Will your new jacket ever look vintage?

[greenc]

Hope you're all looking at the start of a good day, or you're halfway through one now depending on where you live.

I find myself thinking about collecting on a fairly regular basis. I'd love to be a one watch, one jacket kinda guy, but I can't seem to stop poking around and looking for the next version. I enjoy what I have but there's something obviously appealing about the hunt, which I'm sure many of you relate to.

And I think it's made all the more interesting with the notion that there's a certain amount of money to spend and an opportunity cost with each purchase - if you buy this now it means you can't have that other one that you find tomorrow. So for me I do lots and lots of research and examining and thinking about which example I'd like best and inevitably I get sidetracked by something else shiny I need to go investigate over there and then later I come back to the original thing I was looking for and the process continues.

And sometimes it takes a long time, which is okay and really fun, and frustrating, and fun.

If I owned every jacket or watch that I purchased in my head with imaginary money I would literally need a second home to store all of it in. But the hunt is the stuff.

I have to be in Paris at the start of the Olympics for a work project and I'm counting the days until I can get to the Paris Flea Market (Le marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen à Clignancourt) for a good poke around.

So that brings me this - I'm not a vintage jacket or watch guy to own, but I can appreciate the look on other people and I see the appeal - I don't think the deep-V cuts of the 1950s double riders do me any favors on my frame. They're too exaggerated but they look fabulous on some people.

And part of the look is that those jackets have been worn hard - they're scratched and the grain has popped and they just look like they have stories to tell. But so too, a lot of those pieces have been mistreated over the years - they've gotten wet on a consistent basis and left to dry however, they've been involved in motorcycle accidents, people have used them while painting or working in factories or on cars, they've not been babied and it shows. And they've likely never been cleaned or conditioned or hung on proper hangers or anything else we currently do to take care of things today.

I'm guessing that from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s people just had one leather jacket that they wore all the time everywhere - they didn't have a rotation, which brings me to my subject line above...

Will any of us ever wear our new-newish leather jackets enough to turn them proper vintage? Will anything in our closets that we bought unblemished ever look like a 1950s beat-up, well-loved, well-lived in jacket? Will your new Schott, or Lewis Leathers, or Vanson, or 5-Star, or Flathead, or whatever ever show the signs of an ill-spent youth?

And this is particularly true for people with a big rotation of jackets. If you have more than one piece in your closet will you put enough wear into any of them that in 50 years time someone gets excited about a vintage Y'2, or Vanson Octagon, or Schott Double Riders, etc from 2024? Are the good old days gone in that respect?

What do ya'll think?

 

[Carlos840]

Hope you're all looking at the start of a good day, or you're halfway through one now depending on where you live.

I find myself thinking about collecting on a fairly regular basis. I'd love to be a one watch, one jacket kinda guy, but I can't seem to stop poking around and looking for the next version. I enjoy what I have but there's something obviously appealing about the hunt, which I'm sure many of you relate to.

And I think it's made all the more interesting with the notion that there's a certain amount of money to spend and an opportunity cost with each purchase - if you buy this now it means you can't have that other one that you find tomorrow. So for me I do lots and lots of research and examining and thinking about which example I'd like best and inevitably I get sidetracked by something else shiny I need to go investigate over there and then later I come back to the original thing I was looking for and the process continues.

And sometimes it takes a long time, which is okay and really fun, and frustrating, and fun.

If I owned every jacket or watch that I purchased in my head with imaginary money I would literally need a second home to store all of it in. But the hunt is the stuff.

I have to be in Paris at the start of the Olympics for a work project and I'm counting the days until I can get to the Paris Flea Market (Le marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen à Clignancourt) for a good poke around.

So that brings me this - I'm not a vintage jacket or watch guy to own, but I can appreciate the look on other people and I see the appeal - I don't think the deep-V cuts of the 1950s double riders do me any favors on my frame. They're too exaggerated but they look fabulous on some people.

And part of the look is that those jackets have been worn hard - they're scratched and the grain has popped and they just look like they have stories to tell. But so too, a lot of those pieces have been mistreated over the years - they've gotten wet on a consistent basis and left to dry however, they've been involved in motorcycle accidents, people have used them while painting or working in factories or on cars, they've not been babied and it shows. And they've likely never been cleaned or conditioned or hung on proper hangers or anything else we currently do to take care of things today.

I'm guessing that from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s people just had one leather jacket that they wore all the time everywhere - they didn't have a rotation, which brings me to my subject line above...

Will any of us ever wear our new-newish leather jackets enough to turn them proper vintage? Will anything in our closets that we bought unblemished ever look like a 1950s beat-up, well-loved, well-lived in jacket? Will your new Schott, or Lewis Leathers, or Vanson, or 5-Star, or Flathead, or whatever ever show the signs of an ill-spent youth?

And this is particularly true for people with a big rotation of jackets. If you have more than one piece in your closet will you put enough wear into any of them that in 50 years time someone gets excited about a vintage Y'2, or Vanson Octagon, or Schott Double Riders, etc from 2024? Are the good old days gone in that respect?

What do ya'll think?

I think you are conflating vintage and heavily worn.
To me vintage means "old", it has nothing to do with how beat up the item is.
If i could find vintage jackets that fit me i would buy them, but i would still favour clean/unworn examples over a beat up one.
In 100 years, all my jackets will be vintage, few will be heavily worn.

PS: You can argue that what is defined as vintage is linked to the age of the person defining it, ie i was born in the 80s, to me vintage is 70s and older. For the people born in 2000s, the 80s and 90s are becoming vintage...

 

[Marc mndt]

Will any of us ever wear our new-newish leather jackets enough to turn them proper vintage? Will anything in our closets that we bought unblemished ever look like a 1950s beat-up, well-loved, well-lived in jacket?

The jackets from the 30s / 40s / 50s that are still around today haven't been worn heavily from the moment they were bought until today, otherwise they wouldn't have survived.

If you buy an Aero today and wear the crap out of it for five years it'll look more worn out than most of my 75 year old vintage jackets (which were hardly worn throughout their lifetime).

Like @Carlos840 said, there's a difference between vintage and heavily worn.

 

[bigmanbigtruck]

Will any of us ever wear our new-newish leather jackets enough to turn them proper vintage?

Just let the passage of time do it's thing... eventually that's what makes it vintage

 

[greenc]

The jackets from the 30s / 40s / 50s that are still around today haven't been worn heavily from the moment they were bought until today, otherwise they wouldn't have survived.

If you buy an Aero today and wear the crap out of it for five years it'll look more worn out than most of my 75 year old vintage jackets (which were hardly worn throughout their lifetime).

Like @Carlos840 said, there's a difference between vintage and heavily worn.

I appreciate the nuance between heavily worn and vintage - but the point I'm making is that during those decades between 1930 and 1960 the likelihood of people having multiple jackets in rotation isn't what it is today.

Money and consumption were different back then for the majority of people, so they wore what they had a lot, and those pieces are today's vintage finds.

You're absolutely right that there are examples of really well-preserved vintage jackets, but when the word "vintage" gets used I think it's not unlikely that most people equate that to a jacket from a forgone time that shows the life it has lived.

The word "patina" - and as a term I really don't like it - has in the last ten years allowed people to overlook all manner of defects and faults and instead see them as charming or indicating vintage status.

Good grain, creases, scratches, repairs, etc are oftentimes the hallmarks of preowned vintage pieces - fifty years or older, let's say - but I would argue that enthusiasts will sometimes seek out jackets with those characteristics because they don't look like new pieces.

So again, are any of us wearing our new pieces enough to put the creases, scratches, wear to the top coat, etc that in fifty years' time they'll look like the hard-worn pieces some collectors crave.

Put a different way, I would suggest that most of us simply don't wear our jackets today as hard or to the extent that people did decades ago - and I think this is partly precipitated by the idea that many of us have pieces to rotate through or that industry safety standards for construction sites, factory work, racing, etc means the jackets aren't worn as daily gear that gets put through the wringer like they used to be.

Vintage photos of men wearing leather jackets with the sleeves pushed up in a factory, or working outside on a building are cool because these garments are being worn in the way they were intended to be worn back then - as something to keep you safe and protected.

The idea of a motorcycle jacket for example as something worn for fashion probably didn't begin to take hold until the 1960s. In fact, if you wore a double riders in the 1950s people feared you were part of a gang.

 

[JMax]

OP- you mention enough wear and type of wear. IMO, the latter is more important for getting the worn look. If jackets are used for more than going to the pub or the supermarket, (I’ve got some of those), they definitely will look worn.

 

[Rm759]

In the '80s and '90s bikers, rock and roll guys, blue collar guys etc had one leather jacket, maybe two and wore it 24/7. Many didn't have money to buy multiple jackets and saw no reason for more. A lot of today's buyers are different and buy multiple jackets so they get a lot less wear. Also the internet has made it very easy to find and buy great jackets all over the world.

 

[dudewuttheheck]

As already stated, vintage is not the same as beat up or worn out.

I recently purchased an original Buco J22 that is less used in appearance than jackets that were worn for less than a year.

 

[Aloysius]

A fast-fading Japanese jacket will look older in 80 days than my 80 year old jackets (even the beaten up ones) look. (This is not a positive in my book; the fast fading looks like crap.)

 

[Observe]

A fast-fading Japanese jacket will look older in 80 days than my 80 year old jackets (even the beaten up ones) look. (This is not a positive in my book; the fast fading looks like crap.)

The teacore craze has grown to annoy me to be honest.

 

[Marc mndt]

New vs one year of wear... Not a good look imo.

 

[bigmanbigtruck]

New vs one year of wear... Not a good look imo.

View attachment 613943 View attachment 613945 View attachment 613944

ugggh... looks like it rusted rather than "teacore'd"

 

[Marc mndt]

ugggh... looks like it rusted rather than "teacore'd"

I have a hard time believing this is all natural wear. My 65 year old well worn Buco hardly shows any of those honeycomb wear marks.

 

[Aloysius]

I have a hard time believing this is all natural wear. My 65 year old well worn Buco hardly shows any of those honeycomb wear marks.

View attachment 613949 View attachment 613950 View attachment 613951

The thing you need to keep in mind when looking at these brands is that they're just porting things over from 2000s denim culture, like fast fading, an obsession with honeycombs, etc.

Mind you, not every Japanese brand got into that stuff. For example, Sugar Cane jeans don't do fast-fading, which is likely why the leather jackets from them/their sister brand don't either.

 

[Edward]

For me it all depends what you mean by vintage.... A lot of folks want their jacket to look like that cool 70-year old jacket that's really beat-up..... Not a look I want. I don't like teacore finishes for that reason. I like a black leather jacket the looks broken in, but stays black, not worn to brown. That sort of thing. But then my aesthetic isn't "1950s jacket worn now, in 2024", but 1950s jacket worn as it would have looked in the 50s, after a couple of years of relatively regular wear. That's my "vintage" look. That said, if the question is will a jacket bought new now ever look like a worn in, 70 year old jacket - then yes, in time, it will. Either with wear, or if you buy one of those finishes designed to wear off super-fast, then pretty quickly.

 

[greenc]

As already stated, vintage is not the same as beat up or worn out.

I recently purchased an original Buco J22 that is less used in appearance than jackets that were worn for less than a year.

dudewuttheck, what do you attribute the Buco's preservation to?

Was it barely worn? Worn carefully? Is the leather of a different quality than today and doesn't show the same kind of wear?

On a call with Vanson recently they indicated that today's leather is tanned differently than decades ago, which makes sense - different technology, perhaps different chemicals and additives, etc.

It's likely a purely subjective conversation but is 50yo horsehide substantially better than new horsehide?

 

[AbbaDatDeHat]

Hope you're all looking at the start of a good day, or you're halfway through one now depending on where you live.

I find myself thinking about collecting on a fairly regular basis. I'd love to be a one watch, one jacket kinda guy, but I can't seem to stop poking around and looking for the next version. I enjoy what I have but there's something obviously appealing about the hunt, which I'm sure many of you relate to.

And I think it's made all the more interesting with the notion that there's a certain amount of money to spend and an opportunity cost with each purchase - if you buy this now it means you can't have that other one that you find tomorrow. So for me I do lots and lots of research and examining and thinking about which example I'd like best and inevitably I get sidetracked by something else shiny I need to go investigate over there and then later I come back to the original thing I was looking for and the process continues.

And sometimes it takes a long time, which is okay and really fun, and frustrating, and fun.

If I owned every jacket or watch that I purchased in my head with imaginary money I would literally need a second home to store all of it in. But the hunt is the stuff.

I have to be in Paris at the start of the Olympics for a work project and I'm counting the days until I can get to the Paris Flea Market (Le marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen à Clignancourt) for a good poke around.

So that brings me this - I'm not a vintage jacket or watch guy to own, but I can appreciate the look on other people and I see the appeal - I don't think the deep-V cuts of the 1950s double riders do me any favors on my frame. They're too exaggerated but they look fabulous on some people.

And part of the look is that those jackets have been worn hard - they're scratched and the grain has popped and they just look like they have stories to tell. But so too, a lot of those pieces have been mistreated over the years - they've gotten wet on a consistent basis and left to dry however, they've been involved in motorcycle accidents, people have used them while painting or working in factories or on cars, they've not been babied and it shows. And they've likely never been cleaned or conditioned or hung on proper hangers or anything else we currently do to take care of things today.

I'm guessing that from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s people just had one leather jacket that they wore all the time everywhere - they didn't have a rotation, which brings me to my subject line above...

Will any of us ever wear our new-newish leather jackets enough to turn them proper vintage? Will anything in our closets that we bought unblemished ever look like a 1950s beat-up, well-loved, well-lived in jacket? Will your new Schott, or Lewis Leathers, or Vanson, or 5-Star, or Flathead, or whatever ever show the signs of an ill-spent youth?

And this is particularly true for people with a big rotation of jackets. If you have more than one piece in your closet will you put enough wear into any of them that in 50 years time someone gets excited about a vintage Y'2, or Vanson Octagon, or Schott Double Riders, etc from 2024? Are the good old days gone in that respect?

What do ya'll think?

I’ll answer your thread title question and leave the answers to your other questions and observations to yourself.
Yes, i think this one does.
Was cool when bought new in ‘73….still fits, gets worn and still kinda cool looking in ‘24.
I don’t know if it’s vintage but it’s a survivor.
50 years is a long f***ing time to wear any jacket for anyone.
So…you tell me.
B

 

[greenc]

The teacore craze has grown to annoy me to be honest.

I don't mid teacore but too much of a good thing can be too much. I don't like how Vanson's go grey along the scuffs, @dudewuttheheck I've seen your video about your C2 and I remember you not being a fan of that either.

 

[Aloysius]

Was it barely worn? Worn carefully? Is the leather of a different quality than today and doesn't show the same kind of wear?

Barely worn. I've owned Buco like that, still own Beck like that, etc.

A jacket that is worn will show it. Even if it doesn't have a different-colored core, you'll see creases and other kinds of wear.

It's likely a purely subjective conversation but is 50yo horsehide substantially better than new horsehide?

Depends on the horsehide, then and now. And in many cases 60s cowhide was nicer than the 50s horsehide it replaced.

I don't mid teacore but too much of a good thing can be too much. I don't like how Vanson's go grey along the scuffs, @dudewuttheheck I've seen your video about your C2 and I remember you not being a fan of that either.

I don't want to speak for DWTH but my impression from the forum is that his own views/experience on vintage has changed since he got the C2 which was his first. (An experience many of us go through.)

 

[Marc mndt]

what do you attribute the Buco's preservation to?

Was it barely worn? Worn carefully? Is the leather of a different quality than today and doesn't show the same kind of wear?

How fast a jacket will show wear depends on a lot of factors. It depends on the animal, goatskin being much more hard wearing than lambskin for instance.

It also depends on the tannage. Both Buco's shown below are steerhide but their hides were tanned differently, one having a black core the other having a brown core. The black core leather is much harder wearing than the brown core.

The black core jacket was probably worn a lot more than the brown core jacket yet its leather is in much better condition.

Then there's individual differences, one hide to another. Some hides are more dense than others.

Then there's the thickness of the topcoat.

All of the above also holds for today's leathers.