ABSTRACT
Any description of someone wearing leather carries connotations of combat and aggression. Wearing leather is the legacy, softly but unerringly applied, of warriors wearing the spoils of their hunt on their backs or incorporating their totem on their person. These images are now reserved for film and fancy but they maintain a powerful hold upon the popular imagination. The leather bomber jacket, and the gang jacket, both bearing the insignia of their particular fealties and allegiances, have become indelible displays of strength, defiance, and fortitude. The conjunction of leather styling and masculinity exposes the fault lines in a homogenous idea of masculinity. For the robust (straight) assertiveness of the wearing leather has tended, by the end of the twentieth century, toward sexual inclinations that fork into more than one direction. It is also the assertion of roughness in men's styling that exposes a very different pattern in the objectification of men in modern culture when compared to that of women.
