For projects requiring a reinforcement or lining which later require skiving around the perimeter, I'm wondering if it's possible to skive the leather before adding the reinforcement.
For example, the body and gusset of the De Havilland bag is reinforced with canvas. After the canvas is glued to the leather and trimmed to size, you need to skive all the edges. I'm curious if you can skive the leather before gluing the canvas to the leather?
Yes, you absolutely can. However the tradeoff may be the need to skive the leather very thin.
For example, let's say you use 1.5mm leather and 0.5mm reinforcement and you want a skived edge thickness of 1mm. You would need to skive your leather edge to 0.5mm to end up with 1mm including reinforcement. This may be quite hard to do by hand with stretchy soft leathers, and the chance of making a slip-up is high.
A better option may be to pre-skive the leather as you mention, then cut your reinforcement with a border 15mm (or wherever your skive starts) inside the leather edge, then glue down. Fiddly, but less chance of a mishap.