Louis Vuitton and Hermes turn our saltwater crocodiles into high fashion

Australia’s saltwater crocs make the world’s most luxurious handbags. And it’s about conservation too, darling.

TWAM-20150711 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 11 July 2015 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION Model with crocodile handbag. Trench coat by marcs.com, Handbag by Valamoda.com, Boots from Witchery, Bracelet from Pierre Winterfine, Ring from Anglediamonddot.com Pic : Guy Bailey

Paris. Milan. New York. Wangetti. A crocodile farm off the Captain Cook Highway, 40km north of Cairns.

The tender-hearted crocodile farmers of Queensland’s far north can’t bring themselves to name the ­creatures they will one day shoot with a single bullet. The six-hours-old crocodile hatchling crawling across my left hand is testament to exceptional evolutionary design. In rare and precious crocodile skin, which will one day be stripped from his flesh with an air knife and sold to international leather buyers for $600 to $1000, he is the must-have item for every ­foreseeable European fashion season.

He combines refined biological details — a digestive system allowing him to exist without food for a year, a sensory system able to predict climatic changes half a year away, a brain capable of tracking the migratory patterns of prey — with a spacious, functional belly skin stretching beneath a body that grows the length of one-and-a-half family cars, or 20 Birkin bags stacked side-by-side in an Hermès store.

Its distinctive jaw can eat me in two ways: quickly, detaching my head from my neck with ripping teeth up to 9cm long; or slowly, turning me first underwater in its famed death roll, letting me live just long enough to realise the error of my goofy, rule-breaking smile. Something regal about him, something so prestigious and unattainable. I think I’ll call him Louis.

“Nah, we never name ’em, that’s for sure,” says Nick Stevens, manager of the Hartley’s crocodile farm in Wangetti. “Otherwise, we’d never kill ’em.” Nick looks towards a concrete holding pen of maturing saltwater crocodiles. “We have one up there we called Little Stevie Wonder. He’s blind. We can’t shoot him. I keep pointing the finger at the guys, ‘Righto, Brett, you’re doin’ it’. But, nah, can’t do it.”

This sprawling, wild bushland farm has ties back to 1961 and a crocodile farming pioneer named Gary Zillfleisch, who crawled through bushlands across Cape York saving crocodiles in the wild west days of trophy hunting. Zillfleisch struck upon the notion that crocodiles bred in captivity to satisfy a growing market in skins could relieve pressure on the rapidly depleting wild populations of Northern Australia. ­Zillfleisch’s veritable crocodile stud evolved into the Hartley’s Creek Crocodile Farm and, later, Hartley’s Crocodile Adventures, the crocodile tourism and conservation park connected to it.

About 80km southwest of here is the Melaleuca Crocodile Farm in Mareeba, bought in December by French fashion house Hermès. In Innisfail, 88km south of Cairns, is the Johnstone River Crocodile Farm, purchased by French fashion powerhouse Louis Vuitton in 2013. In Gordonvale, just outside Cairns, is the old Cairns Crocodile Farm which locals say Hermès bought in 2012, although an odd air of international high-­fashion intrigue surrounds the place.

“No comment,” says a senior farm staffer.

“That’s mysterious,” I say.

“That’s our policy,” he says.

Policies of mystery. So hot right now.

“It can take three to four crocodiles to make one of our bags so we are now breeding our own crocodiles on our own farms, mainly in ­Australia,” said former Hermès CEO Patrick Thomas at the Reuters Global Luxury Summit in Paris in 2009. “We cannot face demand. We have massive overdemand. The world is not full of crocodiles, except the stock exchange!”

Six years later, there are an estimated 14 commercial crocodile farms across Queensland and the Northern Territory exporting more than $25 million a year in skins to an insatiable international fashion market enamoured with the Australian saltwater crocodile; a market where Parisian, Italian, Chinese and American millionairesses crawl dry-mouthed across agonising year-long stock-drought deserts towards the kind of rare fashion fix that can only be found by storing a $5 antibacterial gel inside a $50,000 handbag made of Crocodylus porosus.

Run, little Louis, run.

“It’s amazing,” says Hartley’s farm manager, Nick Stevens. “We’ll be feeding our [crocodiles] chicken heads one minute and the next we’ll have the directors of Hermès or Louis Vuitton here talking about $50,000 handbags.”

Nick has farmed crocodiles for 30 years. “Back in 1988 I worked in a Darwin croc farm and it was very adventurous,” he says. “Pretty rough and ready. We didn’t have the internet in those days. We had to fly to France and speak to these people. France is where the fashion houses are. It’s an art form to them. They’ve been going to Africa for hundreds of years for skins. Now they come out to us and the market has grown hugely. It used to be very up and down, but now the French are coming in and buying…” – Nick curls his bottom lip in thought — “everything.”

“Five years ago, mate, it just went boom!” says Geoff McClure from Cairns, who has spent 30 years travelling the world consulting on crocodile pen designs and farming production systems. “Hermès produces the skin here, exports it, sends it to France, and they have their own tannery dedicated to saltwater skins. So they’ve value-added all the way from an egg to a product in a shop. That sent shock waves through the industry, internationally.”

Mark MacFadden left crocodile farming when he sold his Johnstone River and Melaleuca businesses to Louis Vuitton and Hermès for prices he won’t disclose, but reports suggest upwards of $2 million. “Farming crocs has always been for the high-end fashion industry,” he says. “The real high end, they all want the porosus. Of the 23 species of crocodile in the world, porosus is the most sought-after. It’s got the best quality skin. It’s what Louis Vuitton and all them want for making the handbags. They’re looking for the best possible skins to make the best possible products and they want A-grade skins with no marks on them.”

Vivid colours, bold but fine scale patterns and malleable skins, each one stamped as complying with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. “Because our conservation credentials are so high, our skins can be imported into any country in the world,” says Professor Grahame Webb, chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Crocodile Specialist Group and chief operator of ­Darwin’s Crocodylus Park specialising in crocodile breeding, production, research and tourism. “If you have a $60,000 handbag the last thing you want is someone coming up and saying, ‘Are you sure that skin’s legal?’ That’s why they’ve invested in farm production in Australia. They can secure a reliable and legal skin supply that can’t be challenged anywhere.”

Hartley’s owner-operator Angela Freeman walks over to a shed where she raises up to 1000 hatchlings a year, from egg incubator to temperature-controlled hatchling tub to concrete holding pen. “Some NT farms are into the 20,000 [hatchling] bracket or more,” she says.

She and her husband, Peter, have created a boutique “zero environmental impact” farm. Recycled water. Recycled sewage systems. Fewer skins, better quality, with production methods that attract increasingly ethical fashion buyers. She’s a passionate wildlife conservationist whose job entails skinning 1000 crocodiles a year.

“How do I reconcile it?” she nods. “If you are going to farm exotic animals you should do so in such a way that it has minimal impact on the environment it’s in, and also farmed ethically, like the overwhelming majority of our farmers do. I’m pragmatic. I’m a realist. My parents were dairy farmers. The reality of the situation is we’re the driest continent on Earth. We have natural resources of crocodiles and kangaroos and I think it’s a question of finding a balance between the natural resources we’ve got here and introduced species that sometimes don’t fit into that natural environment.”

Angela opens the door to an incubator. “We’re only using the eggs that we collect here on site,” she says. “We have breeding pairs of crocodiles and we’re raising them ourselves. A lot of the NT farms use collected eggs from the wild, which is perfectly valid in NT because they’ve got a very robust wild population,” she says.

Angela’s breeding crocodiles lay their eggs in summer, in nests made of hay placed inside enclosures by Nick and his team, who then have the unenviable task of raiding those nests in the presence of protective mothers. “An interesting process in itself,” says Angela.

She opens a door to another room that’s heated to well over 30 degrees. Hatchlings are transferred to this room at 80 days of age, resting in tubs the size of small backyard spa baths under artificial light and in calming warm water. Calm crocs mean clean, undamaged skins. She studies her hatchlings for signs of health. Robust health means flawless skin. Each crocodile scale pattern is unique, like the human fingerprint, which means each LV handbag is unique.

“When you’re looking at up to $50,000 to $70,000 for a handbag, you have to have absolutely perfect skin, unblemished,” Angela says. “It’s the ultimate in custom-made and bespoke fashion. A woman will wait two or three years for a bag because there is such demand, and the workmanship is so meticulous at every step and it’s being produced for them individually. I’m talking about as little as two small pinhead-size pieces of damage and the skin has downgraded on the resale value for the European market.

“What the French are doing now is they put a skin on a light table,” says Geoff McClure. “That light shines up through the skin when they’re grading it and they can see any blemishes. Some scars will show for the rest of a croc’s life, same as in people. You’ve got to be thinking attention to detail from the day it’s born to the day you slaughter it.”

Angela walks to large concrete enclosure lined with smooth blue plastic to protect the precious bellies — belly skins become the bags — of 30 or so young, sunbaking crocs that will grow to 2.5m. “They’re communal, they like to cluster,” she says. “Look at them. Lovely bright, clean skin. Happy-looking crocodiles, a little bit chubby. Which is good. They don’t look gaunt and lean. I know that they’re a reptile but you can tell by the look on their face if they’re unwell.”

One crocodile holds some of this morning’s feed still in his mouth, a hearty plunder of chicken. Diets are meticulously planned. Certain protein diets bring out certain colours in the skin. The number of chicken heads a crocodile has swallowed could mean the difference between Taylor Swift choosing Hermès or LV. These young crocodiles crawl and slide across each other contentedly. Intolerance comes with age and intolerance means cuts and scratches. Soon they’ll be relocated to individual pens.

They’ll be “processed” at about two and a half years old, Angela explains. “It’s done under ethical standards. It sounds a bit nasty but we have an electrocution [device] and they’re stunned and they don’t feel anything so they’re just knocked out. We check the skin. And then they are processed. They’re shot with one bullet which kills them instantly. Then what you do is you get a knife and it goes into the back of the head and you sever the spinal cord. Then we have a hanging system for draining them so that they can be refrigerated.”

Nothing is wasted. The meat is snap-frozen, the back straps of skin become belts. “Then you salt your skins [to draw the moisture out] and roll them up and refrigerate them. You need to make sure they’re not hot. Then your grading people come over and they grade them. You have to measure them and they’re sold on a per centimetre basis from the measurements across the chest. It’s graded according to whether it’s a top grade or lower grade skin and your payment is negotiated from that basis.”

Skins are sent to leather tanneries across the world that vary in levels of expertise and cost. Angela works with Tokyo artisans who undergo 10-year apprenticeships to work with crocodile leather and take between eight and 12 months to produce a single customised handbag. French artisans can spend three years working on a bag. Skins are dyed to client requests, chemically treated, examined for rubbing and rain resistance, and sent to artisan workshops where they are cut, sewn and painstakingly poshed up.

The Marc Jacobs Carolyn crocodile handbag, $30,000-plus: “Separators and extra pockets provide smooth organisation and systematic segregation of contents.” The Gadino bag by Hilde Palladino, $38,000-plus: “Fitted with clasps made of white gold and adorned with 39 high quality white diamonds.” Chanel’s Diamond Forever handbag, $261,000-plus: “Crafted from fine crocodile leather and adorned with 334 diamonds totalling 3.56 carats.”

And on a quiet Sunday in Bond Street, ­London, when the shelves are filled and the store clerks can draw no more air into their fast-beating chests, Victoria Beckham settles on another Hermès Birkin bag.

Taking its name from the Rue des Capucines in Paris, where Louis Vuitton opened his first store in 1854, the Capucines bag is a testament to exceptional leather craftsmanship. In rare and precious crocodile skin, it combines refined details, including a semi-rigid handle secured by jewel-like rings, with a spacious, functional shape. Its distinctive flap can be worn in two ways: outside to reveal the outline of a monogram flower, or inside to show the LV initials. $58,000.

— From Louis Vuitton’s website

“What’s the use of having a second one? You only need one and that busts your arm; they’re bloody heavy. I’m going to have an operation for tendinitis in the shoulder”

— Actress Jane Birkin on the bag she inspired in 1981 when, seated next to then Hermès chief executive Jean-Louis Dumas, she conveyed her struggles to find a decent leather weekend bag.

“Why?” I ask Angela. She understands the question, dwells on it for a moment. I mean, philosophically, why? As in, what if I was spying on Earth from Mars and my super telescope zoomed in on several busy Frenchmen fashioning handbags from Australian saltwater crocodiles? As in, one big, fat, cultural “WTF?”

“Human beings are fascinated with things that eat them,” she shrugs. She thinks some more. “We had the suppression of affluence,” she says. “We had the GFC and affluent people were still affluent but they were not able to express that because there was a period in which you had to look like you were poverty-stricken even if you weren’t. It just wasn’t the right thing to do to have any bling, to be out there. People still bought crocodile but they took it to private parties. But professionals with money now want to show it. This goes in line and fits into that whole consumer trend. Diamonds, sports cars, and you must have a crocodile skin bag.”

Why? Because of Kanye West. Because of capitalism. Because of diamond-encrusted teeth. Because of desire. Because of emptiness. Because my super Mars telescope could just as easily zoom out and find every answer I could ever need in the dual-moon planet of Kim ­Kardashian’s bare arse.

“It’s a safe bet,” says McClure. “After the GFC, demand did not suffer. In fact, in Hong Kong, people were lining up out in the street to get into the Hermès store to purchase product. The staff were letting customers in in threes. Some of these handbags, like the Birkin handbag, can sell for $30,000, and there was a year-long waiting list. That was in the GFC.

“Backing it all up is Chinese tourism and the middle classes expanding exponentially. If you’ve got 200 million millionaires out there, that’s a big market.”

John Lever runs the Koorana Crocodile Farm near Rockhampton, a family farm with 4500 crocodiles — and a plan to expand up to 10,000. Various high-end international fashion houses have been offering to buy it for the past two decades. “The answer’s ‘no’,” John says. “When my wife and I pass on I’d like to think my children continue it on for their families.

“Companies like Louis Vuitton and Hermès are the price-setters of the international price for saltwater crocodiles. They determine the price. Now that they own the resource in ­Australia, my greatest fear is that the price may be compromised somehow. The critical thing to emphasise here is that it comes down to a resource supply chain. If you don’t have access to eggs, you don’t have an industry. They’re getting in on the ground floor, not only buying farms but buying eggs because along with the farms goes the permit to collect eggs.”

John began crocodile farming in 1981, when 400 skins a year was “enough to keep the family alive and fed”. Now, “3000 to 4000 skins would be the minimum because the price of food and electricity and water supply and fencing have all gone up,” he says. “The corresponding price of the finished product, the skins that leave ­Australia and go to overseas tanneries, has gone up but not as much as the costs. That point where the costs equal the returns is coming closer. We need to be a little bit careful to ensure the industry remains viable.”

Geoff McClure says the Queensland ­Government needs to deal smaller farmers back into the industry through “ranching”, allowing eggs to be harvested from nests in the wild, thus bypassing expensive egg production processes. “In the Northern Territory they’re taking 25-30,000 eggs out of the wild every year under a licensed, sustainable system,” he says. “A lot of these eggs are coming off land owned by indigenous people. So landowners have an incentive to preserve wetlands. Wetlands are a refuge and fish-breeding ground for thousands of species. What we’ve got is a keystone species for preserving wetlands. But in Queensland, you can’t take eggs from the wild. It’s against the law.”

For good reason, says Dean Adermann, North Queensland Crocodile Protection Society president. “I know Geoff,” says Adermann. “Geoff used to be a bit of an adviser for me and we had a bit of a relationship and then he was trying to get egg harvesting introduced and I said, ‘Mate, you have instantly lost me. I’m going to be your enemy now’.

“They’ve proven that only one per cent of crocodile eggs will actually get to adulthood. It’s a very, very small number. That’s just nature. There’s a huge food chain attached to those eggs. Geoff’s argument is the nests will get flooded anyway, but why do we need to even step in? The numbers are just not sustainable at this stage. Crocodiles are still classified as a vulnerable species in Queensland. I’d rather see them farm them than taking them out of the wild like in the Northern Territory.”

Adermann puts Queensland’s croc population at roughly 20-25,000 (State environment minister Steven Miles last month ordered the first comprehensive count in more than a decade). In the Northern Territory, croc numbers are estimated at between 80,000 and 100,000, with the NT government issuing some 600 permits a year to capture or cull crocodiles that are attacking livestock or threatening humans.

In Darwin, Grahame Webb has been involved in the management and research sides of crocodile conservation since the ’70s. Nearly half a century of passionate endeavour has led him recently to the, perhaps unexpected, conclusion that crocodiles should be blown to bits in lucrative NT “trophy hunting” safaris, trials of which federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion said last month were “very close”.

“You can’t do things up here like you do in f. kin’ Centennial Park in Sydney,” Webb says. “In reality, conserving predators is the hardest thing. If your conservation works you build up the numbers and they start eating people. If you happen to be one of those people being eaten you’ll have some pretty strong views about that.

“Where the Territory went alone was they decided that if we don’t make crocodiles an asset to the Territory then no one’s gonna f. kin’ put up with them. Who’s gonna put up with some five-metre animal that rips your f. kin’ arms off, chews you up and drowns you and then grabs your kids? Nobody is going to put up with that. But the more money we can make for our landowners from the sustainable use of crocs, the better off crocs will be because they’re an asset.”

We undoubtedly have the best crocodiles for fussy Frenchmen, says Webb, but labour costs are driving us out of an industry we’re driving. “In Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, the going price for someone to work on a crocodile farm is about $3 a day,” he says. “Here, we’re sitting there paying $20-$30 a day. Well, how are we gonna make this work?

“The question is, if a landowner gets a permit to take one crocodile out he might be able to get $500 or $1000 for a skin, but if he lets a hunter take that crocodile, and instead of the landowner pulling the trigger, the hunter pulls the trigger, then the landowner might get $5000 out of the same crocodile. And the hunter comes over and spends a week in a local hotel and he might spend $20,000 in town to get his croc. Do you pull the trigger and get $1000, or get $20,000? You don’t have to be a f. kin’ rocket scientist.”

The president of the NT Crocodile Conservation and Protection Society, who goes by the pseudonym “Broady” because of death threats, says such hunting initiatives would be legalising a practice that’s “already happening”. “They do it through legal loopholes,” she says. “Technically, they have to be the ones pulling the trigger. But it’s not legislated well. These properties can be hundreds of kilometres from Darwin.”

Broady, who once worked in Webb’s Darwin ­crocodile farm, believes legal trophy hunting would dramatically reverse the conservation gains made in recent years. “To be honest, if it wasn’t for farms we wouldn’t have wild crocodiles now,” she says. “Mainly because they take the pressure off the wild ones. If we didn’t have farms the amount of illegal poaching would be horrendous. Farming was essential to getting the populations back up.”

Posh Spice doesn’t know it, but if the tabloids are true and she really does own 100 Birkin bags, then she may well have done her bit to secure the immediate future of Northern Australia’s wild salties.

But what of their long-term future? Nothing lasts forever, especially fashions. NQ Crocodile Protection Society president Dean Adermann agrees with Grahame Webb that the answer for the mighty porosus lies in big-game tourism. “Just a different type of shooting,” he says. “People shooting them with their cameras.”

Louis the six-hours-old crocodile crawls back onto the hands of Nick Stevens beside Hartley’s incubation shed. Louis opens his jaws and gives a gentle squeak like a plush toy. Nick smiles. “He hatched today but he already knows exactly what to do in life,” he says. “He swims, he eats, he has his hunting skills already all in-built. It’s like a computer chip.” I wonder if Nick’s thinking what I’m thinking: that evolution intended something more for Louis than page 12 of a winter fashion catalogue.

Goodbye little feller. May all the suns in your short life beat full on your mighty hide. May your chicken lunches be hearty and long. May you be struck with acute blindness at the age of two. And should your fate belong in France, may you take solace in the fact your belly could one day be pressed against Jennifer Lopez.

Later, I enter Cairns’ Louis Vuitton store looking to ease my mind with a fix of retail therapy. The store clerk looks like Pierce Brosnan, circa Remington Steele. I’m after a handbag for my wife, something in rare and precious crocodile skin, combining refined details, including a semi-rigid handle secured by jewel-like rings, with a spacious, functional shape and a distinctive flap that can be worn in two ways: outside to reveal the outline of a monogram flower, or inside to show the LV initials.

The clerk quivers. “Ohhhh,” he aches, shaking his head. “I wish. But you tell her I will get one in for her because I’d take any chance I can get just to look at one.”

“What am I looking at in cost?” I ask.

He gives a brief, embarrassed shake of his head, the kind of moving-right-along look people give to racists at dinner parties. “We don’t have any because the ones we sell have to be flawless, and flawless saltwater crocodile skin is rare,” he says.

He leans in closer, like he’s about to share some lost secret of the universe, some hidden truth that aligns fashion with life and meaning and existence. “But …” he says, eyes wide and full of wonder, “it lasts forever.”