This extraordinary hooded jacket, basically cut like an anorak, displays a chamois tanned buckskin in an almost sumptuous way. This material opulence finds its correlation in Hack’s love of detail. He chooses zippers, snap fasteners, cord stoppers and eyelets made of metal and bolsters them with cowhide. Besides, you find a sturdy cotton twill lining most parts of the jacket, and a sleeve lining made of viscose serge makes it easy to put the anorak on.

Behind Hack Lederware is Christoph Hack, founder and master leatherworker with his own studio in Cologne. For decades, he has been working with a wide variety of leathers, gaining a wealth of experience that flows into the design of his garments. For example, Hack uses exclusively open-pored leather from Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia to craft durable, functional clothing and understated accessories for us. The pieces, made from cowhide, horsehide, and deerskin, bear traces of the animals’ lives, such as insect bites or thorn tears. Their patina—which develops through movement and frequent wear—is expressly desired, as it demonstrates that the leather garment is allowed to age gracefully. It is precisely through this natural aging process that Hack’s jackets acquire their unique “character.” They are manufactured at Hack’s headquarters in Cologne and at a partner facility in Poland.

The chamois tanning of buckskin is one of those old tanning methods that produce leather of unrivalled beauty and durability. Chamois tanned buckskin is soft, warm, almost woolly to the touch and temperature-balancing. When the tanners work animal fats and train oil into the skin, the protein fibres of the skin transform into leather fibres by oxidation. Following this, the colour is applied by hand in several steps. At the cut edges, the leather still shows at the reverse side the yellow typical of this type of tanning. We obtain the leather from the traditional Saxon tannery Müller in Nossen, founded in 1830.