How Leather Coats Are Made

Leather coats are made from animal hides that have been treated in the age old process of leather tanning. There are many complicated steps to go from a raw animal hide to a completed leather coat. The leather manufacturing process is divided into three fundamental sub-processes: preparatory stages, tanning and crusting.

All true leathers will undergo these sub-processes, which are not much different from how leather has been treated for hundreds of years or longer. A further sub-process, surface coating, can be added into the leather process sequence but not all leathers receive surface treatment. There are so many types of leather it is difficult to have a list of operations that all leathers must undergo, but most leather coats are given a surface treatment or several surface treatments.

The preparatory stages are when the hide or skin of the animal is prepared for tanning. Preparatory stages may include: preservation, soaking, liming, unhairing, fleshing, splitting, reliming, deliming, bating, degreasing, frizing, bleaching, pickling and depickling. Each of these steps is an effort to make the animal skin ready for a more finished look, and usually takes place in a large leather tannery plant. Hair, impurities, and other problems are removed at this stage and the hide is primed to become a fine leather coat.

Tanning, perhaps the most important and well known aspect of leatherwork, is when the skin fibers are stabilized to be resistant to bacterial attack, remain flexible on drying, and show an increase in thermal stability. Without tanning, the animal skin would ultimately break down and not be the lasting material that we know as genuine leather. Tanning processes include: penetration and fixation, which makes the leather ready to be cut and sewn into a leather coat.

Crusting is when the hide or skin is thinned, retanned and lubricated. This is the point when an animal skin is made to be even in texture and thickness, either a durable thick skin or a more high end thinner skin like lambskin.

Often a coloring operation is included in the crusting sub-process of leather making, which can give fashion leather a variety of color options. The chemicals added during crusting have to be fixed in place. The culmination of the crusting sub-process is the drying and softening operations. Crusting may include the following operations: wetting back, sammying, splitting, shaving, rechroming neutralisation, retanning, dyeing, fatliquoring, filling, stuffing, stripping, whitening, fixation, setting, drying, conditioning, milling, staking and buffing.

For some leathers a surface coating is then applied. Tanners refer to this as finishing. Finishing operations may include: oiling, brushing, padding, impregnation, buffing, spraying, roller coating, curtain coating, polishing, plating, embossing, ironing, and glazing. These processes (or some combination of them) are common when the leather is ultimately going to be made into a fashionable leather coat. In particular, oiling and buffing are common leather finishes before a leather coat is made. Finishing is indeed the most important step for the appearance of a leather coat, ultimately determining what the coat will look like.