Symbolic, functional, and iconic, leather has gone from a lifestyle choice to a material favored by everyone in the fashion industry. The story of a material in search of respectability.
Leather has always been praised for its robustness, resistance, and durability. Cowboys used it for protection by wearing over-trousers: the famous chaps.
Butchers wore thick leather aprons to minimize the risk of injury. Plumbers stored their heavy tools in ultra-resistant vegetable-tanned leather bags. And, since time immemorial, it has also been used to make shoe soles.
Before conquering the catwalks of Haute Couture and ready-to-wear, leather was therefore associated with the rural world or the sphere of work.
Then, with Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), he became a leather jacket and thus became the emblem of the bad boys and bad girls, a symbol of a rebellious, marginalized youth that challenged the conservative system of 1950s America.
The urban and destructive rock of the Stooges in the late 1960s and the Velvet Underground from 1965 onwards, then the punk scene in the 70s, imposed a leather philosophy that revolved around the values of getting high, counter-culture, urban violence, the rage to exist, and the challenging of norms.
The undisputed high priestess of punk, environmental activist, and early anti-fur campaigner, Vivienne Westwood used, among other things, the leather jacket to challenge the established system and promote alternative ways of living and thinking. The same is true of Robert Mapplethorpe 's photographic work , which expresses transgression by elevating leather (jackets, trousers, whips, etc.) to the status of a fundamental vocabulary.
Within gay and lesbian cultures and the BDSM world, leather asserts a particular identity, carrying heterogeneous connotations such as hyper-masculinity, dominance, submission, etc. It can evoke erotic arousal (tactile, olfactory, etc.). Since the mid-1990s, leather fetishists have celebrated the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco . More recently, a Folsom Europe was established in Berlin.
Over the decades, leather has ceased to be a marker of rebellion, becoming just another look: the all-black look of Matrix (Lana & Lilly Wachowski, 1999) or the hyper-stretch jumpsuits and leathers of Jean-Claude Jitrois in the 1990s.
These machine-washable stretch leathers that he invented are revolutionizing the way we wear a material whose fetishistic charge is being reinterpreted.
Gone is any hint of vulgarity; leather is elevated in a feminine reinvention with refinement and sensuality.
In the world of haute couture and ready-to-wear, Hermès - originally a saddler - Botega Veneta , Alaia and many others have restored its prestige.
Ambiguous and cold, wild or sophisticated, or even a second skin that hugs the flesh, leather has become, in the fashion sphere, a marker of luxury and elegance.
Symbolism of leather
