How Shoppers Got Tricked By Vegan Leather

If you’ve ever purchased a pair of faux-leather sandals without realizing they were faux, the sandals probably cleared up that misunderstanding for you pretty quickly. Both real and fake leather can shred your feet on first meeting, but the real stuff will eventually stretch, bend, soften, and mold itself to your needs. Faux leather, meanwhile, is more likely to remind you why it has long had the derogatory moniker of pleather. It’s plastic, which doesn’t really break in. In many of plastic’s uses, that’s a feature. In footwear, it’s a skin-sloughing, blister-producing bug.

Pleather has always had some obstacles to full consumer acceptance. Real leather is widely understood as a status symbol, so among shoppers, pleather is known primarily for what it fails to be: rare, luxurious, expensive, convincing, . Its main advantage is being super cheap—a property that ingratiates it to manufacturers looking to cut costs and shoppers looking for bargain-basement prices. But even a couple of steps up the fashion food chain, buyers are harder to convince that pleather is tolerable, let alone desirable. As plastics have successfully slithered into all kinds of clothing, many people who are perfectly happy with a viscose-polyester-blend dress or a partially acrylic wool