Leather

Leather is one of the oldest materials humans have ever worked with. Its use predates written language. Before iron was smelted, before cloth was woven, humans were curing animal hides - stretching them, drying them, treating them with fat and smoke to make them last. Every civilisation that has ever experienced cold has known leather. What changes, across ten thousand years, is only what we make of it.

The modern leather jacket begins in the sky. In 1915, Royal Flying Corps pilots flying over France in open cockpits began wearing long leather coats against the cold and wind. The U.S. Army officially established its Aviation Clothing Board in 1917 and began issuing heavy-duty leather flight jackets to pilots - high wraparound collars, zipper closures, snug cuffs. The material that had protected soldiers became the material that protected aviators. Then, in 1928, a New York garment maker named Irving Schott changed everything. He designed a jacket specifically for motorcyclists, named it the Perfecto after his favourite cigar, and sold it for $5.50 at a Harley-Davidson dealer in Long Island. It had an asymmetrical zipper, a belted waist, and an attitude no other garment possessed. The Schott Perfecto model 618 is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1953, Marlon Brando wore a Perfecto in The Wild One. He played Johnny Strabler, a motorcycle gang leader - brooding, defiant, magnetic. The image of Brando astride a motorcycle in black leather became one of the defining photographs of the 20th century. American schools banned the jacket. The ban guaranteed its mythology. Two years later, James Dean died in a car accident before Rebel Without a Cause was released. Sales of the Perfecto spiked. Dean's death transformed the jacket from a fashion choice into an elegy - worn by everyone who wanted to claim something of what he represented. The leather jacket had become the single most powerful shorthand for a new idea of cool.

The musicians took it from there. Elvis Presley wore leather on stage in 1956 and again in his 1968 NBC Comeback Special - an all-black leather outfit that remains one of the most studied looks in rock history. The Beatles arrived in Hamburg in leather, photographed against the grain of the walls of the Reeperbahn, before Brian Epstein put them in suits. The Ramones wore matching black leather jackets on the cover of their 1976 debut album - a uniform, a manifesto, a look so complete that nothing needed to be said. The Sex Pistols, styled by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, covered their jackets in studs and slogans. Joan Jett made the leather jacket a feminist statement. By 1999, Keanu Reeves in a full-length black leather trench in The Matrix had extended the garment into science fiction and philosophy.

The hierarchy of leather for outerwear begins with the animal and ends with the tannery. Full-grain leather - the entire top layer of the hide, with all its natural texture and marks intact - is the gold standard. It develops a patina over decades of wear, each crease and fade a record of the life lived in it. Top-grain leather has the surface sanded for uniformity - more consistent, less alive. Nappa lambskin is the benchmark for outerwear softness: the hide of young lambs, incredibly thin and supple, with a drape that no other leather achieves. Italian nappa, tanned in the traditional mills of Tuscany and Veneto, is what the finest jackets have always been made from. Below these: suede (the inner split of the hide, velvety and soft but porous), nubuck (grain-side sanded to a velvet finish, tougher than suede), and the various corrected-grain leathers that dominate mass production.

Vintage leather outerwear occupies a particular position. The great European and American leather houses of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s used full-grain and top-grain hides of a quality that is now extremely difficult to source. The tanning processes were slower, the finishing more considered, the construction entirely by hand. A jacket that has survived fifty years has already proven itself. The leather has broken in completely - it has conformed to the shape of whoever wore it, softened in the right places, stiffened where it needed to hold. It carries a patina that cannot be manufactured. Every mark on it is evidence of a life.

When we select leather for the vestiaire, we are reading the hide. The weight of it. The way it falls from the hand. The grain - whether it is still present and alive, or whether it has been corrected into uniformity. The quality of the lining, which is the first thing a furrier or leather-maker cuts to save money. The stitching, which on the best pieces is dense and even and shows no shortcuts. A leather coat is one of the few garments that improves with the passing of time. This is what we are looking for. This is what we carry.