Sunday, August 19, 2007

Leather jacket

A leather jacket is a type of clothes, a jacket made of leather. The jacket has naturally a brown, dark grey or black color. Leather jackets can be styled in a range of ways and different versions have been linked with different subcultures in places and times. For example, the leather jacket have often been associated with bikers, military aviators, punks, metal heads, and police, which have worn versions intended for protective purposes and often for their potentially intimidating appearance.

In the 20th century the leather jacket achieve iconic status, in major part through film. Examples include Marlon Brando's Johnny Storable character in The Wild One (1953), Michael Pare in Eddie and the Cruisers, as well as James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. As such, these all serve to popularize leather jackets in American and British childhood from the "greaser" subculture in the 1950s and early 1960s. A later description of this style of jacket and time was "The Fonz" in the television series "Happy Days" which was shaped in the 1970s and 1980s but depicted life in the 1950s and 1960s. The Fonz's leather jacket is at the present housed in the Smithsonian Institution, and the Grease movie duo has also since popularized leather jackets with their T-Birds male clique.

The leather jackets worn by aviators and members of the military were brown in color and regularly called "Bomber jackets" as seen on frequent stars in the 1940s and 1950s such as Jimmy Stewart in the 1957 film, Night Passage.

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