A Spiked Collar With No Leash Ring

Black bridle leather, hand-stitched, a ring of steel points, and a chain with nothing to pull

Hang this collar on a hook and it stops being a dog collar. It becomes a ring of black leather with steel points reaching out of it in every direction, a chain dropping through the middle, and a quick-release buckle at the bottom that looks like it was lifted off a piece of tactical gear. It’s built for a neck. It’s also a drawing in three dimensions, and I’ve never been sure which one I made first.

Video: “Bespoke large dog aggressive spiked bridle leather collar,” Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker on YouTube.

That video is from February 2020, and it shows a different collar from the black one in these photos. A custom build for a large dog: two rows of long spikes, a row of smaller shark-tooth spikes down the center, a tactical quick-release lock, hand stitching along the edge. Same idea, different animal. The black one came later, and it’s the one I want to talk about.

Questions people ask

A piece like this invites questions before it invites an opinion. These are the ones it raises, in the order I’d expect them.

Is it for the dog or for the owner?

Both, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. A collar is the only piece of clothing a dog wears that a human picks out. The dog doesn’t care about the color. The person does. That makes a collar a message from owner to street, and I just made the message louder than usual.

Isn’t it aggressive?

I put the word in the title of the video myself, so no argument from me. A row of steel points reads as aggression to anyone who sees it from across a park. Up close it reads as something else: a lot of hand-work, a lot of spacing, a lot of small decisions about where each point goes. Opinion: aggression is the first thing the eye reports and craft is the last thing it admits.

Does it work as a collar?

The one in the 2020 video is a single custom size. It doesn’t adjust, and it closes with a tactical quick-release lock, so you push, it lets go, and it clicks shut again. It has no leash ring. I said in the video that it’s a collar for show and for protection, in my words. So no, it isn’t a walking collar. It’s a collar built for a dog that’s standing somewhere being looked at.

The black one in the photos is a different piece, with a ring and a chain hanging from it. Its listing gave the size as 16.5 inches and the price as $300, back in February 2021. It’s no longer in the shop.

Why no leash ring on the first one?

Because a ring would have changed what it was. Put a ring on a collar and you’ve told the world it belongs to a leash, and a leash belongs to a walk. That’s a different object. Leave the ring off and the collar belongs to the dog’s neck and nothing else.

Who does this?

That’s the question I like best, and I’ll answer it with a story that isn’t mine to finish. In March 2020 I filmed a Doberman wearing one of my London tan spiked collars at a pet show. The clip is twenty-five seconds long, and I never added a word to it. I wasn’t selling anything in that clip. I was watching an object I made walk around in public without me.

A drawing you can hold

Look at the photo above and forget it’s a collar. Three circles on a sheet of brown paper. One tan, one brown, one black. A box of spare points in the corner, a knife with a red handle lying across the black one like a pen across a page.

That’s the bench as it looked that day, and the bench is where this kind of work gets decided. Spikes don’t go on by accident. Every point needs its own hole, and every hole has to land where the leather is strong enough to hold a steel stem under load. Space them badly and the whole collar looks nervous. Space them well and it looks like it was grown.

I think of it the way a printmaker thinks of a plate. The pattern comes first, then the surface, then the wear. The leather underneath is English bridle, a material that was made to be pulled, waxed and stretched across the back of a horse, and it can take a ring of steel without complaint.

The chain

The black collar hangs a short length of chain from a ring on the front. I like that the chain doesn’t connect to anything.

Chains in leatherwork usually carry a load. A shoulder strap, a key, a watch. This one carries nothing. It hangs there as a gesture, like the tassel on a graduation cap, and I can’t prove it makes the collar better. I can only say that without it, the collar would be a ring of spikes, and with it, the ring becomes an animal’s neck at rest.

You can argue it’s ornament. I’d argue that ornament is what most of art history is made of.

Where the spikes come from

Spikes on a collar started as armor, and I’m not going to pretend my version is anything but a cousin of that. The history of spiked collars on working dogs goes back a long way. I haven’t verified the details, so I won’t repeat the stories people tell about it.

What I can say is that building one is a leather problem before it’s a philosophical one. How do you set a steel stem through bridle leather without weakening the strap? How do you hide the back of a screw so it doesn’t rub a neck? How do you finish the edges so the black reads as one clean line? Those questions have answers, and the answers are the craft. The philosophy shows up later, on the day you hang the finished collar on a nail and step back.

The brown one

I haven’t talked about the brown collar yet, and I should. In the top-down photo it’s the one with the thickest cluster of metal on it, studs and points mixed together, close enough that the leather almost disappears. The black collar below it is spare by comparison. Two ways of thinking about the same job: cover everything or leave room.

Both are mine, and the photo makes the argument without me. The crowded one can feel honest and the spare one timid, or the reverse, depending on the viewer. A design that can’t settle that argument is doing its job.

What a collar says about the person who makes one

A briefcase is a polite object. It sits next to a desk and keeps its voice down. A spiked collar has none of that politeness, and Opinion: a maker of polite objects now and then needs one loud paragraph.

The leash I make is a quieter cousin, a bridle leather leash built to be handled, and it’s all hand and edge and burnish. These collars are the loud paragraph. I wouldn’t trade either.

If you want to see how I stitch a seam like the one running along the edge of that black collar, the stitch-count guide walks through what to look for.

Hung on a wall

I’ve thought about what happens when a collar like this leaves the neck it was made for. Mounted on a wall, it behaves like a wreath, and a wreath is a symbol of welcome. This one is the reverse. It’s a wreath that keeps its distance, a circle that invites you in and then makes you think twice about stepping closer.

That’s the double life I mean when I call a piece of leatherwork a sculpture. The same object can be a working thing at one moment and a pure shape the next. A briefcase does it quietly, over decades. A spiked collar does it as soon as you take it off the dog.

Opinion, again. A sculpture earns the word by being something you can walk around, and these collars can be walked around easily. Every angle gives a new constellation of points, and no two views are the same.

Still life with steel

The knife in the photo keeps pulling my eye. It’s a red-handled blade lying across the black collar, and it makes the whole picture work. A tool beside a thing made with the tool. A weapon-looking collar on a table beside an actual blade, and the blade looks gentle by comparison. That’s what I mean when I say I make things to be looked at. The picture says something I didn’t plan to say, and I’m happy to let it.

You Might Also Like

• A Bridle Leather Dog Leash Built to Be Handled
• Normal People Call It a Handbag
• Reading a Leather Maker’s Stitch Count: Quality Signs to Check Before You Buy

Sources

• Bespoke large dog aggressive spiked bridle leather collar (Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker, YouTube, February 2020)
• Doberman With My London Tan English Bridle Leather Aggressively Spiked Dog Collar at The Pet Show (Marcellino NY Briefcase Maker, YouTube, March 2020)
• A Bridle Leather Dog Leash Built to Be Handled (Marcellino NY)
• Reading a Leather Maker’s Stitch Count (Marcellino NY)