If you want to look tough, you go buy a leather jacket.
Why? I’ve never been sure of that. Maybe wearing an animal’s skin for clothing affects people on some subconscious, hunter/gatherer sense of the word; then again, maybe not.
But whatever the reason, it’s hard to deny just how cool the leather jacket really is. Born out of the greaser mentality of the 1950’s, the leather jacket has since been adopted by dozens of social cliques in the last 50 years: bikers, aviators, punks, rock stars, and people who generally just like to intimidate other people.
What’s kept the leather jacket in public perception is that any member of the public can wear it. Unlike safety pins or Mohawks, the leather jacket doesn’t belong to any one particular social circle. Librarians can wear them just as freely as some drug-addled guitarist can. And what’s more, slipping inside a leather jacket makes you feel good – really good.
Like Marlon Brando in The Wild One or James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, putting on a leather jacket makes you feel like you have an edge. You feel dangerous, even if you’ve never thrown a punch in your life.
And, like most things that have been engrained into the public conscious, the classic nature of the leather jacket has a lot to do with film. So many characters that men look up to in film wear leather jackets:
Indiana Jones.
Neo.
Tyler Durden.
Alonzo Harris.
Wolverine.
This, when coupled with the marriage of the leather jacket and the rock star, ensures that men will be buying leather jackets for years and years to come, in the vain hope that we will be just like our heroes of stage and screen. Even if that doesn’t pan out though, there is still one saving grace to be found:
They always look good.
Always.
