Cuir de poisson

A skin the food industry throws away. Salmon and perch hides come off the line as waste; tanned, they become a leather with a grain no land animal produces — a fine, hard scale pattern that catches light in rows rather than across a field.

It arrives in small panels, and that constraint decides how we use it. Never a whole jacket; always a placement — a yoke, a cuff, a facing, a pocket bag you only find with your hand.

It is stronger along the grain than its thinness suggests, and it takes dye more deeply than anything else on the table.