Unsung icons: Leather Our writer’s ode to the humble hide

COMEDIAN DAVID SMIEDT TAKES AN IRREVERENT, BUT APPRECIATIVE, LOOK AT THE CLASSIC THINGS THAT DEFINE YOU-BEAUT AUSSIE LIFE

Leather has been a central part of Australian life for millennia. Centuries before colonisation, Indigenous people worked the flesh of emus into magnificent cloaks with designs etched using oyster shells, bone and stone tools. The First Fleet, and those who came after, brought with them tanning skills: not so much in their complexions, but in their leather goods. The result was material that served you from mangrove to mountains. It was known to weather immaculately, could be repurposed when needed and was crafted by hand – hipster heaven. And you can be sure they existed back then – just look at all those beards and beehives.

Point is, leather has been in our homes for a very long time. For a while, we drank the Kool-Aid and decided that too much leather was never enough. In an ’80s splurge, which saw more of the stuff than a Mardi Gras parade, we summarily decided that our sofas covered in fabric would simply no longer do. Urged on by shouty commercials featuring business owners – themselves leathery – we went hell for you-know-what. It was the sectional revolution.

Not only did these gargantuan three, four and more seaters come in colours that only sometimes occurred in nature, they also featured that most luxurious of inbuilt additions: namely, the lever-operated footrest. What had we been doing all these years with our feet not nudging the horizontal? Better still, the leather sofa was equally at home in family spaces, the reception areas of Botox pioneers and the most covetable bachelor pads.

Even Joey and Chandler of Friends had matching versions.

When it came to collectible pieces, leather was in a beautifully cracked league of its own. Before the era when a replica Eames or a Wegner was just a mouse click away, the scarce real deals were invariably sheeted in aged cow flesh that bore the fissures and the cracks of bottoms unknown and gatherings as sophisticated as yours would undoubtedly be, once this was in your living room.

But this verdigris cost puh-lenty, as did new leather sofas, which, despite manufacturing innovations that lowered their prices, were also still quite the investment. For the many of us who could not afford a leather statement, an accent was within reach

– especially in the office. Few items set off a dark-stained desk better than an inlay in British racing green. It spoke of a serious space where important drafts were considered and cajoled and deals ratified, and it bore the ghostly shapes of the thousands of letters it cushioned. Add a bunch of hidebound books with gilt-edged pages on a shelf behind – why of course I’ve read Anna Karenina – and you could practically get away with calling what was once a mere spare bedroom “the library”.

Leather also had its place in the bedroom. If you think that will lead to some tawdry single entendre, you don’t know this columnist. Rather than being on the occupants, the boudoir leather was instead affixed to the bedhead with buttons. Totes fancy, like a five-star hotel whose designer was going for “corporate chic”. Due to its intrinsic nature, the leather would age along with the bed’s occupants and reflect their various proclivities, by which we mean, of course, reading their favourite home decor magazine.

“FEW ITEMS SET OFF A dark-stained DESK BETTER THAN AN INLAY IN BRITISH RACING GREEN, ESPECIALLY IN THE OFFICE”

Leather went with almost everything: shabby chic, southwestern desert, country cool, your olds’ castaways. Which brings us back to the couches. An entire generation of young Australians inherited the leather sofas that their upgrading parents offloaded or guilted them into accepting. And here’s the thing, they – both the couches and the parents – persisted for so long that fashion eventually changed around them.

They endured, despite the fact that you stuck to them in summer and they could cause ripples of gooseflesh during accidental winter contact. So all hail the sofa – the leather sofa. Just the place to ponder a substance ingrained in our nation’s history. You may even want to put your feet up. Allow us to help.