Remember Level 2 — comparing good leather to other good leather? This is where it gets uncomfortable, because at Level 2 the question everyone wants to ask turns out to be broken.
The question is: which leather is better? Put a rider jacket in Guidi horsehide next to one in Shinki horsehide and ask which leather wins. It feels like a sharp, decisive question. It is actually a malformed one.
Quality Needs a Context
A leather can be superb and still completely wrong for the thing you made from it. Guidi is extraordinary — deep, muted, oily, washed and shrunken into irregular character; it speaks a quiet, avant-garde language. Shinki is also extraordinary — the honest, structured horsehide that the great Japanese reproduction houses build their vintage jackets from. Both are top of their field. They are not competing. They are answering different questions.
A personal aside. Let me step off the path for a moment, because I can't write about Guidi coldly. Guidi and Backlash are two brands I admire and have studied closely for a long time — and the two are fundamentally different from each other, which is part of what makes them so interesting to me. Guidi belongs to a different category altogether from vintage reproduction: restrained, never especially glossy, a deep and muted black, and after washing and wear it shrinks into the irregular contractions that make it so right for avant-garde clothing. It isn't the leather I would reach for to build a vintage rider — it speaks a different language entirely — and I admire it precisely for speaking that language so well. Anyway, back to the point.
Make a vintage motorcycle jacket from Guidi and something will feel slightly off — the leather and the garment are not speaking the same language. Make Guidi-style avant-garde boots from Shinki's structured black and the same dissonance appears from the other direction. Neither leather failed. They were simply asked to be something they were never meant to be.
So the better question — the only useful one — is not "which is better" but "which leather best expresses the character of this garment?" A great leather is one used in the right place. The right hide in the right application is what greatness actually means.
The Absolute, Revisited
This is why the marketing line "the finest leather available" should make you more suspicious, not less. Finest for what? In which garment, treated which way, aging toward what? A claim that refuses context is a claim that has stopped thinking — and it is hoping you'll stop too. (That was Idea 4. You'll keep meeting it.)
You cannot ask "is this good?" until you've asked "good for what?" Once you are standing at Level 2, that is the only question left worth asking.
The Real Simons Leather Series
A four-part introduction to Real Simons' philosophy on leather — how to judge it, how to choose it, where it really comes from, and why it's built to age.
- Part 1 — How to Judge Leather
- Part 2 — There Is No Best Leather, Only the Right One
- Part 3 — Same Hide, Honest Price
- Part 4 — Beauty by Design