In 2014 I bought a leather jacket and I’m hoping by the end of this year (2018) I will work up the nuts to wear it. Everyone alive looks good in a leather jacket, is the thing. Fashionistas wear leather jackets unsleeved like a cape over their shoulders. Grizzled bikers wear leather jackets that have eroded and formed to them like a sweaty second skin. Goths in long leather trench coats, still somehow watching The Matrix on DVD, look more at home than they ever do when they are clad in leather. Every single woman alive looks demonstrably sexier in a cropped leather jacket over literally any outfit they wear. (If you ever want to melt my heart to honey just be a human woman and wear a leather jacket at me with the slightest degree of sass. Pair it with shades and I will propose to you on the spot.) Have you ever seen Lenny Kravitz wear a leather jacket? To see Lenny Kravitz in a leather jacket is akin to hearing the trumpets of heaven played down by the angels. Lenny Kravitz was born in a leather jacket and will die in one too. Imagine, for a moment, how many times Lenny Kravitz has had sex while wearing a leather jacket at the same time. Nobody is ever going to tell Lenny Kravitz to take his leather jacket off to bone down in. Lenny Kravitz said once in 2005 that he was giving up on sex until he got married, presumably because every time he wore a leather jacket people just kept tearing at it, trying to fuck him. He re-affirmed this celibacy vow in 2011. Lenny Kravitz, on remaining celibate, 2014: ‘Did what? I said that?’ Lenny Kravitz does not remember disavowing from sex, twice. I cannot imagine how much leather-clad sex this man has had to so addle his mind. I desperately, desperately want to be Lenny Kravitz. I bought a leather jacket.

After Mum died we cleared the house and I found the three jackets my dad ever treasured hidden in the cupboard under the attic: a long overcoat his dad had left him, in a sharply insane houndstooth check, size double-XL and unwearable in the 21st century: this we donated helpfully to charity. Another was a greasy-necked bomber jacket that read ‘CARLTON TELEVISION’ across the back of it, presumably some throwback to that brief time when he had some success in his career: this was entirely unwearable by either anyone who had ever worked for Carlton television or anyone who respected ever looking good, ever (my dad was not a fashionable man: he once came home with a pair of flesh-pink cowboy boots he’d found in a charity shop and he insisted on wearing them [they had a heel], and I remember this particular act of unstylishness being one of the Top #5 arguments my parents ever had with each other). And, finally, an old A1 leather jacket – deep brown, a sort of purple-brown, frayed ribbed cuffs on the arms and round the body, cutaway collar, beautiful. It was hard like a shell of armour would be. The inside was softly padded in a faded yellow-green. Inside the pockets: some old, gross tissues. The smell: leathery but also dusty, at once smelling of masculinity and nothing at all. ‘Heh,’ I said. ‘This is cool!’ I wore it to the pub that night. Everybody told me I looked stupid.

You have to have gravitas, to wear leather, is the thing. A cow died for this. When you wear leather, you are saying: I am wearing the very skin of a very large, mad animal. Cows can fuck you up. We squeeze them of their milk and meat then wear their skin for warmth and sport. Leather has a powerful musk to it from that fact. An animal, vanquished and tanned and stretched taut and shaped, and cut to size and riveted and folded, and an especially gnarly chunky zip affixed to it, and sold to you, with all the allure, in shops with pulsating stereo speakers in the corner and low lights and assistants with facial piercings. Do you have this gravitas? I am not sure I have this gravitas. My father’s leather jacket was formed into the very shape of him – his shoulders, apparently, were far broader than mine, and the leather was taut across the back as a result; around his torso the jacket was bulged and round, as if it had been affixed with belts around a barrel for many years – and it felt odd to be wearing the shape of my dad’s body over the reality of my own. I took the jacket home, moved it to five houses with me wherever I went, and now it’s in a trunk somewhere, still in his shape and not mine, still with his cigarette smell and not my far more florid fragrance, still his and not mine.

I often think of vintage guys, when I see them, with their little waxed moustaches and their silk bowties: I look at them and I think: how did they happen? Because as young teens, we all more or less wear the same thing: jeans, hoodie, a shoe of some sort. The cut of the jeans and how disgustingly unwashed the hoodie is tends to fit with your style tribe, and that’s where the edges between us start to fuzz and differ (if you like music with guitars in it you basically have the same one-size-too-big oversize black hoodie with the drawstring missing, same blue pair of jeans with crisp dust rubbed in streaks onto the thighs, and same squashed dirty trainers; if you are more of a kid who likes pop music or dance CD mixes then your jeans will be well cut and frequently laundered by your mother, your white trainers will be immaculate: these are the only rules I know). Then, somewhere around 14 or 15, we start to diverge – a band t-shirt here, a fashion top you saved up all your pocket money for there – and little sprawling roots of fashion dig themselves away from the knot, out into the soil. Apart from vintage guys, who are like: suddenly wearing a three-piece suit. Or: they have a bowler hat on, and don’t own even one single t-shirt. When I see vintage guys, I have to wonder about the sheer logistics of them – did they start small, maybe with a single pair of cute braces, and work their way up over the years? Or did they just spend their overdraft at Beyond Retro one day, entirely refitting their wardrobe and becoming A Vintage Guy overnight, they don’t remember buying one but now they have a ukulele? I have similar feelings about goths: you never see half a goth, do you? You never see an early, fledgling, tiny little goth. Goths are all or nothing. To be goth is to be very binary about it. You can’t be half-goth, half-normal. You either have a little vial of blood around your neck or you don’t.

It’s when I saw some goths recently that I realised I would never be Lenny Kravitz, or a goth, and it was then that I gave up on the leather jacket dream forever. They were wearing leather trench coats, the goths, and baking under the summer sun: you could sort of smell the musty scent of parched skin coming off them. But I admired their dedication to the leather cause: they all looked good in it, despite all very visibly looking like they were poetry writers. There are various ways you can wear a leather jacket – rock-star cool (Kravitz, Alex Turner); rock-star uncool (Chad Kroeger, Adam Levine); country-star uncool (Blake Shelton, constantly); actor uncool (Kevin Bacon, in one of those collarless jackets, the ones that definitely come with a pair of wraparound shades in the pocket). You can look like one of those lads who keeps going to underage emo nights long after he has graduated from college, or one of those kids who was in a band once but then the band broke up and he hasn’t cleaned under his fingernails even once ever since but he wants you to come to his house to watch him play guitar about it. Metalheads look absolutely fantastic in leather jackets. Instagram fashion girls in wide-brimmed hats. You can look like an aged fashion type, Goldblumesque, as if you smell of rich sandalwood and tobacco scents. Or you can look like I do: a tight-faced American divorcée, waiting for his children at the school gates, desperately trying to make them think he’s cool again after that time he cried in front of them and begged for their mum back. Sometimes you just have to admit things to yourself, and the goths and Lenny Kravitz and the leather jacket experiment has made it thus. I will now cart two leather jackets through five house moves and ultimately keep them locked in a trunk. I am not – however hard I try about it – a Leather Jacket Guy. That’s one thing I’ll just never be.