Leather for Hard Times
Angelina Jolie on the red carpet in
strapless Michael Kors. Cate Blanchett
in a biker jacket posing for Interview
magazine. And Kate Moss in head-to-toe
Prada scaling the stairs to the Miu Miu
catwalk show in Paris just last week.
What fashion trend unites three of the
world’s most beautiful women? Leather.
Kate Moss in a leather dress from Prada
And it makes perfect sense: leather is
the ultimate hard times textile. Tougher
than it is expensive, it’s one of the
few materials in life that looks better
with age. And, as Jolie, Blanchett and
Moss prove, it can also work in the high
fashion tier – for the premiere, the
glossy photo shoot, or the front row.
“Leather is hugely important,” says Erin
Mullaney, the buying director of Browns
boutique in London. “Stefano Pilati at
YSL used almost entirely leather in his
first eight runway looks in this
season’s collection. The most popular
use of leather was motorcycle jackets
and leggings. I think the trend has
re-emerged as part of the 1980s revival,
but there is a much sexier and more
glamorous feeling to it – more Marianne
Faithful in Girl on a Motorcycle than
Iggy Pop.”
On the catwalk, leather was everywhere
for autumn: ultra-modern at Galliano,
with nipped-in waists at Temperley,in
minor bondage form at Rodarte, and
reworked as Brando biker jackets at
Blumarine, Hussein Chalayan and Jasper
Conran.
And the specialist leather companies are
enjoying a lucrative period. Those who
are currently influencing the high
street and high fashion are Lewis
Leathers, previously the go-to brand for
bikers, not to mention Cate Blanchett
for her Interview magazine appearance –
their 1950s Bronx jacket and 1970s
Lightning jacket, priced around £640,
are classics – and Belstaff, which
created Brad Pitt’s S.Icon Jacket for
Inglourious Basterds and Bruce Wayne’s
dark leather blouson in The Dark Knight
.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
More from Style - Nov-24“There’s a quest
for authenticity in fashion now,” says
Derek Harris, Lewis Leathers’ owner.
“And that’s twinned with ‘hard times’
dressing. In Japan in the mid-1990s the
magazine Free & Easy coined the term
‘Dad’s Style’, which was distinguished
by vintage fashion from the 1930s to the
1980s, with a lot of leather. I think
that genre is making its way into
European fashion right now.”
Of all the designers working with
leather, Rick Owens is perhaps the most
accomplished and influential. Leather
has been central to the Owens canon ever
since he began working as part of a
louche, underground clique in Los
Angeles more than 10 years ago. Since
relocating to Paris in 2004, he has
established a style distinguished by
layering, asymmetry and earthy tones
that fall somewhere between vampish goth
and stone-grey modernist.
“I’ve always loved the theatrical menace
of it,” he says. “In terms of
inspiration, I started out looking at
fetish glamazons from Eric Stanton
illustrations and ended up in leather
bars. My leather work is a mixture of
camp fetishism and the minimal languor
of [the fashion designer] Madame Grès.”
It may sound an odd combination, but
while leather is traditionally stiff,
Owens has transformed the fabric so it
hangs like a knit, and his approach has
been copied prolifically. It’s a rock
’n’ roll look that is also buttery soft
and luxe, a one-two punch that justifies
a jacket’s £1,800 price tag.
As Owens points out: “The generation
that saw punk rock and grunge and
Altamont are now in their 60s. Leather
isn’t just for the youth market any
more. In fact, I’m surprised young
people don’t reject leather as being an
‘old’ textile.” Maybe they just think of
it as adult.
Above article reproduced from Financial Times of London
