You and Your Leather Jacket

[nick123]

Have any good stories/memories/experiences while wearing your jacket? Please share!

 

[mendelboaz]

Awesome idea for a thread!

Back in June of last year, when I had just gotten my Schott Perfecto, a heat wave hit my country. I was head over heels in love with my Perfecto and I simply refused to take it off. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy for wearing a leather jacket in that weather. So, one day, I decided to wear the jacket without a shirt underneath it. When I was making my way to school on my bike I instantly noticed it was still hot-as-hell, but I didn't care. I was making a statement. The second I walked into school I started getting looks left and right. Girls checking me out, guys looking away with disgust, people laughing. That day I was the trending topic on Twitter. People even came up with a rhyme, that translates to "That hairy bear is hurting my eyes" (it rhymes in my language: die harige beer doen mijn ogen zeer). I have quite the hairy chest for my age so that kinda popped out there. That day, I was giving a musical performance of I Shot The Sheriff with some other kids from my music class. So there I stood, on the stage, in front of half the entire school (600 people), wearing nothing but my boots, a pair of jeans and my Schott Perfecto, singing I Shot The Sheriff. Boy did I feel like Johnny Ramone...except for the fact I was singing Bob Marley, LOL. People still talk about it to this day. Talk about making a name for yourself. FYI: jacket still smells of leather, nothing else.

 

[rocketeer]

Here's my funniest, just tooooo many memories to mention over the years.
Mid 1980s and I went to a fancy dress rockabilly gig at the Downham Tavern in Bromley, London.
So stuggling to think of someone to go as I spied my old Aero 1982 Battersea contract. Grabbed that, some tan trousers, an old 1940s snap brim fedora that was my summer work hat. So Indiana Jones it was.
No one was so picky in those days to say this was wrong or that was wrong but someone did comment that I really needed a thin moustache to be Howard Hughes. I guess they never spotted the whip

Then a year or so later I went to another fancy dress do, this time I didnt bother with the whip and went as Howard Hughes in the same gear, complete with the previously missing moustache. And everyone asked, "Where's your whip?"
John

 

[mendelboaz]

^That is utterly brilliant. Wonder if some folks asked on purpose the 2nd time around. Sounds like they were just messing with ya.

 

[nick123]

Both of those are absolutely hilarious!

 

[Stand By]

I mentioned this tale earlier in the year when it happened on a thread somewhere, so please forgive me repeating it here for those who've already seen it - but it's the best I've got.

Last March, I was out for the usual pre-dawn dog walk in the wood/park and I was in my usual gear for the time of year, but this had been, hands down, the most BRUTAL Winter in my 18 years out here - but this was the tail-end of Winter and was feeling like Winter's last gasp and it was an unremarkable -15C and with the windchill it felt like -25C, so I was in my ELC Irvin and C-3 beneath that, ELC B-3 cap and A-10 gloves, Aero RAF sweater and flannel-lined jeans and Blundstones ...
The dogs all have lights on their collars so I can see where they are in the dark ... and one of them, Willow, the golden/sheperd rescue from Texas loves to run all over the place and her light is constantly moving - and then I call her and she comes running - no problem.
Except this one morning, she ran waaay ahead of me and I saw her light go down the bank from the path and to the frozen river that we walk beside ... and then I heard a loud crack-pop sound - and her light stopped moving.
Oh crap. I called her - and still her orange light still didn't move. Oh crap.
So I run/shuffle as fast as I can on the frozen path - trying not to slip - and get to her ...
And there she is down in the river having fallen through the ice, up to her neck hanging on to the bank with her paws in the hole she's made ...

Now the path I'm on is set quite high compared to the river and the bank is very steep - almost sheer - so I lowered myself down to the water's edge and hung on to a solitary tree root with my left hand and grabbed Willow's collar - and heaved with all my might again and again. She's about 50lbs - and soaking wet in her double coat, was suddenly more - and I had no leverage to lift her out. I ride mountain bikes every day to work - so all my body strength is in my legs, not my arms - and I could not get her out. No way.
So I just knew that, to get her out, I'd have to get some proper leverage - and push her out - from behind ... and get in the river.
So without thinking about it, I just lowered myself into the hole beside her and I felt fairly certain that it wouldn't be too deep - I walk this walk every morning all year round, so know it's not a hugely deep river and I expected it to go to my thighs at this point ...
So it was a bit worrying to then find myself with the water up to my chest (!!) - and getting a good footing in the water was hard with all the broken branches and stuff hitting my shins ...
Anyway, I was able to get a footing and with a good heave, pushed her up and out over the height of my head and up the bank she went ... safe.
Time to get out myself ... and then I realised just why Willow couldn't get out - the bank is almost sheer with nothing to get a purchase on ! Oh.
So I stood there for a few moments wondering what to do - and yes, it was cold, and I could actually feel my thoughts slowing in a surprisingly un-worrying kind of way - but I knew I'd been in the water for too long as it was, so I had to get out - quick. So I saw some roots a few metres up the river bank and broke the ice to get to those - and climbed up and out ... and I crawled on to the path on my hands and knees.
And Dooie, our 115 lb Rottweiler, saw me clamber out and thought I was now playing a new game - and he started jumping and barking around me, wanting to play - and then jumped on me, knocking me over ! This was not turning in to my day at all. This was no way to start a morning - I'd not even had a coffee yet!
And there was Willow, merrily chasing squirrels up trees.
I got up on my knees and suddenly saw that my Irvin and A-10 gloves had suddenly got a really strange white dusting/frosting/icing-like finish all over - hard to describe. Quite pretty. So weird. And my flannel lined pants were hard like cardboard.
So then I'm trying to hook up all the dogs to the umbilical leashes and get back to the car ASAFP - as suddenly - NOW I felt COLD. Wow. Must get home.
But Willow's still chasing Squirrels - and Dooie still wants to play this new game and is hopping about me and barking at me, playing ... I was not amused.
Got them hooked up - and hurried back to the car ....
Then I realised that I'd locked the car and put the keys in my back pocket ... and they'd been in the river with me. Uh-oh.
Amazingly, the electronic thing still unlocked the car (! Thank you Honda.), into the car we went and I got home - my gear looking all grey/white all over when I walked in.

My girlfriend was most concerned - that I'd soaked the seat in the car as she has to drive in later ! (we laugh about that now). Had to put a towel on the seat for her ... LOL.

Straight in to the shower I went - and my shins were all banged up from the branches in the river and I was coughing all morning - and felt cold until around 2PM ... and later, I saw that my Irvin had developed a nice nubby curl to its fleece up to the chest. But as a way to achieve this look, I can't recommend it.

I regaled the story back then and the consensus of opinion was that Willow was a lucky dog - as was I. And as a result, I decided to add Lucky Dog to the back of my ANJ-3 jacket in a 40's font (which is something of a tribute to our pets and the dogs we've rescued from Texas.
Have made the stencil (using the A2 "Shack Rabbit" as inspiration) - just need the time to do it now.

 

[nick123]

Great story Stand By.

For me, it was going down to Los Angeles this year to visit my dad (who I rarely see these days-maybe once or twice a year) and having a chat with him, explaining my newfound fascination with all things jackets. Explaining to him that the thousands of dollars spent were all justified, that there was a whole subculture of guys interested in minute details, etc etc. etc. Then he pulls out a Cooper A-2 he's had since the 80s! Turns out the jacket thing runs in the family! (He is an aviation enthusiast so it was no surprise, but it was still cool).

 

[schitzo]

Stand By you're a better man than me. I would have called emergency services

 

[tropicalbob]

Great stories. Mendelboaz, if you get the chance check out a song called "I've Got the Bull by the Horns" by Johnny Horton. It's one of the greatest Rockabilly songs ever made, and it suits you to a tee. The guitarist is the stupendous Grady Martin.

 

[mendelboaz]

Great stories. Mendelboaz, if you get the chance check out a song called "I've Got the Bull by the Horns" by Johnny Horton. It's one of the greatest Rockabilly songs ever made, and it suits you to a tee. The guitarist is the stupendous Grady Martin.

Checked it out, radical song. If only I could have performed that song on that hot, Summer's day...

 

[DougC]

I wore my Indy goatskin to a couple lacrosse games during fall last year...cold, wet and nasty. My wife and my son both tried to steal my jacket after making fun of me for taking it on the trip. Since then, the jacket has logged ever mile I have either on me or in the back of the truck.

 

[Monitor]

Great stories! Rocketeers really made me chuckle, though.
Too bad I've nothing interesting to share...

 

[mendelboaz]

Great stories! Rocketeers really made me chuckle, though.
Too bad I've nothing interesting to share...

Now, I don't believe that for one second!

 

[nick123]

Other "non-stories" stories are just as encouraged. There has to be at least one person here who's gotten married in their jacket.

 

[Joao Encarnado]

There has to be at least one person here who's gotten married in their jacket.

Well, not a marriage but in a baptism and it's not "that" of a great story but one of my memorable leather jacket stories...
The child's mother didn't wanted me to wear a leather jacket on her son's baptism but it was a cold and rainy day.
I went also with a blazer but in that weather condition I do not wanted to get the blazer wet so I kept the leather jacket on for much despair of the child's mother.
I do not own any pictures of that day, maybe because the mother was so angry with me, she never gave me one.

 

[mendelboaz]

Kudos for not taking off your jacket. A man should never be forced to part with his leather jacket, not by God or a woman.

 

[Monitor]

Well, here's... a story of my Schott Multipocket. Not much of a story, but...

When I was a kid, back in the 80's, my father brought me a Schott Multipocket from the States. Being a serious rider all his life, he loved the style and figured his son deserves only the best (kinda guy who insisted only on originals and he must've paid more than he could afford for it) but unfortunately, as I've had no taste in anything as a kid and even less so in music and clothes, that jacket didn't go well with my gangsta rap phase - plus I really disliked anything rock/metal and considering metalheads and punks wore these, I wanted none of that, thank you very much.

So the jacket saw zero use and despite my fathers best attempt at trying to convince me to at least try wearing it, the Perfecto ended up hanging in the closet for years, until one day he, rather sadly asked me if I would mind if he gave it to one of my cousins (who was, yes, a metalhead). Not only could I have not cared less but I was actually happy that the ugly thing finally disappeared because, yo dawg, who would want to wear something so uncool, right?

Fast forward a decade or so - my dad passed away in the mean time - I re-discovered leather jackets. Naturally progressing through several different styles, I finally reached the ultimate one - the asymmetrical zipper, lancer fronted black leather jacket, aka the Perfecto, and thus my quest for the ultimate one began...
Didn't take too long for me to I learn about Schott (not a very famous brand in Europe, especially back then!) and so I began dreaming of one day owning the one and only original. Yeah, you can tell where I am going with this.
Oddly so, even though I was spending days and days browsing Schott.com, digging through eBay, etc. looking at the pictures of Perfectos and reading about the properties of their fantastic jackets, I still could not recall the Multipocket! Nothing occured to me, not a bloody thing. I was completely oblivious to the fact that I have had this jacket and it wasn't until much later that one night, it finally hit me.

My God... I've had it!

I don't think I've ever felt this stupid in my life. Anyway, took me days to track down all my cousins - had no idea which one it was that the jacket was given to. So I find the guy but he immediately starts about how the jacket means a lot to him, how he has intended it for his 5 years old son, once the kid grows up and also how it is a very expensive jacket! You don't even ride, man, I said. No, but he met his wife in it so there's definitely some serious attachment going on there.

How much?

$50?

Sold.

My Multipocket is back with me now, never to leave the wardrobe ever again.

 

[mendelboaz]

And you're saying that's not much of a story? Could almost be the plot of a summer flick, if you ask me! The childlike stubbornness, gladly giving the jacket away, and a decade later wanting it back more than anything... Being aware of your childhood stupidity, I think it's great and sort of a fundamental part of life. Reflecting upon your childhood.

 

[Edward]

How much?

$50?

Sold.

My Multipocket is back with me now, never to leave the wardrobe ever again.

That's a great story! I've got a Schott too now; my 618 was acquired second hand to replace an Aero MC. In truth the Aero is a superior jacket by some way, but it's just not cut for me (a size 42, it's great in the body but suddenly swoops in in the last couple of inches to be tighter than a size 42 slim halfbelt in the waist. Not sure if they've changed this in recent years - I bought it used a few years back ,and it was made under Lauder-era management, so Ken may have tweaked the pattern since he returned). Maybe one day I'll have Aero make me one, but for now it's a style that I know I won't wear as often as the other Aeros I have my eye on now. Still, it's the oldest leather jacket style I've loved. When I was fifteen and wanted a leather jacket badly, that's what I meant. It's what we called a "biker jacket", that very specific style, and nothing less would do. Alice Cooper wore one, and I wanted one too. Christmas 1990, I was not long turned sixteen. Santa tried me with what I believe the fashion magazines call a "blouson" in leather. It was worn for ten minutes in total, to and from church on Christmas morning - under extrem sufferance. When the shop reopened, it went back, and I left with a Perfecto-style jacket that cost, after haggled discounts, precisely £72.00 - about GBP150 in today's money. Wouldn't have been on a par with an Aero now, though I well remember it as being on a par with the Schott I have now. Maybe I just got lucky (I've since owned a few cheaper jackets in this style which were also pretty damn good, if you weren't fussy about things like chunky and functional YKK zips, which I wasn't back then). I wore that jacket everywhere I could get away with (despite stern parental instructions never to wear it in Belfast I still did any chance I got) for three and a half years, by which point I'd started to fill out in the shoulders and it began to resemble the ill-fitting jacket sported by a young Joey Ramone, who by then had replaced Alice Cooper as style guru number one when it came to leathers.

For the first couple of years at university I did without a leather jacket, but still wanted one. By this time the wide availability of leather jackets like this in the eighties had given way to nineties fashions. Still pre-web and with limited resources as a student, it wasn't easy to track them down. For my 21st in 1995, my parents tried to buy me a nice quality "biker jacket", something they knew I wanted. My dad being at this point a former biker (some years later, he'd get back on a bike again, but not for now) went to a quality bike dealer and came away with the jacket they chose to surprise me with, one they thought I'd wear. The shop owner had poo-pooed the Perfecto style, claimed they were no use, too short, called them "boob tubes" and said he wouldn't stock them, so they came home with something of this design:

It would have been about £300 in today's money. It was never worn. I think they persuaded me to try it on, just about, but it was never going to fly. It was heavily padded, made me look twice my size, too long for my liking, and I still believe I'd have looked like an idiot wearing it on a bike, let alone on the train. Clearly the roots of my vintage-style preferences were already beginning to form, subconciously, at least when it came to leather jackets. It was returned, and in the absence of the Perfecto style I wanted, I elected for a much cheaper jacket, approximating what I would now know as a Highwayman-style, in black cowhide. I wore it quite a lot for a bit (including one sweaty night at a close-packed Joyrider gig in the Mandela Hall in Belfast, at which black dye came out of the jacket all over my prized Foo Fighters t-shirt... washed out fine, though), but for all it fitted in with what my tribe were wearing at the time, it still wasn't.... quite right. It ended up in the wardrobe, unworn, for a few years until I moved to London, and during my second spring here, in February 2000, I brought it over from my parents' house and wore it quite a lot. In October 2000 it went with me to Vegas for the official 25th Anniversary celebrations for the Rocky Horror Picture Show. That jacket got worn a lot to the office, and it became the first leather jacket that taught me to actually appreciate the value of something a bit less..... in yer face for office wear on less formal days, and the likes. At this time I also had two other leathers... In 1997ish, my dad had found a Perfecto-style (albeit with one small buckle each side rather than the halfbelt on the front - same size and style of buckle, though) in a charity shop for just a tenner. It was quite grey when I got it, but a lot of work with boot polish and leather restorer brought it up nicely (Dad knew his stuff on that front; he'd been resotirng vintage cars for thirty odd years by that point). That jacket got worn hard for a long time. First as my primary leather jacket away from work... Eventually it got a bit worn and was replaced with a traditional Perfecto-type from eBay. It still hung around, though... At one I time I contemplated painting it up, but then, as a serving member of the Fishnet Army, my position in various Rocky Horror shadowcasts changed and I became a Dr Frank N Furter. For a while, until I found a fringed Plainsmanalike, it served as my Frank leather jacket. Later it was used in a Grease-themed evening as Leo from the Scorpions' jacket. I still have the sleeve on which I painted the Scorpions colours.... the sleeves were removed in 2006 to replicate the then-current costume for the stage production of the Rocky Horror Show. It's still in my wardrobe in that form, hanging along side my old punk military dress jackets and a wide-lapelled leather blazer that used to me my dad's, and which I wore a lot around 96/97/98. The Perfecto type that replaced it was worn extensively from 2002 until 2010, when it was pressed into costume service; it now bears Johnny Strabler's BRMC "colours". 2010 was, of course, the year I picked up the Aero I'm now planning to sell having only worn it a couple of times, replaced just in June 2014 with a Schott 618 - Joey having given way to Brando as the main fashion influence. The jacket remains the same; the jeans are now significantly wider in the leg, and a sturdy pair of engineer boots appears where once there were Converse.

In the last ten years or so, my tastes in leather have broadened. I now own a few jackets of different styles. The Highwaymanalike eventually wore out the lining, but it wasn't worth enough for it to make sense to replace that, so it was sold on and I picked up a cafe racer which I wore to the office in the Spring. Around 2006, I decided this really wasn't for me, and so it was sold on and I began to look for something else. I was opening my mind, gradually, now to some fairly unconventional stuff in leather - I was even open to the notion of a brown jacket - or, indeed, other, non-black, leathers.

Around the time I found this place I also rediscovered the Aero and Eastman websites I had once discarded as being overly expensive, and so things cranked up a notch... I now own eight leather jackets which get worn regularly, with one on the way, and seven I've identified for sale, proceeds to go towards the eight on my wants list that I have convinced myself will be the end of it.... Yeah.

That first Perfecto style was really something special, though. I sold it in 1993 for GBP35, to a young lady who wore it on the back of her first bike. I like to think it's still out there somewhere, acting as a gateway drug for somebody else...

 

[Monitor]

There's a lot of me in your excellent story, Edward! Albeit, as much as I try to find myself in a style other than the Perfecto, I can't. Most I can stand wearing my Highwayman is for one week tops and then I'm back to the good old Strabler look... Can't help it. Other than the Perfecto, my first serious riding jacket was a fantastic Hein Gericke CR styled number that was simply perfect for the kind of bike I ride (1979 Ducati Desmo), but I still insisted on riding that thing wearing a Perfecto, even though it was uncomfortable as hell... Many years ago, when I started working for a relatively big publishing company, I bought a Highwayman thinking, I can't go to a meeting dressed up like something from The Wild One (or Village People music video, take your pick), I definitely need something, yeah, less in your face and more formal, office friendly but even that didn't last long. Of all the jackets I have, HWM has seen least use.

My lady says she doesn't like seeing me in anything other than my Strabler gear. She says she finds it reassuring. Exact word she used. Never figured out what she meant by that... Don't think I want to, either.