What a decade of Muscat humidity does to calfskin

Muscat is generous to people and hard on leather.

Salt air is hygroscopic: it pulls moisture into the fibre and holds it there, so the leather never fully dries between summers. The fibre relaxes, the grain slackens, and a bag that held its shape for years in Geneva starts to slump in two seasons here.

The lining tells the truth first

Before we read the leather we read the lining. Foxing at the seams, a tide-line under the zip tape, hardware bloom — each one dates the exposure more honestly than the hide does, because nobody polishes a lining.

The remedy is never a product; it is a sequence: dry slowly, clean, feed, and only then recolour.