Proliferating Poseurs
Proliferating Poseurs
AT LARGE
MOTORCYCLISTS ARE RARELY ENTItled to gloat. This is one of those times. You can thank your jackets.
Fashion has rediscovered leather. Now. fashion being what it is (fickle, mainly), we know this won't last; we know that this season's haute couture will be next year’s declasse. But while it lasts, this whimsical attachment of the department store gurus for clothing the smart set in leather, head to toe, has to make all of us smile who have weathered the storms of public censure because of our longtime use of other skins to save our own.
It really doesn't matter that the cause of all this leather lather is the designers’ crosshairs having dropped on the likes of Tom Cruise and Robert Redford—or rather, their screen images as portrayed in Top Gun and Legal Eagles. What matters is that for legions of folks whose most daring moment comes when they buzz down the windows of their Pontiac Fieros to peer at the weather, the tough-guy leather look, the Indiana Jones adventure-look, the badassbiker leather look, is definitely in.
Most interesting is what a slick young salesman wearing a gold earring told me in a local high-fashion leather store about what today’s female buyers want. He said what the women most wanted was brown, bomber-style jackets, but only if they were four sizes too large and “distressed.” The “distressing” was to simulate long years of wear. The extra sizes were to simulate the jacket's being a gift from their boyfriends.
Think about this. For years, you and I have worn our Lewis and Bates and Langlitz and Hein Gericke and Staedler and Vanson and Avirex jackets through rain, shine, bugs and gravel, dutifully cleaning the things to make them last. If you're old enough, you remember when the bomber jacket was about the only kind you could buy. Or maybe it was one you were issued by Uncle, and when you finally were discharged from that military madness, you managed to “lose” it from your personal equipment list. However you came by your old jacket, it got its beat-up look the old-fashioned way— by being beaten up, either in your crew station or on your bike.
So now' we are faced with a fine irony. A society which for years eyed us motorcyclists with suspicion when we climbed off our bikes and walked into its cafés wearing our “distressed” jackets is now going absolutely crazy to buy the very look that once caused that suspicion.
I'll leave the heavy-duty psychosocial analysis to the guys who specialize in long-term grants and obscure doctoral theses. But one thing about this is worth us noticing: the apparent need for the jackets to look timeand weatherand use-worn. This attracts my attention because it suggests a yearning for a certain kind of validation on the part of the folks who buy such things. It suggests that they desperately wish to be thought the kind of adventurous spirits who’d wear a favorite leather jacket from Day One until the new is literally worn off. “Instant adventurers,” you might label them. Pretty harmless stuff (especially since next year at this time they'll be buying something entirely different), but. from my lessthan-tolerant view, also pretty offensive.
Here's why: You don't buy adventure. You live it. And you don't live it through videos and Club Med, either. You live it by taking chances, suffering hardships when necessary and going to the edge, however you might define it. In our two-wheel world, you can only do it by riding—not by talking, not by buying, not by leafing through innumerable glossy mail-order catalogs.
This is not a new syndrome. I got my first glimpse of it 20 years ago. when I worked at a bike shop in
Berkeley while in college. We sold Montesas and Triumphs—and the latter were the preferred rides of the frat boys, who would stroll in, adoring girlfriend on letter-sweatered arm, glance at the bikes and announce that they wanted “the red one.” When we gently tried to find out if they had the slightest idea how to work a Bonneville—then the most potent streetbike around—they'd give us the Of-Course look, and we'd sigh, because we knew what would probably come next. Usually it was Bruce or Randy (they always seemed to be named Bruce or Randy back then) doing an inadvertent wheelie into the traffic on University Avenue. Sometimes it was B. or R. doing serious damage to an ankle just trying to kickstart a Bonnie. Almost always it meant the bike would come back to us, much the worse for wear, very quickly.
Bruce and Randy figured the bike was part of a Look, just as today’s trendies figure a “distressed” jacket is part of the Look. So it might be. But the real Look does not come cheaply; it comes with commitment, training and the acquistion of skill. I was offended by Bruce and Randy in 1966, and I'm offended by people who imagine they can simply buy 40 years of flying or riding today.
In addition to being a motorcyclist, I'm pilot. So is my father, who got his brown leather USAAF A-2 jacket in 1941 in pilot training, then painted it with the name of his B-25 (“Mickey Finn,” after my mother), took it through 20 months of green hell in the Pacific until he was shot down by a Kawasaki (yes, Virginia, they did make something other than bikes back then) and sent home. His jacket is very “distressed”; and it never occurred to him that anyone other than he might wish to wear it in pathetic emulation of his life with it, just as it has never occurred to me that anyone other than I would wear my flight or motorcycle racing gear. Like the Distinguished-Flying Cross or an FIM World Record Diploma, the look of this equipment is earned.
So is the road-rash and bug-spattered “distressed” look of your riding gear. Wear it with pride; you got it the right way. The poseurs didn't.
Steven L. Thompson
