Everyone treats brown as the safe biker jacket, the one you buy when black felt like too much of a decision, and I think that’s a lazy way to pick a leather that’s actually harder to get right than black ever was. Black hides seam wear, hides scuffs, hides the fact you bought it too big because the sample size ran small. Brown shows all of it. You can’t hide behind brown. Nobody says this out loud when they’re recommending it as the “easier” choice, they just let you find out the hard way, on your own shoulders, in bad light.
I own four of these right now, which is one more than I need and exactly the number that happens when you keep buying jackets you’re not sure about instead of jackets you’re sure about.
Two are real. Two are crushes. The real ones get worn on repeat, thrown on over a flannel that used to be my brother’s, over a plain gray tee, over pretty much anything I already own. The crushes get worn twice, get complimented once, then get color, cut, or a zipper that catches, and go quiet in the closet for a season.
The pockets are where I judge these hardest. A biker jacket pocket that’s decorative, that gaps open or sits too shallow to trust with anything heavier than a receipt, tells me the whole jacket was designed to be photographed, not worn. Mine currently has a house key, one hair tie, a folded parking stub from three weeks ago I keep meaning to throw out, and, for reasons I can’t explain, a single AAA battery. That’s not glamorous. That’s a jacket doing its actual job.
You Might Also Like
Color wise, brown does more than people give it credit for. Against black, it reads sharper than black on black ever does, more like a decision than a default. Against blue, denim especially, it looks like something out of an old catalog my dad would’ve actually worn, and he did, for about a decade, without one complaint about how it aged. Against a bright color, an orange sweater, a red bag, brown stops being the safe option and starts doing real work, it grounds the whole outfit instead of fighting it.
The gamble in this lineup is the lighter cognac one, the one that looks incredible on the one friend I know who can wear it without it reading as a costume, and slightly like a rental car interior on almost everyone else, myself included on a bad day. I’m not pretending otherwise. If you’ve got the coloring for it, it’s the best jacket in the group. If you don’t, you’ll know in about four seconds in a dressing room mirror, and there’s no fixing that with a good scarf.
