Getting the most out of your menswear purchases means buying items that will stand up to repeated wear and continue to look good–and this is just as true for accessories as for full garments. Belts in particular should be both functional and stylish, so quality is paramount! Today, we’ll dissect 6 popular brands to learn what’s inside, and which is the best investment.
*Note: Be sure to watch today’s video to understand all the nuances of the deconstruction process!
Video Transcript [Lightly Edited for Clarity]:
Sven Raphael Schneider: Welcome back to the Gentleman’s Gazette and our series “Cutting it Apart”. In today’s video, we’ll be cutting apart north of $2,000 worth of belts. Why? Well, so you don’t have to. We’ll examine what you get when you buy a $790 belt all the way down to an $84 on-sale belt from Allen Edmonds.
We’ll be cutting apart an Hermes belt, which retails for $790, a Fort Belvedere belt, which retails for $240, a Brooks Brothers belt, which retails for $98, a Montblanc belt, which retails between $320 and $400, a Gucci belt, which retails for $490, and an Allen Edmonds belt, which retails for $120, but, I think, on sale, they’re more like an $80-$84 range.
Buckles
Allen Edmonds
First, let’s quickly take a look at the buckles and then, cut the leather apart. First of here, Allen Edmonds. It’s a traditional belt buckle, sewn-on, that can be removed. It’s a belt loop here. But, the buckle comes right out.
It says, “solid brass” and then, “aman row.” A-M-A-N. Aman row. Solid brass. You can see there’s the plating, basically, here and that’s the buckle of the Allen Edmonds belt.
Gucci
Now, on the Gucci belt here, you see we have the original part here. It’s all brand new Gucci Made in Italy. Let’s cut it apart. Heavy, heavy buckle. Also seems to be like solid brass and quite, quite a good weight. You can tell it’s solid. Much better than the Allen Edmonds buckle. It’s definitely a thicker, thicker plating.
Brooks Brothers
Next up, we have the Brooks Brothers buckle. Now, here, it says, “made in Italy.” I don’t know if it’s brass or what it is. Now, you can actually see I’m cutting into the buckle. And it all remains silver. There’s no brass that comes through.
Fort Belvedere
Here we got a Fort Belvedere buckle and one of the things that we did with our buckles that a lot of people don’t do is we chose an extremely thick palladium and gold plating, which is 10 times thicker than what you usually get. Just so it lasts. Well, what that also means is — palladium is expensive and gold is also very expensive and so, it’s just, yeah, a very expensive buckle.
Solid brass. Made in Italy. Meant to last you for a long time. Different men wear buckles differently, depending on how much they sweat. And, oftentimes, in cheaper buckles, you can see after a while, they show their age. With these buckles, that’s not supposed to be the case. They should last you for a very long time.
Hermès
Now, here we got the Hermes buckle. Individually, costs $335. The belt is, I think, $455. So, a total of $790. It’s very nicely finished. You can see it’s like matte in the back, shiny in the side. Looks like a nice piece. It says it’s “Made in France.” Looks like it’s all silver throughout. There’s no information on their website as to what exactly it is that they have.
Belts
Montblanc
Now, next up, let’s cut the belts apart. The Montblanc belt here, I lost the buckles. I’ve had them for years. You can see I wore it. It even opened up by itself just by wearing it. And, when I had that experience, it was like I want belts that don’t just do that. But, I want belts that actually last. So, that was my inspiration for the Fort Belvedere belt line.
And you can see here this one opens up very easily on its own because the thread is just not that thick. That’s it. Two layers of leather. One is the upper leather here. It’s like an embossed croc calf. And then, on the bottom here, it’s a thicker leather. It’s the inside lining.
You can see, on the edge, it’s thinned out at the edge here. Thinner at the edge here and here. It seems like nicely tanned leather – aniline-dyed. You can see it’s a little darker in the middle than the outside. But, it seems to be a pretty good leather.
I mean, over time, you can see how it aged, right? The leather actually was good. What wasn’t good was the stitches and that’s where they came apart and that’s why I could pull it apart so easily.
Also, if you look at the belt, it kind of bends a little bit. You can see the curve, it curves up. That’s typically something that you get with belts, especially cheaper belts. As you wear them, they really kind of create a curve.
I mean, just look at this one here for example. You can really see the bend of the belt. This is the Allen Edmonds belt. And, typically — I don’t know. Hallmark of a not-so-expensive belt, I would say.
Allen Edmonds
Next up, Allen Edmonds here. You can see, on the edge here, it’s edge-painted. The Montblanc was edge painted, too, in a matching color of the leather. This here is distinctly darker.
Just cut through the leather here. So, you can see what there is and I’ll try to just separate the layers just like the Montblanc one. So, it seems like the Allen Edmonds, just like the Montblanc, has a very simple construction. You basically have two layers of leather, right? They’re just cut on all ends, thinned down at the edge, and then sewn together. Same construction.
Now, the Montblanc was not really glued in between. It was floating. The Allen Edmonds, on the other hand, is glued in between. I think the difference is, over time, the glue may loosen and it may bulge if you don’t have glue in there to begin with. It may never show. But, glue is okay. It’s not a hallmark of bad quality or anything.
Now, I’m just going to try to separate these layers here. There we go. You can see here I’m pulling. And, actually, the stitch density is so strong that I’m not taking that part off. So, I have to cut it separately.
You can also see there’s this kind of other layer that is black in the middle of the belt that’s supposed to probably just make it a little bit thicker. Otherwise, you have this other piece of leather here. They had broguing and had glue on the inside.
Leather quality overall feels a bit cheaper, I have to say. The finish is okay. There’s some wax in here. It’s okay for a belt, but it’s also nothing special.
Brooks Brothers
Let’s look at this one here. Brooks Brothers belt. Kind of interesting dark layer and then, the light layer. Even though, from the front, I mean, you can tell this is a uniform brown because it’s kind of a finished brown. But, you wouldn’t expect something that dark to be underneath of it.
Let’s cut it at an angle here. You can really see the black and white. So, over time, you’re aligning, as this top layer will wear off, it’s obviously a pigment-dye leather. You will really see something black underneath, which looks kind of odd. I don’t even know if it’s full-grain leather or more like a leather product. It doesn’t seem to have been the highest-quality material.
So, this is the Brooks Brothers. You can see it’s edge-painted. This is the brown upper leather. Looks like full-grain leather. Not like a leather product. The bottom layer here, the lining leather, looks odd. I’d have to lab test it to tell you exactly what it is. But, this is not the highest-quality leather, I tell you that.
Of course, also, as you know, with $98 dollars, you can have different expectations. But, even here on top, you can see you know as soon as the top will come off, you will see a lighter color.
Sometimes, if you want to get a certain effect on top, where you want to almost look into the leather, the bottom has to be lighter like in this case, right? You wouldn’t get this effect if it was all the same color underneath.
So, that’s not necessarily a quality issue. You can have leather that’s darker on top than underneath. But, if you have this pigmented leather, like here, where it’s really just one uniform layer of color on top of something, that’s usually done to hide something that’s underneath.
Hermès
Now, let’s look at the Hermes belt here. So, you can see, you know, an original Hermes. Very nice stitch density all the way around. That was definitely better than on the Brooks Brothers one and the Allen Edmonds.
You can see here everything is very neatly stitched and then, it’s also edge-painted here. You can see it’s slightly thicker up here. So, let’s try to take that one apart.
Again, this costs around $455. But, it’s not like you can just buy it separately. The whole belt was like $790, I think. So, now, you can clearly see three layers of leather. So, typically, in a higher-quality belt, you have more layers of leather.
Hermes leather is very nice. You can see they have this kind of scorched top. It’s embossed on it. So, when you buy an Hermes product, you typically get a quality leather. You also pay a very high price. But, at least, you don’t get crap.
On that note, check out our “Is It Worth It? Louis Vuitton” video. By the way, we’ve also started cutting apart shoes. So, you can check that out and see what you find there.
Okay, so, you can see this is this leather here. Pretty much, you know, aniline-dyed – the top leather. It’s a double-sided belt. But, yeah, good decent quality.
It’s not the same color. But, again, you can’t always have that for the effect. And then, this middle layer is kind of this gray that has a glue or primer structure on top. You don’t see any glue residue like you did on the Allen Edmonds for example. Clear difference here, right?
So, you pull this off. Let’s see if we can separate these two layers here. They’re also edge-painted. So, you can see the thick layer in the middle is the thickest one; it gives the belt its thickness. But, they’re glued together and sewn, but they’re glued very carefully and thinly.
Okay, Hermes. Three-layer belt. Two kinds of embossed leathers. Aniline-dyed. Plus a kind of grayish leather in the middle. It’s black on one side, just like what we saw on the Allen Edmonds belt on the inside here.
Thickness-wise, because there are three layers, this is thinner. The lining there is thinner. The workmanship is neat. But, still, the edge here is cut and then, edge-painted. Just like an Allen Edmonds belt or just like a Brooks Brothers belt or Montblanc belt. So far, all the belts have the same edge-painting.
Fort Belvedere
Now, let’s look at the Fort Belvedere belt. I mean, just from the outset, you can see here, these are made in Portugal. The lining leather is from Italy. The top layer is from Germany from alpine cows, which has fewer buck bites. So, you just get perfectly grained leather. It’s all super open pore, aniline-dyed. It’s not embossed or anything where it’s not hiding anything. It’s all the quality hide you get.
On the inside, we embossed the leather because, when you have a belt on the inside, you automatically have creases. And when you pre-emboss the leather, it will crease there and not randomly in other parts. So, that was the thought behind it. Just from the outside, you can tell this is quite thick leather. It’s much stiffer. And you can see it has double-folded edges.
Cutting it through, you’ll see there’s a lot more layers. Maybe if we cut it at an angle, you see it better. That’s the lining leather here. Then, it’s another liner in the middle. Something else in the middle, not a liner. And then, the outer layer. So, you have five layers of leather. That’s definitely the most complex belt we’ve seen so far.
Also, you saw the edges here is where we got the folded edges; versus everyone else had the edge-painted edges, where they just cut something and then put paint on top to finish it. This is the actual leather. It’s just thinned out at the edges and folded. So, much more complex to make this Fort Belvedere belt than any other belt we’ve seen here.
We also do this on our wallet and you can see how we cut apart a Fort Belvedere wallet in that video. One thing that was really important for me was that, in a Fort Belvedere product, we do everything leather on the inside. Even though you may not see it and it’s easy to cheat and put some filler material in there, that’s not as good. I didn’t want that.
Yeah, it’s really hard to pull apart. So, you can see we use a thick thread here. So, we don’t have this experience from Montblanc. But, really thick stuff. If we cut the belt here you see this is the upper leather and it’s folded here in the edges.
Let’s cut out the middle part. It’s glued down. Then, there’s a layer of leather underneath that’s lining it and keeping it in shape. And you can see here, it’s all the way folded in. Then, you have another layer, this black layer, that goes on top of it. And then, the same procedure on the other side with a green leather.
You can clearly see here – green leather layer, then lining, and then folded to hold everything in place and keep everything in shape with the goal that you don’t see the warping in the belt if you wear it over time.
You can see the seam is so strong that I’m able to pull the leather apart, which, in normal circumstances, will not happen because this is so thick and solid. You will never rip that apart on itself. But, it’s over-engineered for a reason and that is just that you can wear it for a long time.
The other thing is, with Fort Belvedere products, we decided to have changeable buckles. So, you can have all these buckles. Let’s say you buy three buckles and three belts, you have nine possible combinations.
Now, Hermes offers that as well and so does Montblanc. Montblanc has a very similar system to the one at Fort Belvedere, which allows you to just exchange different buckles. The difference is the Fort Belvedere buckles have a much thicker gold and palladium plating, so they won’t wear off. Also, when you travel, it’s nice to just bring two belts, three buckles. That’s six combinations right there.
Gucci
So, last but not least, let’s look at the Gucci belt. Frankly, it looks like a completely pigment-dyed leather that is embossed with the Gucci logo. You can see here a three-layer belt – upper leather, lining leather, cut and edge-painted here at the top, almost seems like a glue layer here in between. But, then, that actually comes apart easy-peasy. Yeah, this is not glued together very much.
Overall, the leather feels just not very high-end compared to the Hermes leather. It’s not as nice. Construction-wise, yes, has the three layers like the Hermes. But, unlike the Hermes, it doesn’t have a reversible buckle. It has just this giant classic Gucci buckle. I don’t know. In my mind, it’s a bit gaudy. But, each to their own.
I think, for $490, it’s overpriced. It’s not quite as bad as the Louis Vuitton bag, which is, you know, PVC vinyl. At least, this here is leather. The middle layer isn’t. I mean, workmanship seems all, you know, neat. The stitching is all neat and stuff. But, the thread is very thin. So, if it wears out, it’ll kind of open up after a little while.
A Brief Word on Leather Quality & Tanning
These days, too, there’s a lot of people who talk about, “Oh, it’s full-grain leather. It’s full-grain leather,” which is definitely high-quality leather, but it sometimes isn’t, right? So, just because it’s printed on it doesn’t mean it is the highest quality.
You can find full-grain leathers – you know, calfskin leathers – that sell for a third of what other tanneries do just because they have a better understanding of tanning. The color consistency is there, the feel, the subtlety. There are definitely differences even among top grain leathers.
And, oftentimes, I see, you know, like cheaper brands like top grain leather where the whole belt is $25. Well, this is from Chinese tanneries. They use zamak buckles, not solid brass. Like, you know, the gold price that we pay is much higher than the retail price and all the marketing costs you pay for those.
Conclusion
Cutting those belts open, I hope, was interesting and you learned a few things. If you enjoyed the cutting apart, check out our series with shoes and wallets, and you’ll probably also like the “Is It Worth It” series, where we just figure out if your hard money is worth it or not.