Fashion · The Leather Edit
The Leather Jacket
Not a trend — and the runway data actually proves it. Twenty jackets in four shapes, and one decision you only have to make once.
Not a trend — and the runway data actually proves it. Twenty jackets in four shapes, and one decision you only have to make once.
Here's something odd. Leather shows up on the spring trend list this year. It isn't on the fall one. It isn't on resort either.
A colour does that because it's been and gone. Leather does it because it was never really a trend to begin with — it just sits there, season after season, while everything else cycles past.
What's changed is how it's being cut. The silhouettes have gone quieter and more considered: cropped lengths, gently cinched waists, smooth leather instead of anything overtly tough, and hardware kept to almost nothing. Less attitude, more lived-in. These jackets don't shout any more — they just make everything you put them over look better.
And there are really only four shapes worth knowing. The biker is the 1928 one, with the asymmetric zip and the lapels and usually a belt, and it still reads as confidence before you've said a word. The bomber is softer through the body, gathered at the hem, and goes over more things. The cropped stops at the waist and exists to make a high-waisted trouser look deliberate. And the tailored version is leather cut like a blazer, which is the one that goes to work.
The shape itself has barely moved in a century. Irving Schott made the first proper leather motorcycle jacket in 1928 and sold it for five dollars fifty at a Harley dealer on Long Island. He named it the Perfecto, after his favourite cigar. And that off-centre zip everyone still copies? It was there to block the wind. Loewe, meanwhile — which turns a hundred and eighty this year — has been working leather since a group of artisans opened a workshop on calle Lobo in Madrid in 1846.
If you want a styling idea for these in-between weeks, Vogue's is a good one. A full white outfit, a leather jacket over it, a horseshoe belt, black strappy sandals. And socks.
Below, twenty of them across all four — the biker, the bomber, the cropped and the tailored. Buy the shape first. The house matters less than you'd think.
Every piece in the edit — tap to shop.
The original, and still the one that does the most work. Loewe's cropped version is nappa lambskin with the asymmetric zip and a belt you can actually pull. Prada's is Prada — never quite the obvious version of anything. Magda Butrym does it twice here, panelled and plain, Acne puts its logo on, and Nour Hammour's Varda is full-grain leather made in Turkey by a house that still works with the same family atelier in the Marais where its first jacket got sewn. Wear it over a white t-shirt. That's the outfit.
Softer through the body, gathered at the hem, easier over more things. Brunello Cucinelli's is smooth leather cut in Italy with one flap pocket and nothing else going on. Khaite's Hamett is nappa lambskin — also Italian — with a stand collar and a little guard you can unclip. Loewe's has that balloon shape with the draping gathered by hand across the back, and The Row's Morisel is the one nobody will comment on, which for The Row is rather the point. Good with denim. Better with tailored trousers on the days a coat feels like too much.
Two of these twenty are the ones I would buy. The Khaite Hamett — a leather jacket that is not black is the harder choice, and the more interesting one. And the Prada biker, because it is edgy and effortlessly chic at the same time. Almost nothing manages both.— K.W., Editor-in-Chief
Tap any piece below to shop the whole edit.
This is the shape everyone's been cutting this year, and it's the one that does something for a high waist. Prada's sits at the top of the range. St. Agni and Loulou de Saison both come in under a thousand, and ARMA's Emy is the least expensive thing in this edit at seven hundred and fifty — which, for a real leather jacket, is not very much at all. Wear it open, ending at the waist, everything below it long.
Leather cut like a blazer instead of like outerwear. This is the half that goes to work. Miu Miu and Saint Laurent are the expensive end. The Row's Elenora is lambskin with ribbed-knit trims and a concealed placket, lined in silk, made in Italy — you never see the silk, you just feel it. Bottega Veneta's patch pocket jacket and Max Mara's Bouquet sit in the middle, and Nili Lotan's Charly brings the whole thing down to twelve hundred. Over a shirt, with trousers, instead of a blazer.
Every piece in this edit, by the houses behind it. Explore them all.
Buy the shape, not the season. A leather jacket is one of the very few things you will own that looks better in ten years than it did in the shop.— ESVRA