Distressed Leather has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple decades and covers a wide range of looks. In 1990 when I first started manufacturing leathers for Indian Motorcycles we needed to find a vintage look for the leathers. This is early in the life of the modern Indian Motorcycle company. My friend Fuss Cooper in Toronto was rebuilding the brand from the ground up starting with the clothing line. A company in France was selling leather jackets made of horsehide with the Indian crests on the back. Fuss had already secured the trademark in Canada and sent us one of the Lee Trevor jackets to copy. Horsehide was not a common leather in Canada and was quite expensive. The Lee Trevor jackets retailed for $1600 in exclusive boutiques. Fuss wanted a worn-out look to the jackets. The original Indian Motorcycle Company went out of business in the mid-fifties, and all the company graphics were very cool and vintage.
Our main leather supplier at the time was Enterprise P. Boucher Ltee. out of Quebec. The owner, Pascal Boucher made for us the absolute best leather for this purpose. In the early 20th century there was no drum dying of leather to speak of (submerging the skins in a vat of dye), most leather was surface dyed. The crust color (crust is the skin itself) was usually a natural beige, or taupe color. If you see a black leather biker jacket from the 50's, you will see the beige color showing through where the surface dye or paint has worn or cracked away. It's a very cool look. So when we wanted to make jackets look like they were from the fifties we needed to have the leather made in the same way. Pascal took a beige crust, surface dyed it in black and then milled the leather. The milling process began to crack and wear away the finish. The end result was a leather that was already partially "worn" before we even cut. However, if you cut and sew a jacket with this leather and think that you are done, you are wrong. The jacket will look contrived. When the jackets came out of production we took to sandpaper to further ruin them. Think about it, if your leather jacket is going to wear, where will it show first? The most? On the seams, right? It took a whole bunch of practice but we finally got our technique down where we were sanding all the seams and other wear points like the elbows and by pockets to come up with a "naturally' worn looking jacket.
These early jackets retailed for around $900 in the exclusive fashion boutiques. I still have jacket # 2 that we had made for Indian in 1990. I will photograph it and post it here so that you can really see the distressing. With the customer wearing the jacket, in no time it would be hard to tell if the jacket was recently made or if it was 60 years old!
