Ever since Marlon Brando slouched across the screen wearing a black leather jacket in "The Wild One", the mixture of animal magnetism, brooding menace and sexual aberration which the leather jacket manages to convey has ensured it a best-selling place in the catalogue of cool. But how did this functional garment, originally designed for military use, come to be universally adopted as a teen symbol, and how has it managed to survive the constantly shifting sands of trend and fashion? In "The Black Leather Jacket", Mick Farren unfolds the story behind the appeal of leather from its roots among the motorcycle dispatch riders, World War One flying aces and Nazi gauleiters, to its adoption as part of the uniform of postwar rock'n'roll. Using more than a hundred evocative photographs, "The Black Leather Jacket" traces the popularity of this visible emblem of macho meanness through the Hells Angels of the forties; the original punks and beats of the fifties; the counter-culture of the sixties; the sexual excesses of the seventies, the punk explosion; the heavy metal and rock groups of the eighties; to the present day where the black leather jacket is a potent part of 21st century consciousness and is constantly being adopted by high fashion and street style. Original and very revealing, this is the first book to really address the symbolic potency of the black leather jacket.
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