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All the sorts of festive fashion changes that Labor Day usually signals seem sort of meaningless this year, don’t they? Who cares about a nice new sweater, or a fancy double-faced cashmere coat? In the absence of such clear-cut trends is a material poised to dominate the fall: leather.
Last year, the leather blazer, popularized by a perfect Supreme specimen and the general greaseball charisma of Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, was the season’s could-you-or-can’t-you menswear item. In the winter, leather pants, too, became a menswear cult item. (We are far enough removed from that episode of Friends, one supposes.)
A new chapter of the leather revolution began this summer, when the British-Nigerian designer Mowalola Ogunlesi was tapped by Kanye West to lead the design team for his Gap collaboration. Those in the know were already hip to her eponymous line, which includes some of the best leather pants on the market and a hot pink leather trench coat printed with monsters from her spring 2020 collection. That show also included a number of leather suits and halter tops in jolting colors; it was slick, rich, and sort of sacrilegious. (“So this is as if I’m in a Black Woodstock festival,” Ogunlesi said at her show, “and someone has been murdered.”)
Empty though your fall calendar may be this year, it is in fact studded with leathery events. First is the debut of Alyx cofounder Matthew Williams as the new designer at Givenchy during Paris Fashion Week in October, where he will undoubtedly bring his ability to craft the perfect leather jacket to the house’s bourgeois lady atelier. In December comes Dune, the sci-fi epic featuring industrial leather poet costumes and starring Timothée Chalamet, who is certainly not a leather daddy, but is indeed a father of the leather movement. For truer leather daddies, there is Berlin-based GmBH representing with beefy trenches and vinyl trousers, and for Rick Owens heads, the Dune look is already familiar—the apotheosis of expensive cowhides that protect and preen in equal measure.
Humming in the background of all this leather froth are some significant accessories. Earlier this fall, menswear icon Ashley Olsen entered her New York office wearing what appeared to be a leather mask—it was in fact merely a black version of the standard-issue surgical model, but Olsen-favorite designer Yohji Yamamoto has produced a leather version. (It is minimalist, deer skin, $108, and sold out.) And the hottest leather accessory of all is not even leather: the Telfar shopping bag, made of vegan leather, which is a fancier way to say plastic, but in this instance carries all the edgy, bitchy panache of the genuine article.
What makes leather so right for now? The usual churn of fashion fads seems useless at a time when trends are so obvious—we’re wearing sweatpants because we don’t see anyone; no pants because no one sees us; Crocs because they are comfortable. Leather represents no particular aesthetic; it can be soft and hard, tough and sexy, and worn-in and even delicate, like on a Chanel purse. It is perverted and streetwise, but totally luxurious. Leather: the only thing in fashion that summons Van Halen as readily as a new car.