Blame it on Marlon Brando—or Pharell. Or maybe Kim Kardashian. The former’s 1953 portrayal of Johnny Stabler in is widely seen as the origin story of motorcycle style—the sort of splash that created the ripples still rolling out in the form of biker jackets and jeans and tall, sturdy black leather boots.
What Brando personified, of course, was the outlaw, the iconic rebel, with or without a cause. (When a local girl asks Stabler what he’s rebelling against, he famously responds: “Whaddya got?”) What began as mere protective gear in the form of Brando’s Schott Perfecto One Star studded leather jacket has become the prime mover of an entire ethos, industry, world view, and way of life. But if the mythology and iconography of biker rebellion are so simple as to be fixed in stone, the state of the art of that protective gear is an ever-evolving, highly engineered terrain, with everyone from racers to recreational riders now donning wildly colored, custom-fitted leather suits and jackets equipped with titanium skid plates at shoulders, knees, and elbows.
And while it’s a bit hazy as to exactly when style-forward early adopters began wearing this functional, highly technical gear away from the motorcycle as a style flex, it’s easy to see Pharell as a kind of canary in the high-vis coal mine: His evolution from bespoke classic biker jacket in the summer of 2015 to full-on racing leathers with an articulated leather skeleton sewn onto the outside a mere 18 months la.
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