Your Guide To Leather Jackets | Why Wear A Leather Jacket

Why Leather?

Leather jackets are pricey pieces of clothing.

They don’t go with everything the way that a plain dark overcoat does.

It’s hard to find one that can go with both a dressy business look and a unique casual one. So why the heck does anyone buy them?

  1. Attitude

Yeah, we’ll go ahead and put this one at the top of the list.

Attitude. Style, funkiness, class, uniqueness, that bad boy vibe – call it what you want to, but leather has an attitude that cloth doesn’t.

The nice thing about leather is that its tough-guy appeal is timeless, not trendy. We associate leather jacket with ruggedness because rugged people have depended on leather since the early days of humanity. It’s not a constructed image the way that ripped jeans or metal studs are.

So a leather jacket gives its wearer a sense of toughness, competence, and edginess, even when it’s a very smooth and refined style of jacket. Attitude that doesn’t look like it’s trying too hard is tough to come by, and that’s one of the best reasons to wear leather now and again.

  1. Protection

On a much more practical note, leather is tough. Leather hide protects an animal for its whole life. Personal armor has used leather for protection for almost all of human history, up until the advent of bullet-resistant synthetics in the 20th century.

You’re hopefully never going to need your jacket to turn a knife or protect you from a bear’s teeth, but the toughness that protects from those holds up just fine against lesser, day-to-day wear and tear as well. A good leather jacket made from quality hide and treated well should last through all kinds of nicks and scrapes.

Elements of a Leather Jacket

We’ll get in to individual styles and traditional cuts in just a minute here. First it’s worth familiarizing yourself with the bits and pieces that make up a style, so that you can understand why a simple change in the height of the collar and the angle of the pockets can make the difference between a sleek business jacket and a rugged working man’s coat.

The Classic Leather Jacket Styles

Most leather jackets fall into one of a few common families. These common styles all have their own niche – wearing a duster to a suit-and-tie meeting will look just as odd as wearing a Prada fatigue jacket to chop wood.