I’d like to have a word with the woman who bought her first biker jacket in 1987 convinced it made her look dangerous. It didn’t. It made her look like someone’s substitute teacher who’d borrowed a leather jacket for a costume party. I still have opinions about that jacket, and apparently I still have opinions about every one that’s come since, because this is the one category where nobody on this roster agrees on anything, and it’s not about fit, and it’s not about whether the zipper survives a Denver winter. It’s taste, plain and simple, and we have never once resolved it.
Half the argument is that a biker jacket should look a little dangerous, or at least look like it remembers being dangerous once, scuffed at the cuff, sitting slightly wrong on purpose.
The other half thinks that’s a costume too, just a different decade’s version of it, and wants something clean enough to wear over a blouse to something that isn’t a motorcycle rally, which, statistically, none of us have ever attended. I sit somewhere in the middle, which is its own kind of useless in an argument, but I lean toward the one that’s heavier than you’d expect the first time you put it on. Not for the look. Because the ones with real weight to them are the ones I actually reach for on the way out the door, and the flimsy ones stay on the hook looking good and doing nothing, which is its own kind of failure nobody warns you about.
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The gamble pick, and I’ll say it plainly, is the cropped one with the asymmetric zip that half the team is thrilled about and my sister took one look at in a photo and said nothing, which from her is a review in itself. It’s genuinely striking on the right frame and slightly like a costume on everyone else, mine included, and I’m not going to pretend that’s not true just because it photographs well.
The one I’d actually vouch for without hedging is heavier, sits a little past the hip, and has a collar that stands up properly instead of folding over like it’s tired. I’ve had a version of this silhouette three separate times across three separate decades, and I can tell you exactly which decade got the proportions right, and it keeps not being this one, except this jacket is the rare exception that argues back.
We never did settle the taste argument, not really, we just agreed to disagree loudly and buy different jackets, which might be the most honest thing I can tell you about this category. Buy the one you’ll actually put on when you’re already running late, not the one that looks best hanging still on a rack. The rack doesn’t go anywhere. You do.
