What do you do with thousands of dead Everglades pythons? Wear them.

National Geographic

7 days ago

Most Burmese python hunters dispose of their snakes after euthanizing them, but South Florida designer Elle Barbeito upcycles hers into accessories to help spread awareness about an ecological epidemic eating away at the Everglades. Photographs by Danielle Levitt
Just after midnight, Elle Barbeito drove her Dodge pickup deep into the shadows of the Florida Everglades. After hours navigating narrow marsh roads, past towering bald cypresses and raucous shoots of bromeliads, she suddenly pulled onto the shoulder and aimed a flashlight at a writhing patch of prehistoric-looking ferns. 'Python!' Barbeito shouted, pointing to a metallic sheen of scales glistening like silken chain mail in the moonlight. The next part would require her gun.
No one can say for certain how Burmese pythons arrived in the Everglades in the first place or how many there are today, though conservative estimates put their population in the tens of thousands. What we do know is that the voracious snakes are destroying one of the country's most important ecosystems by reproducing rapidly and feasting on just about anything they can fit their jaws around, from endangered wood rats to threatened wood storks. The snakes have few regional predators except alligators, so the only way to stop them is by culling them. Over the past 25 years, more than 23,500 pythons have been removed from southern Florida's wetlands through organized annual hunts, eradication agents hired by the state, and volunteers like Barbeito who help capture and kill them.
While most snake hunters dump them or leave the carcasses to rot, Barbeito does things differently. After euthanizing the python, she carefully loaded its serpentine body into the back of her truck and took it home. Snake hunters like Barbeito slowly drive around the Everglades after dark, when nocturnal pythons are more active, sweeping roadside marshlands in the hope of spotting one. She often tags along with her dad, Mark Yon, who captures and euthanizes snakes as part of Florida's python elimination program.
The 29-year-old, who comes from the world of New York fashion, hunts these enormous creatures and then repurposes their remains, transforming each one into a highly sought-after python-skin accessory. 'I get to have this connection with my material that most artists don't,' Barbeito says. She's developed a cult following for her limited-edition line of carefully sourced products, including bags and belts, which appeal to clients who want to wear reptile skin without some of the ethical complications.
For years animal welfare advocates have encouraged shoppers to steer clear of animal-based leathers, prompting fashion companies to explore synthetic or vegan alternatives derived from things like mushrooms and apples. Now an increasing number of designers are recognizing how useful the leather of Burmese python skin from the Everglades can be. As brands race to scale their ambition, Barbeito plays a unique role as someone involved in every step of the sourcing and sales process. 'Here is a beautiful material that's sustainable, and nobody was really doing anything with it,' she says. 'It became this solution to a problem.'
For as long as she can remember, Barbeito wanted to make clothes. At age 18 she moved to New York City for fashion school, enrolling in classes like patternmaking and interning for big-time designers. She also helped stitch pieces for a collection shown at Paris Fashion Week, but each experience only made her more aware of the industry's environmental trade-offs, like pollution from industrial manufacturing and textile waste. 'This is what I wanted to do with my life,' she remembers thinking. 'How [can] I pursue it without becoming part of the problem?'
During a trip home to Florida eight years ago, Barbeito joined her father, Mark Yon, a python-removal agent for the state, on a job in the Everglades. Recognizing how beautiful the intricate tan and brown puzzle-piece skin patterns were, she was shocked to see other hunters tossing their snakes into the garbage. 'Such a waste to have to remove these invasive species and then just throw them in the trash,' she says. 'The material felt like an answer to the question I had been asking myself.'
Fashion school hadn't exactly prepared her to hunt pythons. So Barbeito moved back home and studied tracking and capturing techniques alongside her father. Since releasing her first collection on Instagram in 2019, she has continued to join him on countless midnight hunts while developing a deep appreciation for their urgent conservation work. 'This isn't something he does because he loves hunting and killing snakes,' she says. 'He just loves the Everglades.' If you have to destroy something harming the land, she reasons, why not find a way to recycle it and create something useful? 'It's a way to honor them,' she explains. 'And I see that as a privilege.'
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Barbeito repeats that mantra to herself in the backyard of her family's house in Cutler Bay, a half-hour drive south of Miami, where the 'second life' of these animals begins. There she soaks the hides in six-gallon glass jars of water, glycerin, and alcohol for two weeks to preserve them, before stretching them out on plywood boards to dry and tan. She then hand-sews each accessory from her own customized patterns. Barbeito removes the skin from this bulbous python using a razor blade, a tedious process done in the backyard of her dad's house outside of Miami. She preserves the hide in a mixture of glycerin and alcohol before drying it out on a wood plank for two weeks. The resulting leather is a delicate material that requires hand-stitching and occasional binding for added durability.
Prices range from $425 for cowboy boot straps to upwards of $1,200 for mini-handbags, and items often sell out within 24 hours of being listed on social media. While Barbeito will schedule more hunts for custom orders, she isn't interested in creating a backlog. 'I'm not Amazon Prime,' she says. 'There's a reason why I don't have an inventory of stuff. I try hard to not be wasteful and [to be] as intentional as possible with every single thing I'm making.'
Requests now come in from all over the country, and for customers in places like New York or Los Angeles, Barbeito says her designs sometimes double as conversation starters about Everglades wildlife conservation. 'When I first started, I just saw it as this material I was able to utilize,' she says. 'But it's also a form of being able to educate people.' A recent small-batch release was inspired by a visit to Florida's largest working cattle ranch, also located in the Everglades, and includes python spur straps and a headstall for horses.
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As more people seek her out, she is weighing how to scale up production and whether to collaborate with celebrities. 'I would love to see Doechii in my pieces,' she muses about the stylish singer. For a lot of fashion designers, that kind of high-profile exposure is carefully orchestrated and primarily about building brand awareness. In Barbeito's case, she argues the ecological impact is poised to 'blend the lines of what fashion and art can be.' "The python accessories coming out of Barbeito's showroom, from belts to bustiers, are part of a larger shift in fashion toward more regenerative materials."
Barbeito isn't the only one who has noticed how sourcing python skin from the Everglades skirts many of the major dilemmas around using animal-based products in clothing. Since late 2020, a Miami-based start-up called Inversa has operated as a broker between independent Florida hunters—or 'invasive-removal specialists,' as Inversa CEO Aarav Chavda calls them—and high-end designers interested in using materials made of species like Burmese pythons or lionfish, a similarly damaging animal threatening native fish populations and coral reefs along Florida's coasts. While Barbeito runs a small, often bespoke operation, Inversa has a more industrial outlook. 'If we're going to tackle something as big as invasive species, we have to be thinking in terms of scale,' Chavda says. 'We have to be removing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, eventually, millions, in order to really make a difference.'
So far, there's more than enough supply to satisfy the growing demand. Inversa recently partnered with acclaimed sustainable fashion designer Gabriela Hearst on a line inspired by the snake goddess of Neolithic Europe, which included Burmese python pumps and bags. Like Barbeito, Hearst had never seen a textile that could have such an immediate impact on conservation. 'I was never a big subscriber to the mushroom leather, because I knew that it wasn't going to have the impact that this leather could,' Hearst says. 'It was exciting to work with something that is beautiful [and] also helping restore the environment.' "One of luxury designer Johanna Ortiz's recent collections included a belt made with invasive carp scales, and last year Gabriela Hearst showed a moto jacket and pumps made from the skin of Everglades pythons at Paris Fashion Week." Gabriela Hearst (shoe and jacket), Johanna Ortiz (belt)
Catherine Holstein, founder and creative director of the New York–based brand Khaite, has also worked with Inversa on a collection of made-to-order python-skin handbags. In the meantime, Chavda's company has expanded to offer other materials made from environmentally devastating species: Beachwear designer Johanna Ortiz recently debuted belts made with the scales of Asian carp, a ravenous fish threatening to destroy the delicate ecosystem of the Great Lakes after being introduced to help control algae blooms in aquaculture facilities. And Chavda hints that several major fashion houses may be poised to debut lines that include Inversa's materials at upcoming fashion weeks in Paris, London, and Milan.
Back in Florida, Barbeito still finds satisfaction in staying connected to every part of production, even as her mission reaches larger brands that increase awareness of the problem she initially set out to solve. 'I don't want people to look at it as only clothes,' she says. 'One of the most important things to me is making something with purpose.'
(Luxury fashion brands had thousands of exotic leather goods seized.) A version of this story appears in the September 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.