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.
