ByMick Farren

Ever since Marlon Brando slouched across the screen wearing a black leather jacket in The Wild One, the mixture of animal magnetism and sexual aberration which the leather jacket manages to convey has ensured it a best-selling place in the catalogue of cool. Using more than a hundred evocative photographs The Black Leather Jacket traces the popularity of this emblem of macho meanness through the Hells Angels of the forties; the original punks and beats of the fifties (James Dean, Brando, Elvis); the counter-culture of the sixties (the Weatherman, Electric Dylan); the sexual excesses of the seventies (S&M, Al Pacino, Christopher Street gays); the punk explosion, begun by the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Clash; the heavy metal and rock groups of the eighties; to the present day where the black leather jacket is a potent part of 21st -century consciousness and is constantly adopted by high fashion and street style.

144 pages / 100 photos
250 x 192mm
ISBN 978 0 85965 410 4
Paperback

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