Horse Leather

You buy the thing that is worse on day one than everything sitting beside it, and you are usually right, and you are unbearable about it for the first month. Horse leather leaves the box a shade darker than the swatch, shiny where it should be matte, stiff across the vamp. Six months of your hands and it goes soft in the four places you actually touch, and nowhere else.

What you call patience is sometimes avoidance. You will carry a bag with a failing strap for a year rather than make a decision, then call the delay taste. Horse leather is wrong for a person who needs to look finished by April, and wrong for a week of rain nobody planned for. It takes a mark and it keeps the mark.

The compensation is that nobody can borrow your look, because it is made out of your habits.