A Burgundy Alligator Portfolio, Read Like a Map

Two bellies, one jaw, a few honest holes, and a handle I took off because it looked wrong

Most people look at alligator leather and see a surface. I look at a burgundy alligator portfolio and see a map: ridges running one way, a scar running another, a patch where a hole once opened and I backed it from behind. This is a piece to read slowly, from the outside in.

Video: “Closer Detailed Look with Imperfections at the Glazed Burgundy Alligator Portfolio,” Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube.

I filmed that in September 2023. In the video I call it a portfolio and not a briefcase, because it carries paperwork and doesn’t pretend to carry a day. It measures 13.5 by 10 inches, and it opens out about two more. The skin is real American alligator, wild, in a glazed burgundy that goes almost black in the shadows of the ridges and almost orange where the light hits the top of a scale.

Where the skin came from

Two hides hang on my shelf in one of the photos, one on each side of the finished case: long reddish-brown skins, tails pointing down, the shape of the animal still plain. They’re wild alligator, roughly five feet each, medium in size by my own estimate in the video.

That sentence needs a caveat I’ll give plainly. The five feet comes from my own eye in a video, and it’s a rough number, not a measurement. What I can say for certain is that the portfolio used two of those skins. One belly makes the front. The other makes the back. The flap comes from a third piece of the animal, the jaw, which is why the flap has that long tapered tongue of smaller scales you can see in the first photo.

I’ve explained why I work with wild alligator in another video, and the longer version of it is here on the site. In short, wild skins come with scratches, holes and scars, and I’d rather have that history than a skin without any. That’s my opinion, and I’ve said it on camera.

Reading the marks

Every wild hide has marks. I don’t hide them and I don’t apologize for them.

On the edges of this portfolio there are small holes and scratches, and I say in the video that I wouldn’t even call them defects. They’re what happens when an animal fights, and the skin remembers. I handled the worst of them by choosing where to cut. You pick the cleanest stretch of belly for the front and the sides. You take the weaker areas for the places where they won’t take strain.

Where a hole couldn’t be avoided, it got a backing. I glued a layer of vegetable-tanned leather underneath, so the hole sits on a solid floor and can’t stretch or tear any wider. That’s the same trick I show in the longer 2023 video, where I point to two holes on the finished skin and show the lining behind them. It’s not a repair after the fact. It’s part of how the bag is built.

The front, the sides and the body of the bag are, in my words from the video, flawless. The marks are on the edges. I mean that literally: I put the best of the animal where your hand and eye go first, and let the rough edge run to the margins, where it reads as framing.

The stitches I smoothed

Here’s a detail most people never notice. Stitching an alligator skin leaves marks along the seam, small dents where the needle and thread passed through. You can see them if you look closely on the outside and on the inside.

I smoothed them out, and I say in the video that they don’t degrade. That’s a claim about how this particular skin behaves, not a promise about every skin. It held up well enough that I left it alone.

The photograph above is the inside of the flap. You can see two tiny slits in the lining and a line of stitches running along the bottom. I haven’t labeled them in the video, so I won’t pretend I know exactly what each mark is. What I do know is that the lining is thick vegetable-tanned leather, Italian, and I chose it to give the bag some substance without making it heavy.

What the lining is doing

I said something in the video that I’d repeat. I didn’t have a thinner bridle leather in stock, which would have been a fine lining here, so I used the thicker veg tan I had. It’s firm. It gives the portfolio its body even when the case is empty.

That firmness won’t last forever, and I wouldn’t want it to. As the bag gets used, the lining will soften, the structure will relax, and the case will gradually settle. If you carry only a few papers, you can tighten the lock all the way down and the portfolio goes nearly flat. The inside will also change color the way vegetable-tanned leather does, darkening toward something warmer.

I think of a lining as the part of a bag nobody sees and everyone feels. The outside is the performance. The inside is the rehearsal.

The lock and the missing handle

The lock is solid brass, Italian-made, a heavy-duty push lock with three tiers. I said in the video it’s not one of the cheap ones. It’s the part of the case I’d least want to compromise on.

It once had a handle. I took it off because I didn’t like how it looked, and I stand by that decision. A handle would have made this a briefcase, and I wanted it to be something else: an object you hold flat in your hand, or tuck under an arm. Without the handle, the whole thing sits on the body like a book. That’s an editing decision, and editing is half of art.

A portfolio is an odd word

The word “portfolio” has two meanings, and I think the double meaning is the best part of the object. A portfolio is a flat case for carrying papers. It’s also a collection of an artist’s work. I made this one to be both. I can’t tell you whether it holds papers or ideas better.

If you want the longer version of what the word means in a leatherworker’s shop, the site has a short explainer on the portfolio piece. For a bridle leather cousin of this case, I walked through a hand-stitched writing pad portfolio from start to finish.

Its English cousin

The portfolio didn’t come alone. In the September 2023 video I made about the same build, I describe two portfolios made that season. One is the burgundy alligator, a single-gusset flap-over case with a vegetable-tanned lining. The other is cut from UK English bridle leather and fitted with an English brass key lock, and I built it to look like a seventy-five-year-old bridle leather portfolio. That age comes from the video’s own description and I haven’t checked it, so take it as the look I was after and nothing more.

I like the pairing. One is a loud skin with a loud lock, the other a quiet hide with a lock from a long English tradition. Put them side by side on a table and the same shape tells two different stories: one about the animal, one about the horse. Opinion, but I’d defend it.

You can watch the longer walk-through, with the hides on the bench, in Alligator and English Bridle Leather Portfolio.

How you’d carry it

Flat, in the hand, or under the arm. That’s how I carried it in the video, and it’s the reason the handle came off. A portfolio without a handle forces a different posture. You can’t swing it. You hold it the way you’d hold a canvas you don’t want to drop, which is to say with a little more attention than you’d give a bag.

Where it is now

This portfolio was on the shop’s pages in September 2023, and it’s not listed today. I’d treat it as a finished piece of past work, the way a painter treats a canvas that has already left the studio. If you want something in the same spirit, write to me through the Bespoke page, and we can talk about skins, color and size.

You Might Also Like

• What Wild Alligator Leather Actually Is, and Why It Changes How You Work
• Three Alligator Hides, One Briefcase
• A Hand-Stitched Writing Pad Portfolio, Start to Finish

Sources

• Closer Detailed Look with Imperfections at the Glazed Burgundy Alligator Portfolio (Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker, YouTube, September 2023)
• Alligator and English Bridle Leather Portfolio (Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker, YouTube, September 2023)
• What Wild Alligator Leather Actually Is (Marcellino NY)
• What a Portfolio Piece Is (Marcellino NY)
• Bespoke and Made to Order (Marcellino NY)