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Suede is one of those things. It is not a material of crisp, unblemished flawlessness; it is a material of texture, of depth, of a life lived. Its name comes to us from the French phrase *gants de Suède*, which simply means “gloves from Sweden.” In the 19th century, Swedish artisans developed a method for using the soft, pliable underside of the hide, creating gloves with an unmatched suppleness.

The material itself is not the exterior skin of an animal, which we know as traditional leather.

The confusion around suede is part of its character. It is often mistaken for nubuck, but they are entirely different propositions.

Nubuck is top-grain leather—the strong, outer layer of the hide—that has been sanded to create a slight nap.

Pigskin is tougher, with a shorter nap. The suede used by Geronimo and other Piikani and Apache peoples was often brain-tanned deerskin, a laborious process yielding a material that was both incredibly soft and resilient enough for the plains.
It is a material with a thousand small variations, a secret language spoken in texture.

To love suede is to be a certain kind of person.

It is for someone who finds beauty in the process of care, who doesn't mind owning a special little brush with brass and nylon bristles to revive a flattened nap.
It is for the person who sees a faint water spot not as a disaster, but as a marker of a day when they were caught, laughing, in an unexpected downpour.
This is the material of vintage jackets that smell faintly of someone else's perfume, of upholstery in a Lancia Flaminia from the 1960s, of the wall coverings in a Parisian apartment where sound is gently absorbed.

On the runway, designers like Dries Van Noten have used it for its ability to absorb color in a deeply saturated, matte way, creating a visual quiet that shiny leather cannot achieve.
It doesn't reflect light; it drinks it.

Yet, its impracticality is its most honest trait. Suede has no armor. It is a commitment.

It chronicles its own journey, from the dark line where a strap has rubbed for years to the faint smudge from a hurried commute. A forgotten raspberry stain. The dark ring where a wet umbrella leaned.
It asks you to be present. You cannot be careless with it, or rather, you can, but it will remember and report your carelessness back to you.

This is not the material for someone who wants their accessories to remain in a state of suspended animation, looking forever as they did on the shelf. This is for the archivist, the sentimentalist, the person who understands that an object’s value can be found in its scars.

Suede is the sanded underside.
• The Brain-Tanning Method Historically, some of the most resilient and soft suedes, like those used by North American indigenous peoples, were produced through brain tanning, a process using an emulsifying agent made from the animal's brain.