Luxury leather
Yohance Lacour
Yohance Joseph Lacour (American), Florence Flask Pack - Dark Knight, 2023, Courtesy of the artist.
My first appreciation of leather came through gym shoes: Air Jordans, Air Revolutions, Nike Conventions, Air Force Ones. There was a long time, longer than for most of my peers, when I couldn’t buy these things. I wore canvas Chuck Taylors. My father did eventually buy me a pair of Avia 860s, yellow, black and white, and that was quite a thing for me. But Jordans were still out of our league.
I also remember a jacket a friend of mine had, when I was nineteen. I want to say it was Banana Republic, and it had a beautiful rust color, a grain to it, and a soft hand. Sneaker leather was very smooth, firm; this jacket was a different thing. There was something more than just fashionable about it. It was a statement. Today you have clothes emblazoned with logos, supposedly communicating something about quality and status. But for me, it was the material itself that said it. Nobody knew what that jacket was but me, but when you looked at it you could see a richness, in both senses of the word. Just yesterday I ran across a quote: “money talks, but wealth whispers.”
Yohance Joseph Lacour (American), Sorbet Low - Autumn (Scarlet/Acorn), 2023, Grain and full aniline leather, Courtesy of the artist.
Hip hop did a lot to teach our generation about style and fashion: what was expensive and what wasn’t. it was the bridge to a culture that was, up until then, largely distant from us, white and affluent. I can remember in high school, you wanted a leather Coach belt, and you kept the tag on and made sure that it hung down so everybody saw it. The flyest girls had a Coach purse. For a while those were the only leather accessories any of us owned. But we looked at Eric B. and Rakim’s Follow the Leader album, the things Dapper Dan made: they were puffy and ornate. Those big, glossy leather jackets, you’d almost always see them in tandem with the rope gold chains, and drop-top BMWs and Benzes. They all went hand in hand. You have to remember hip hop’s relationship with street hustling. The drug dealers were our icons, our Wall Street tycoons. Rappers wanted to look like them. And leather was part of the uniform.
I started working with leather in 2009, when I first walked into the Hobbycraft program at Duluth Federal Prison Camp. I was actually afraid to, because it was so expensive. The prison tacked on a 25% tax on everything we bought – it was really a cash cow, not designed to help us, and it’s not like the prison provided any tutelage. You learned from other guys who were there, either by watching or being fortunate to have somebody teach you. They made bags, so I made bags too. For my first one I stole a cream-colored blanket from the laundry and made a duffel out of it, with feet and a handle in leather – if I just used it for accents, I was less likely to waste the material. This is why you prototype.
I realized, working with leather, it ain’t nothing to play with. This is a serious material. And I quickly connected that with what it is. Think about your own skin, and how valuable that is. You want to protect it. It’s a precious, priceless material. Humans actually have very similar skin, we’re so basic – but it’s still an identifier. We’ve been reduced to a foolish way of thinking by white supremacy, and unfortunately a lot of us identify the worth of the next person by the color of their skin. With leather it’s similar. Alligator is much more recognizably valuable than calfskin, which is still more valuable than certain cow skins.
And then treatment also affects value. Think about skin care products: you’ve got Vaseline, Neutrogena, Clinique. Rihanna has Fenty. Some people have a glow, based on internal heath and external care. Again that correlates to leather. Properly raised animals will have richer, healthier coats and skins. Different amounts of care in the cleaning, salting, tanning, and finishing and salting processes, which enrich the hides and create a sheen. If you think about it, if it’s genuine leather, even mass-produced pieces are “one of ones.” It’s got its thumbprint, its DNA. It’s still alive, in a sense.
Yohance Joseph Lacour (American), Bespoke bag, 2023, Mixed leathers, Courtesy of the artist.
I come from a waste-not want-not culture. That was true for me with food as a youngster, and it was true in prison, because leather was so hard to come by and so expensive. So we used our scraps. The most affordable way to buy leather was in scrap bags – I never had a full hide of leather until I left prison. As a designer, today, I’m looking to use scraps in a way that you’d never know they were scraps. That’s where the art comes into it. Bags that do more than just hold things, that say something.
Most of the guys I was locked up with in Duluth – it was a predominantly white prison. A lot of people were making Harley Davidson bags, they’d tool the logo on there. And they’d have one or two patterns everyone would share, so most of the bags looked alike. That’s definitely what I didn’t want. I wanted to make bags I hadn’t seen, make leather do things that we don’t necessarily see it do. Bags are containers – what else is a container? You are a container. An airplane is a container. One of my first non-traditional bags was a cone, and I made a pyramid bag – buildings are also containers. My thing was about geometrical shapes and form. Leather can be soft and strong, move with you, that’s the nature of skin. Like a solid water, without being ice. But I wanted to turn it into ice, and make a solid thing that’s luxurious – if you can create a design like that with a beautiful material, how is that not art?
Yohance Joseph Lacour (American), Bespoke bag, 2023, Courtesy of the artist.
