![]() He estimates its true worth is actually around $160 (£133), taking into account all materials used and the cost of labour. In a recent video, Volkan takes apart an Yves Saint Laurent bag which retails at $1,690 (£1,403). So, clearly, that’s not the reason one bag might easily cost ten times more than another. Take Hermes, which has its own tanneries - allowing the heritage leather brand to choose top-quality hides and also control the tanning process.īut even the very best leather, he says, would still only cost around double the price of a decent leather used by an affordable, mid-market brand - say, £10 per square foot instead of £5. ‘They can’t tell by looking at it, so they assume that if it’s expensive, it’s good quality.’ Of course, high-fashion brands often do use the very best materials. ‘People don’t know what constitutes great leather and what doesn’t,’ he explains. Soon he was chopping up bags from all sorts of designer names - and going viral. He was dismayed to discover that the main body of the bag wasn’t even made of leather, but far cheaper canvas. On a whim, he purchased a briefcase for £1,310, then took it apart to assess the craftsmanship. ‘But when I saw the prices, I became curious about how the handbags were manufactured.’ ‘I’d never been into a Louis Vuitton store,’ he shrugs. His bag-burning career began in 2021 with a visit to Louis Vuitton with his wife. What Volkan wants us to understand is just how much we are paying for those ‘extras’. and has his own accessories brand, Pegai. ![]() Born in Turkey, Volkan’s family owned a tannery, and he started working with leather at the age of 11. Those numbers are based on serious insider knowledge. Or the Bottega Veneta handbag that cost £2,076, but which Volkan declared to be worth only £207. There are some shocking revelations - like the £995 Chanel purse which he estimated was worth just £75 in leather, other materials and labour costs. It might sound like sacrilege, but it’s the only way Volkan Yilmaz can discover precisely how a bag is made and what materials are used.Īnd it makes compulsive viewing: he’s got 755,000 followers on his TikTok channel, and his videos have been liked seven million times. One leather craftsman is on a mission to find out, using some drastic methods: cutting up pricey designer handbags, pouring harsh chemical acetone on the expensive leather and then setting the remains alight. There’s no status symbol quite like the designer handbag, but have you ever wondered what really makes one so much more expensive than its High Street lookalike?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |