.
"I worked at it until I ran out of skins and money. " Three years and thousands of salmon skins later John has finally cracked it with a secret formula that yields a supple yet strong leather with not a hint of fishy whiff.
His salmon skins now cover the menus in the award winning Chapter One restaurant in Dublin and top Irish 'haute couture' designer Jen Kelly(Riverdance) has used John's skins to make a bustier and mini skirt. By altering the tanning process, John has been able to produce both a natural and glossed leather in a variety of colours and has launched his products under the brand name MARA, the Irish word for sea.
"We've made coats and boots, watch straps and dog collars and I have two designers working on shoes. I already produce hand bags and evening bags in salmon skin and I even had one man from Scotland call to ask me to upholster his sports car."
And the skins that John uses are by-products of the fishing industry in Ireland, skins which otherwise would be thrown away.
From: THE FIELD est. 1853
Helen Stiles, Oct 2001
