Exotic Trade Brings Louisiana Gator Skin to Milan

Copy to clipboard

Overnight, workers had festooned the Park Hyatt Milan with wreaths, baubles, and Christmas trees. Prime retail season had arrived, and I was not immune to the collective zeal of credit card-swiping tourists who gathered in this cradle of European luxury. A few steps from the hotel, I bought a pair of Prada loafers inside Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Italy’s oldest and most elegant shopping mall. As a tour guide pointed out the Duomo’s pink Candoglia marble and gilded statue of the Virgin Mary, I could not help but notice a Gucci billboard competing for worship at the opposite end of the piazza.

That’s why I think I was so taken aback to find a primordial piece of the South in Milan: Louisiana gator.

Alligator leather handbags image courtesy of Anthony Conforti — Image courtesy of Anthony Conforti

The hotel concierge had arranged a visit to Donna Elissa, a handbag maker tucked into a discreet building in the Cinque Vie neighborhood. As I walked in, I inhaled the aroma of a small-town shoe shop. Shelves held rainbow stacks of leather, and bag patterns hung from hooks. I took a few pictures, but the general manager, Giacomo Cannoni, asked me to delete them. Trade secrets. Donna Elissa produces bags for Armani, Roberto Cavalli, Loro Piana, and more labels Cannoni would not divulge. It takes artisans up to 22 hours to assemble each bag by hand, and the atelier makes just 200 a month. Six of what I would later discover to be $25,500 handbags, the color of limestone clay, were displayed on a table and practically purred to be caressed.

Notably, Donna Elissa specializes in exotic leather: some crocodile, ostrich, python, snakeskin, and zebra. But mostly alligator. “Were these Louisiana gators?” I ask. “Yes,” Cannoni confirms. “It’s the best.”

My mind somersaulted from Milan back to a visit to Eunice, Louisiana. Whack! Wielding a cleaver, a Sinaloan woman, working on an H-2B visa, severed the tail of an alligator from its body. Workers in blue hairnets and waterproof aprons carved out gator meat with flashing knives. Five pink, fleshy carcasses rolled by on a metal cart, their tails suspended in the air like a taut Kardashian ponytail. Outside of crawfish season, workers at Riceland Crawfish process alligators into filets, bone-in legs, and nuggets. Some cuts end up in Cajun sausages and others into easily digestible dog kibble. And some give up their skin for luxury goods.

I vividly recall the first time I ate fried gator, served on white Chinet and dunked in ketchup, at one of my grandparents’ parties. (Someone lied and told me it was chicken.) I own a vintage alligator bag. But I had never contemplated the supply chain that disperses Louisiana’s most iconic swamp creature across the globe.

It all begins in early summer with aerial surveys conducted by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LWFC). Biologists count alligator nests on private wetlands and set a quota for the number of eggs farmers can harvest from each parcel. In late July, riding on airboats and ATVs, collectors retrieve wild alligator eggs from grassy, mounded nests and incubate them for around 62 days. The tiny gators—ready-made with toothy grins—hatch almost at once, and as with other ranched animals, they are penned, fed, fattened, and cared for (apparently, LSU vets make house calls) until they’re ready for market in one to four years.

Processing alligator leather image courtesy of Zach Wolfe — Image courtesy of Zach Wolfe

The gators I saw at Riceland Crawfish were “watch-sized” animals, destined for small leather goods that represent 80 percent of the market. Their skins had been removed, salted, rolled, and shipped to one of about 25 exotic leather tanneries in the world. The raw skins of farmed gators fetch on average $6.50 per centimeter and up to $30 per centimeter. Alligator meat, a delicious byproduct, sells for $7 per pound wholesale, and last year, Louisiana farms netted $56 million on a harvest of 267,065 alligators, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center.

I admit, at first, it all made me a bit squeamish, the comingling of death, dinner, status symbols, and monied interests. A number of luxury houses recently stopped sourcing exotic skins. London Fashion Week banned them from runways this year.

However, the International Union for Conservation of Nature argues that the vitality of the American alligator (and other exotic species) is inseparable from commerce. Every gator shipped out of the state nets $4 that’s directly funneled into research, conservation, and habitat management. The IUCN has implored the fashion industry to reconsider its stance.

“It’s ironic that a luxury handbag brought the recovery of a species,” says Christy Plott Gilmore, a consultant for the Louisiana Alligator Advisory Council and partner in her family’s century old tannery business. “But it’s the truth.” In 1967, the federal government declared the American alligator endangered; wild harvest ceased. In a little more than 150 years, trappers had decimated a keystone species that has survived the Chicxulub asteroid impact (i.e., the one that killed off the dinosaurs). But with intense monitoring and management, the population recovered by 1987.

Blue alligator wallets image courtesy of Anthony Conforti — Image courtesy of Anthony Conforti

Alligator ranching and wild egg collection started around the same time to promote a sustainable harvest. At first, says Plott Gilmore, farmers had to release 18 percent of hatchlings back into the wild once they grew large enough to evade predation. This year, because the alligator population is so robust, the LWFC lowered the release rate to 5 percent.

On a recent trip to New Orleans, I wandered through the French Quarter to Felix’s, where I ordered a dozen Gulf oysters—animals that were alive until the moment I chewed them to bits—and fried gator tail. The latter arrived on a limp bed of iceberg lettuce and had been so thoroughly coated in flour and seasoning that I could not distinguish it from chicken. The nuggets, though tasty, were just as far removed from a living, breathing alligator as a handbag for sale at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. But that $18 plate of fried gator meat and the skin that once guarded it also subsidize the work of biologists, egg collectors, dye specialists, helicopter pilots, meat processors, and the oyster shucker at Felix’s, who wore a crystal-encrusted watch on his wrist. They preserve other threatened species: rural jobs and fine craftsmanship. “There’s 100 pairs of hands,” Plott Gilmore tells me, “that touch every gator we harvest.” And in a complicated world with dwindling natural resources, that means we get to hold onto something ancient, something sacred and wild. I have seen an alligator slip from a cypress log into Lake Martin. In winter, I have canoed by 10-footers sunning in a swamp. They are miracles, these gators, a prayer for the chance to make things right.