Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.07.2010, Síða 47

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35
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 10 — 2010
“To see something so unattractive as a
raw fish skin turn into nice leather—it’s a
beautiful process,” Gunnsteinn Björns-
son said as he led me through his fac-
tory. Gunnsteinn is the general manager
and part owner of Atlantic Leathers, the
fish leather maker behind many of Ice-
land’s fashion designers.
The company’s warehouse in Sauðárkrókur,
Northern Iceland, is where the magic happens.
This is where an initially unappealing by-product
of Iceland’s fishing industry is scraped, scrubbed,
and massaged into luxurious exotic leather.
The building is cavernous—a 4.000 square me-
tre warehouse—and it smells like chemicals plus
a hint of gaminess. The tannery makes leather
from salmon, wolffish, cod, and perch, catering to
companies locally and worldwide. Gunnsteinn es-
timates that half of Reykjavík designers buy from
his factory, including Steinunn clothing and Gastu
jewellery designs. “We have a lot of very small
customers,” Gunnsteinn said.
Making the sea change
Though Icelanders have been using fish skin for
centuries, Atlantic Leathers only recently went
through the transition from making lamb leather
to making fish leather. But now, fish leather com-
prises about 70 percent of Atlantic Leathers’ rev-
enue from what they tan.
Luckily for them, fish skin is easy to come by.
The tannery’s previous owners went out of busi-
ness partly because the decreasing sheep popula-
tion in Iceland forced them to reduce their leather
production. Gunnsteinn was a worker in the fac-
tory at the time. When the old company went un-
der, he and Sigriður Káradóttir, Atlantic Leathers’
export manager and Gunnsteinn’s wife, decided to
buy in.
Today Atlantic Leathers still does business in
sheep leather, as evidenced by the multitudes of
soft skins piled on pallets on the factory floor, but
now the company is also tapping a cheap, plenti-
ful, and formerly wasted resource. Up to 200.000
fish skins come through the factory per year, all
from Iceland.
Fish: the super skin
Making fish leather wasn’t so easy at first, said
Gunnsteinn. Fish skin has been used in Iceland for
centuries, but only by those who couldn’t afford
lamb leather. The untanned skin was considered
poorer quality because it was brittle and disinte-
grated easily. People would measure the distance
over a mountain, Gunnsteinn joked, by counting
how many pairs of fish skin shoes you would wear
out walking over it. But modern methods have
turned the tables.
Modern tanning techniques take advantage
of fish skin’s unique microscopic cross-hatched
pattern. “When it’s tanned,” Gunnsteinn says, “it’s
stronger than most skin you can get.” Ten times
stronger than lamb leather of the same thickness,
to be precise.
When they started tanning fish skins, Atlantic
Leathers had to develop low temperature tanning
techniques, because their fish are native to the
cold North Atlantic, therefore they are adapted
to temperatures below 20 degrees C. If you heat
fish skin above 30 degrees, the temperature lamb
skin is normally tanned at, the collagen protein
that makes up the fish skin dissolves. Too bad
Gunnsteinn found that out the hard way, he told
me with a laugh. He accidentally stewed “thou-
sands of litres of fish soup,” on his first try at fish
tanning.
Making shiny happy fish skin
Raw fish skin is hardly something you’d want to
wear. It takes many steps to turn it into a high-end
fashion product. Gunnsteinn receives the frozen
fish skins from fishing plants, and defrosts them
as leather orders come in. When they’re defrosted,
Gunnsteinn explained, “We scrape off the rest of
the flesh inside the skin, so it will be open for the
tanning agent to penetrate into it.” He showed me
the sinister but essential scraping machine.
After they’re scraped, the skins are washed,
the scales removed in large turning drums, and
the natural fats are cleaned out. When the skins
have been treated with salts and acids, to stabi-
lize their pH, they’re ready for tanning. Gunnsteinn
adds tanning agents to the skins to fill in the col-
lagen, to make the skins soft, and to help with the
dying process later.
He takes me to an alcove full of vats of fully
tanned, undyed salmon skins kept in water. They
are stored here until someone orders a particu-
lar colour—all finished skins are made-to-order.
Gunnsteinn takes out a skin and stretches it so I
can see the texture, the geometrical pockets left
behind when the fish scales are removed. This
pattern becomes the unique fish leather texture
customers covet.
The alchemist’s inner sanctum
Gunnsteinn guided me through the factory to a
small, machine-crowded room he called the labo-
ratory, “the most important place in the tannery.”
The laboratory is where new tanning methods are
born. A breathing mask hung beside the sink, and
from the room’s odour, I could see why—the place
was a chemical playground. One wall was lined
with mysterious blue plastic bottles. He said that
most contained dyes and a few were filled with
vegetable-based oils to replace the natural fats in
the leather, an essential step to soften the skins.
Gunnsteinn needed to develop a special process
for replacing the fats in fish skin. It needs different
fats than sheep skin does.
The laboratory is also where Gunnsteinn
works when he’s making dyes to match the colour
swatches companies send him. Several high-end
fashion companies buy from Atlantic Leathers, in-
cluding Dior, Prada, Ferragamo, Fendi, and Donna
Karan. “Normally they want their own colour,”
Gunnsteinn said, adding that there is no other
tannery the high end fashion brands use for fish
leather. “We have a special product.”
I sense that the laboratory is where Gunnsteinn
takes most pride in his work, engineering the co-
lours and textures that make the skin of a fish into
a thing of beauty. Developing colours is “lots of
fun,” he told me. “There is nothing to stop you from
making colours in fish leathers, except imagina-
tion.” The factory can even put special finishing
touches on the leathers, making them shiny or
metallic. “We can do all kinds of crazy stuff,” he
told me proudly.
Travel | Leather And Lace
Leather Alchemists
Atlantic Leathers transfigures smelly old fish skins into items of luxury
STEPHANIE ORFORD
STEPHANIE ORFORD
“Several high-end fashion
companies buy from Atlantic
Leathers, including Dior, Prada,
Ferragamo, Fendi, and Donna
Karan. Normally they want
their own colour” — Gunnsteinn
Björnsson.