Skip to main content
·

Real Leather Stay Different 2026: Tal Zohar’s Tennis Jacket Wins

Real Leather Stay Different 2026, the student competition of the Leather and Hide Council of America, goes to Tal Zohar of Shenkar College for a leather tennis jacket. The industry funds it because cattle hides have lost most of their value.

Eva Winterer

Tal Zohar of Shenkar College in Israel has won Real Leather Stay Different 2026, the student design competition of the Leather and Hide Council of America. The final of the sixth edition took place at the Jim Thompson House in Bangkok on 29 October. Every entry had to use at least 50 per cent cowhide by area and only natural materials. Zohar’s collection, Neo-Heritage Tennis Club, draws on the 1920s and 1970s, with a jacket quilted like the strings of a racquet.

● In brief

The winners. Siang-Ying Lu of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago won accessories with Playscape, a bag cut from one circle of surplus leather. Roscha Dinler of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg won footwear, as he did in 2024, with shoes formed on the last from offcuts and joined in a way that recalls kintsugi.

The waste. About 15 per cent of US cattle hides did not reach a tannery in 2024, against 7 per cent in 2023, according to the council. Worldwide, up to 40 per cent of hides are lost, about 134 million a year.

The price. A hide once made up 6 to 8 per cent of the value of a slaughtered animal; in April 2020 it was about 1 per cent. US exports of hides and skins fell from $2.3bn in 2013 to $876m in 2022.

The schools. Students from more than 100 colleges entered. Shenkar students also won in 2022 and 2024, and former finalists now work at Dior, Loewe, Louboutin and New Balance.

A model walks the runway in Tal Zohar’s quilted white leather jacket and pleated leather skirt with a wooden racquet, the Neo-Heritage Tennis Club that won Real Leather Stay Different 2026
Tal Zohar’s Neo-Heritage Tennis Club at the Real Leather Stay Different 2026 final in Bangkok. Courtesy of Real Leather. Stay Different.

● Why it matters

The competition is how the industry reaches the designers who will choose materials for the next 20 years. Kerry Brozyna, president of the council, said that “reaching designers and giving them the opportunity to learn about, and work with, leather is critical.”

Offcuts have become the brief. Two of the three category winners built their pieces from surplus leather, and the rules exclude exotic skins and fur. Christopher Koerber of Hugo Boss Ticino, on the jury, praised Zohar’s “stunning design, commercial application and sustainable delivery.”

Thailand, which hosted the final, has about 200 tanneries and 12,000 workers, and its leather output fell 40 per cent in 2025. In Europe the University of Northampton closed its tannery in July 2025, while Portugal’s shoemakers are betting on skill. The students in Bangkok will decide where that capacity finds work.

Sources