Yahoo News No man can wear a leather jacket after this age
Brad Pitt in blood red leather in Fight Club; Marlon Brando lounging against a motorbike in a bulky jacket in The Wild One, and your husband nipping out to the shops for a pint of milk in a black leather biker with too many zips.
In all three cases, the jacket stands out - and that’s because wearing leather is one of the strongest sartorial statements a man can make. The results, however, vary wildly. Do it right and you conjure the spirits of the bad boys the world has swooned over for the last century. Do it wrong and there is a whiff of half baked gangster meets middle-aged divorcé.
Age, sadly, plays a powerful part, as evidenced by Brad Pitt and George Clooney - 59 and 62 respectively - who were pictured this week looking less than their best while filming their new Apple series Wolves in matching leather jackets.
“The styling really isn’t helping them - smart shoes, a proper white collared shirt, grey trousers and cosy knitwear do not belong alongside a leather jacket,” says the Telegraph’s men’s style editor Stephen Doig.
And whereas Pitt appeared mysterious, tough and undeniably sexy in 1999’s Fight Club, a quarter of a century later, I can’t help but think how much better he would look in a nice navy coat. Pitt was 36 then; I’d argue the age to go cold turkey on leather is around 39.
Unfortunately in Britain, this half-office-half-biker attire is more popular with the midlife shopper hoping to inject some sartorial testosterone into his everyday look than anyone else. This was as true in the days of Only Fools and Horses and Love Joy as it is in 2023. Serial offenders today include Ricky Gervais, 61, and the cast of Top Gear. And where Jeremy Clarkson leads, many men in possession of a bald spot, a child and a house in the suburbs will follow.
The problem with the leather jacket is it seems like a silver bullet. It’s expensive, it’s one item, it’s an unfamiliar material and has the right associations with sex, motorbiking and being hard.
What’s clear is that a leather jacket is not the cure to the inevitable march of time, not least because middle age spread doesn’t help the situation (although as The Rock proves, you can have actual rock-hard abs and still look slightly silly).
Women who buy their husband a leather jacket for Christmas in the hopes of sexing up a long-term relationship should also heed this advice (see Tanya Moodie’s character in Motherland). It is about as likely to work as a Victoria’s Secret lingerie gift box would the other way around.
“The issue with black leather is that it has bad boy connotations - at best Marlon Brando, at worst Ross Kemp going undercover - so consider a brown shade instead, which is more subtle and easier to work into middle aged wardrobes,” says Doig. “Suede is also a good alternative; it’s more grown up and less statement-making.”
And if your heart is set on black leather? “Wear it with a plain white T shirt and black jeans,” he adds. “But only if you look like Justin Theroux.”
What of those Theroux-like men who have all the attributes needed to pull off a leather jacket - thick hair, well-cut jeans, a youthful waistline and a non-corporate job? They certainly don’t look ridiculous, but would they look more attractive in something else? Probably.
Exceptions to the cause are men with actual motorbikes and the truly tough. After all, nobody would think to mock Tony Soprano for wearing leather in midlife - but if the bar is being a New Jersey gangster with a murder count in the hundreds, then perhaps it’s not a bar worth hitting.
