Modern Vintage Vol.1 - Leather Westbury Jacket

Long before it became a wardrobe staple, the leather blazer had to earn its place. Its roots lie not in tailoring but in survival - the earliest leather jackets were flight gear, developed for WWI pilots exposed to the brutal, open-air cockpits of early biplanes. Function came first: warmth, durability, protection. Style came later. That shift began in 1928, when American designer Irving Schott created the Perfecto, a civilian leather jacket built for motorcyclists, replacing military buttons with a zip front. It was cheap, tough, and quietly radical. Within two decades, it had become something else entirely: a uniform of defiance.

"Leather has always carried a bit of drama with it - the rebel, the biker, all that shorthand," Spencer explains. "I wanted to take that away and see what was left underneath. Strip the armour out and you're just left with a beautiful hide that can move like wool. That's the bit that interested me."

The 1950s cemented that reputation. Marlon Brando's Perfecto in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean's jacket in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) turned leather into shorthand for youthful rebellion - stiff, structured, built to look tough on a motorcycle, not to hold a lapel. Leather, at this point, meant rigidity. It was armour, not tailoring.

Leather Westbury Jacket Leather Black

£889 GBP

Real Leather

Orsman Trousers Purdon Charcoal

£259 GBP

By the 1960s, leather had started crossing into more considered territory. Paul McCartney's leather blazer look, worn as the Beatles pivoted from suits back toward looser, more expressive dressing, is often cited as one of the first moments leather met finesse rather than pure rebellion. Even so, most leather blazers of the era still carried the material's inherent stiffness: hardware, heavy hides, a jacket that held its shape because the leather forced it to, not because of the tailoring underneath.

"We built the Westbury the way we'd build any of our unstructured jackets - no heavy canvas, no padding, just a soft roll through the shoulder," he says. "Doing that in leather is harder than it sounds, because the hide wants to hold its own shape. You have to work with a much softer skin and cut it so it drapes, rather than stands up on its own."

That's what makes our Leather Westbury Jacket a genuine departure. The Westbury is, at its core, an unstructured suit jacket - no heavy canvassing, no padded shoulders, built to move with the body rather than hold a rigid shape. Rendering that same soft, single-breasted block in leather runs directly against the material's history. Leather has spent a century being rugged by design. This one does the opposite: soft, unlined, with a natural drape more associated with a wool blazer than a biker jacket.

It's a quiet subversion, but a beautiful one too.