Where Have All the Good Belts Gone?
It’s a sad, but common, sight: A man turns out in a decent suit—or even just a shirt and trousers—that might be wholly acceptable, until you take notice of the lackluster belt. A dull strip of leather-looking material that’s visibly warped, cracked, or even peeling can’t be unseen.
Which raises the question: just how hard is it to find a quality belt these days, considering that so many otherwise finely dressed men get it wrong?
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“A belt, fundamentally, is just a strap of leather,” says Bowie & Burton founder Austin Burton. “So, if you have a bad strap of leather, you’re going to have a bad belt.”
Burton would know. Following his disappointment with a belt from a chain department store, he invested in a piece from the well-regarded English belt maker Equus. In contrast to lower quality belts made from bonded leather—essentially a mix of scrap leather and plastic that quickly degrades with wear—Equus’ were made from 100% bridle leather, a hefty hide known for its durability and shine.
So, when Equus went under at the start of 2023, Burton knew there was no going back. In the same year he founded Bowie & Burton, an Austin-based clothing and accessories business whose marquee product is a bridle leather belt made by Texas saddle makers. Featuring a solid brass buckle, it’s priced at just $97, just a notch below the $60 figure Burton gives as the absolute floor for a quality leather belt.
To determine whether a prospective belt is made from the good stuff, Burton recommends a tactile test. “If you fold the belt over and it has a spring to it, it’s probably going to be a good belt,” he says.
There are also ways to suss out a belt’s worthiness from afar. Ben Meckbach, owner of Pennsylvania-based Tory Leather, advises buyers to look out for vegetable-tanned leather in a product description. Vegetable tanning—a method he says is only practiced by three remaining tanneries in the U.S., including his supplier Wickett & Craig—is a more time-consuming process that utilizes natural tree bark tannins to treat hides over a period of four to six weeks, as opposed to the 24 to 48 hours required of the chemically intensive chrome-tanning process.
While casual belts made from weighty leathers like bridle or pull-up are typically left unlined, finer hides used for dress belts including calfskin often require a lining. “The lining quality is critical to the sort of tenure of the belt, the way it wears, the way it breaks in, the patina that it picks up,” says Sid Mashburn, founder of the eponymous menswear brand whose belt selection runs into the dozens, including a 1” calfskin dress belt backed with vegetable-tanned leather.
Aside from being more environmentally friendly, vegetable-tanning produces leathers that improve with time, rather than discoloring. “The leather gets that patina, that gets-better-with-age look,” Meckbach says.
A quality lining, and the refined, slightly feathered finish of the American-made belt, pushes its price point to $195. At its most entry-level, the brand also stocks a Bombay stitch bridle leather belt for $65. Relative to price of men’s shoes and bags, belts are a bargain and likely to outlast the rest of one’s wardrobe. No excuses, if you blind yourself to branding and know what to really look for.
The vast majority of leather belts on the market are machine stitched, with a vanishingly small minority distinguished by a painstaking process called saddle-stitching. The technique utilizes two needles to hand-stitch a single thread, which is passed through each hole in opposite directions to achieve an interlocking stitch with superior durability and strength (it’s the same iconic stitch you’ll see on Hermes leather goods).
Brandon Salcedo, co-owner of the California leather accessories brand Chester Mox—which has made the saddle stitch is calling card—says that the extra labor it demands can add anywhere from $300-500 to the price of a belt. But it can be an investment worth making, particularly if the belt’s hide already comes at a premium.
“It adds a refined and artisanal quality to the belt—especially important for premium materials like alligator leather,” Salcedo says.
Whether it’s made from beefy bridle or glazed gator, stitched by machine or a pair of hands, a good belt ultimately comes down to the “raw materials,” as Mashburn puts it. Get that part right, and you can count on buckling it for decades to come.
“I’ve got belts in my closet that are 40 years old, and in their prime.” He continues. “Not one or two. I’ve got probably half a dozen.”
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