Salmon leather - A sustainable alternative for the future

It was in the month of May 2020, at the 16th arrondissement in Paris, that Founder and Creative Director, Nathalie Dionne, opened the doors of Thalie Paris with an audacious idea to make bags with salmon leather co-produced from the food industry in France.

Cutting-edge technology has made salmon leather to be a notable material in the fashion industry. Granted, the use of fish leather for clothing is of antiquity, the fish leather industry has been revived as a sustainable alternative to land animal leather. Salmon leather is thin, retains color greatly, and is long-lasting. The end-product exhibits distinctive colors and reveals delicate finishes.

“Innovation is exciting because it gives us an enormous amount of opportunity,” Nicole Rawling, executive director of the Material Innovation Initiative, told FashionUnited. “Traditional materials are not used because they’re the best for performance or aesthetics,” Rawling explained. “We’ve been using leather, wool and silk for thousands of years, and they started as by-products of food and we used them because they were available and cheap, and we could turn them into clothing. With innovation, we can exceed those biological constraints of the animal. We can increase the performance of our materials.”

Thalie’s Sushi collection offers bags produced from salmon skin food waste in Sushi restaurants in France. The Sushi collection is made of Squama leather; this skin constituent is developed by ICTYOS – a skin manufacturing startup under the LVMH startup network – out of surplus salmon skin in the agri-food industry.

“Salmon skin has a suppleness, and a finesse, it’s less than half a millimeter thick, but with a resistance which is nearly equivalent to cow leather,” stated Benjamin Malatrait, one of the co-founders of ICTYOS. Salmon leather’s strength, flexibility, and softness, together with a comparable texture with snakeskin leather makes it most suitable in performance and aesthetic.

At Thalie Paris, we create daring handbags for women who do not want to compromise on styling and functionality but understand the importance of not over consuming while using available resources.