Bikers were the first outsiders to take note of the black leather jacket’s utilitarian value, as their inevitable brawls with gravel meant wearing road rash on their leather rather than their comparatively feeble flesh. In 1928, New York designer Irving Schott introduced the “Perfecto,” a zipped and belted hunk o’ hide that reigned as the ideal BLJ silhouette for decades to come. As Schott’s design was originally distributed by Harley-Davidson, the “Perfecto” soon became the saucily soiled flag flown by the most vicious of motorcycle gangs, most notably, the notorious Hells Angels.
In Hunter S. Thompson’s journalistic inquiry into the infamous biker gang, he writes, “The farther the Angels roam from their own turf, the more likely they are to cause panic. A group of them seen on a highway for the first time is offensive to every normal notion of what is supposed to be happening in this country; it is bizarre to the point of seeming like a bad hallucination … and this is the context in which the term ‘outlaw’ makes real sense.”
Indeed, the leather-laden outlaws struck fear into the hearts of civilians and cops alike, as they tore through towns with gleeful irreverence. In 1953, the fearful image of the motorcycle gang was cinematically packaged in Laslo Benedek’s “The Wild One,” led by a young Marlon Brando. Aptly encased in Schott’s “Perfecto,” Brando mimed the sexy saunter of a biker-gang leader with magnetic ease. Hence, the black leather jacket was nationally broadcast as rebel-youth emblem, and Brando was dubbed a big-screen bad boy.