In March, Brandon Mahler took a pair of thrifted leather pants and spliced them into shorts. Holding the results, Mr. Mahler, a fashion consultant in New York, had to acknowledge that he’d crossed the line of sartorial sanity.
“When are you wearing leather shorts?” Mr. Mahler said, speaking with a Hyde-like clarity about this Jekyll-esque tailoring experiment. “They don’t make sense.”
On other leather items, Mr. Mahler, 33, doesn’t hesitate. He owns three pairs of leather pants, several leather jackets and a prized Zegna leather blazer that called out to him at a secondhand store like a lustrous needle in the cotton haystack.
“Maybe it’s this rebel bad boy thing,” he said of his tendency to dress like an oil slick.
Mr. Mahler typifies a cohort of men — often younger, yes, but also unbothered by the material’s many clichés — that have leaned into leather.
There’s Shaboozey, the country-rap warbler who appeared on “Saturday Night Live” this month outfitted in leather from his boots to his bolo tie; Timothée Chalamet, putting a fine point on his rocker pivot by wearing a black leather Prada blazer on the “A Complete Unknown” red carpet; and the Memphis Grizzlies player Jaren Jackson Jr., who arrived at a recent game in inky leather pants and a matching leather tank top.
In stores, glossy options are available at all price points. Bottega Veneta’s $6,700 made-ya-look calfskin shirt is printed to look like pedestrian flannel. Zara’s oversize “leather blazer” sells for $139 though it’s polyester. Somewhere in between are Supreme’s $498 baggy leather pants.
Still, leather is one of those tripwire fabrics in men’s fashion. To wear it is to face that you will look like you’re doing a thing. Even men who clothe themselves in hides concede that there is a theatricality to the look.
“It’s been hard for me to find a leather jacket that feels like it’s not totally a costume,” said Albert Muzquiz, 29, a fashion content creator in Los Angeles who posts under the name @EdgyAlbert.
Women, more conditioned to trying trends, are freer to toy with leather. It is unlikely that a woman in a leather blazer would be called Donnie Brasco. Men, as more than one source noted for this article, cannot skirt that same fate.
“Men don’t want to be a caricature,” said Savannah Yarborough, the designer of Savas, a leather specialty label with stores in Nashville and Los Angeles. In the past year, Ms. Yarborough has introduced $2,600 leather pants cut like five-pocket jeans and created full leather suits for clients. Her most “strange to witness” request, she said, was a zip-up leather hoodie, though she has now sold a number of them. (Wearing leather, of course, can be a base signifier that you spent money.)
“There’s a sense of someone needing to give men permission because they’re afraid that they may look like they’re trying to be something,” Ms. Yarborough said.
Savas also manufactured Mr. Muzquiz’s ideal leather jacket: a raven-black blazer with peak lapels. He described the jacket as a sort of armor. “I often wear this one to clout-y L.A. events that I probably shouldn’t really be invited to,” he said.
Wearing it also makes him think of Brian De Palma’s porn-industry thriller “Body Double,” one of a number of ’80s films — erotic and otherwise — to feature a leather-blazered main character. “There’s just a real sexiness” to the glossy jacket, Mr. Muzquiz said.
The more you talk to men about leather, the more you realize their touch points can vary.
Some offer Leonardo DiCaprio’s cigar-brown leather jacket from “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” as a template. Others propose the cast of “The Matrix,” photos of which are regurgitated today on Y2K-worshiping Instagram accounts. A few nod to the gay subculture captured in the work of the artist Tom of Finland, though the mainstreaming of the leather trend has done much to mute those homoerotic overtones.
The leather hall of fame balloons with names like the Starchitect Peter Marino, who CBS News said dresses like a “bouncer at a leather bar”; Elvis Presley, who played his 1968 comeback special in a glossy leather suit; and John Shaft in his imposing black leather trench.
Leather detractors had their feelings captured in “The Leather Man,” a much watched 2002 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a leathered-up salesman played by Jimmy Fallon tried to sell a customer on venturing into the gloss. “Nothing’s sexier than a pair of capri pants made from rattlesnakes,” he implored. Nothing’s squeakier either per the sketch, which had Mr. Fallon lumbering through the store, his outfit whining like a trapped mouse with each step.
Squeaks are trivial to Bryce Lennon, 37, a cartographer and part-time fashion blogger in Lumberton, N.J., who recently snatched up a boxy leather blazer at Goodwill. “I have an Afro, so it’s giving 1970s,” Mr. Lennon said. He can be swayed to the full leather look (the “Finnish tuxedo,” if you will), but only if the shades match.
“The blacks have to go together, or it’s just not gonna look right,” he said.
The secondhand provenance of Mr. Lennon’s blazer is pivotal to explaining how leather has gained traction again for young men. “We’re going to these thrift stores, finding these pieces for $15, $20, and falling in love with them,” said Raj Modi, a corporate analyst in Chicago who recently located a classic black leather blazer at a thrift store for $15.
This is a real-world example of fashion trend cycles at work: middle-aged men clean out their closets, including those leather jackets that they long ago downgraded from suave to sleazy. Those jackets land at thrift stores on the cheap where a new generation sees them as novel, even covetable.
“It’s a little oversize,” Mr. Modi, 24, said of his jacket. “It’s got the shoulder pads.” In it, he said: “I feel so freaking cool. There’s no other way to explain it.”
The post These Men Can’t Get Enough Leather appeared first on New York Times.
