What the first proper rain does to everything you just bought
We spent two weeks telling you to buy suede. This is the week to spend twenty minutes protecting it, because the rain is not going to wait for you to get round to it.
Written on a Sunday, looking at the week ahead. We promised this one at the end of last week and here it is: what the first real rain does to the things you have just been buying, and what is genuinely worth doing about it before October.
Three things are worth doing, in this order. Seal the suede — and this week rather than after the first stain. Learn to dry leather properly, because rain almost never ruins a leather bag but a radiator will. And start drying the metal, which is the part that actually corrodes and the part nobody thinks about.
A note on what this is. It is not trend reporting and it does not borrow the authority of our trend pages — it is reasoning about how these materials behave when they get wet, plus the standard advice from people who repair them for a living. Where a number appears it is a specification you can check, not an opinion.
