Q: Why do motorcycle gangs wear leather?
A: Because chiffon wrinkles so easily.
This old joke actually raises some interesting issues about motorcycle fashion. Bikers don’t generally wear chiffon, not because it wrinkles necessarily, but because it wouldn‘t offer any protection against the elements. Leather can keep the rider warm, protected from wind, rain, and (sometimes) pavement. Consider laying a bike down wearing chiffon! But the joke is not really making an argument about utility. It’s about the image of the biker. Motorcycle “gangs” wouldn’t be caught dead in chiffon. Chiffon is for girls and wimps. Motorcyclists are simply too tough and their fabric of choice—leather—embodies their power.
Utilitarian arguments—about the usefulness of a particular fabric or garment—can in no way account for biker fashion, or fashion in general. Fashion is not simply about clothes, but clothes in relation to the body and to our culture. In a sense, fashion is a visible language that carries meanings that change over time and within cultures. Fashion means clothing that changes.1 Why and how it changes in contemporary culture is intertwined with our notions of sexuality and gender. Biker fashion, specifically leather and its connections with eroticism, fetishism, and other -isms, reflects shifting ideas about men, women, and motorcycling.
Fashion is inevitably associated with sexuality, owing to its intimate connection to the body. Clothing plays a role in sexual attraction because it both reveals and conceals the body. It also contributes to our sense of gender—whether a particular member of one sex (male or female) appears masculine or feminine, either enhancing or detracting from their attractiveness to us as potential partners. Motorcycle fashion complicates these associations, for, as fashion historian Valerie Steele has noted, “the mystique of the motorcycle is . . . strongly associated with leather and sex.”2
Sometimes we sexualize the motorcycle itself. We call sport bikes “crotch rockets” for a reason. A rider mounts his bike and embarks on a journey that excites the senses. Fused with the machine, the rider experiences intense exhilaration and release. While this image privileges male sexuality, female riders are often quizzed whether their enjoyment comes in part from the vibration of the machine between their legs. But few riders—male or female—would answer that the feel of the machine alone makes the motorcycle sexy. Instead, the sexual allure of motorcycling comes from a set of more complicated associations of motorcycling with risk and rebellion played out on the body through clothing.
For instance, a male biker’s leather jacket associates him with images of toughness and masculinity. It makes him “cool,” because we connect him to the iconic, leather-clad bikers popularized in films of the 1950s such as James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1954). The famous promotional still from the The Wild One displays Brando slouched confidently against a black 600 cc Triumph Speed Twin. He wears leather gloves, jeans rolled up over boots, and a military cap tilted at a rakish, devil-may-care angle. With his leather jacket zipped almost to the top, he exposes just a hint of neck.3
Women unsettle this equation of leather with masculinity. Think Bike Week in Daytona Beach, Florida, with its parade of bikini-clad women wearing only leather chaps for coverage They expose their sexuality, but not simply by exposing flesh. Instead, they take advantage of the contrast between the softness of their bare flesh and the toughness of the leather that partially conceals it. The interplay between leather and flesh adds to their allure.
This same contrast works when women wear full leather, especially if there is some suggestion of the flesh beneath. A tight leather suit, for instance, highlights the curves of the female body. A zipper open to reveal cleavage invites speculation about what else is hidden. The British film Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), starring Marianne Faithfull, exploits this contrast, featuring a frustrated newlywed riding a huge black Harley through Germany to visit her lover. In the film (and in the novel on which it is based), the motorcycle itself is presented as a sexual object.4 It is her “black bull.” She rides wearing her leather riding suit, but her real sexual pleasure comes from the knowledge that she is naked under her suit. (The X-rated version was called Naked Under Leather in America.) The sexual fantasies she entertains as she rides all focus on her lover peeling away the leather to reveal the flesh beneath.
Leather’s association with masculine toughness shapes not only heterosexual but homosexual desire. Policemen and cowboys, in addition to motorcyclists, are important gay male icons. Leather boys and leather men embody a virile male sexuality attractive to some gay men for its equation with power. For both heterosexuals and homosexuals, leather signals masculine toughness. For this reason, leather features prominently in sadomasochistic (S&M) rituals in props—whips, dog collars, belts—to establish dominance. Motorcycling, homosexuality, and S&M come together not simply in the porno section of your local video store but in Kenneth Anger’s cult classic film Scorpio Rising (1964) which features an army of gay Nazi bikers.
The biker’s black leather jacket became associated with toughness partly for historical reasons. Motorcycle clubs such as the one featured in The Wild One originated with the returning GIs after WWII. Seeking camaraderie and adventure in a world of “civilians,” they organized the Boozefighters and other motorcycle clubs. Their shared association with a military past extended even to their clothing, borrowed from their military uniform. The black leather jacket originated with German aviators of WWI, such as the famous Red Baron. Later associations with the Nazis further equated leather with power and domination. Early riders adapted the protective leather armor of wartime battle for the road, retaining their military garb for both protection and solidarity with their riding buddies. Even early female riders, such as Theresa Wallach, who in 1935 was the first person of either sex to make the north-south crossing of the African continent (7,500 miles) on two wheels, chose to wear desert fatigues and goggles. Nearly two decades earlier, when sisters Augusta and Adeline Van Buren rode cross-country on individual motorcycles in 1916 to prove to the military that women were able to ride as dispatch couriers for the war effort, they were arrested numerous times en route for wearing men’s clothes.
At this point, you may be thinking: Biker history is all well and good, but what does it have to do with philosophy? A lot, it turns out, because leather and power have everything to do with a key concept in twentieth-century Western political philosophy and philosophy of mind: the fetish object. The contemporary biker, whose leather jacket does not share this past, still benefits from the association of leather and power, though in a much more complicated way. The black leather jacket has become a fetish object.
A fetish is an object that we make and endow with magical properties. The magical properties of the fetish protect us against our fears. There are two forms of fetishism: psychosexual and commodity fetishism. The biker’s leathers are caught up in both definitions.
Psychologically, fetishism manages gender anxieties about whether one is sufficiently masculine or feminine. According to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the fetish object wards off fears of castration in men. Afraid that their sexual potency will be diminished in contact with an actual partner, men turn a benign part of the female body or an object associated with it into a nonthreatening substitute. Owing to its connection to the body, clothing is particularly likely to be fetishized. To cite an extreme example, some men can become sexually aroused by high heels—not on women but as objects in their own right. The shoe can serve as a tangible reminder of an absent female wearer or substitute for the body itself, leading to sexual arousal in the male who sees, sniffs, or holds it. One man, for instance, kissed one rose-colored slipper while ejaculating into the other (Steele, Fetish, p. 98).
While the shoe diminishes female sexual power for men, the black leather jacket augments male potency. In Freudian terms, it becomes a token of masculine power against any potential feminine threat. By putting on the black leather jacket, a man acquires the toughness and virility associated with it. Your average male Harley rider—no Boozefighter or Hells Angel (but more likely your dentist or accountant)—can feel masculine, sexually attractive, and powerful simply by donning his jacket.
Freudian explanations are more complicated for women. (Freud famously asked, “What do women want?” and then couldn’t answer in his essay “On Femininity.”) Since women are, in effect, already castrated, according to Freud, they have nothing to fear. But you could argue that they might like to feel more powerful and could do so by putting on the same jacket invested with the magical properties of toughness.5 A woman could become like a dominatrix, finding pleasure in having power over men.
However, if she fears being identified as “masculine” or as one of the proud “dykes on bikes,” she may instead wear the jacket ironically to highlight the contrast between the masculine hardness of leather and her feminine softness. Think, for instance, of the lady bikers who wear pink leather or jackets “bedazzled” with rhinestones. They are trying to be tough, to be taken seriously as bikers, but not so tough that they can’t be imagined as wives, mothers, or grandmothers. Dot Robinson, the first president of the first women’s motorcycle club, The Motor Maids, founded in the 1940s, insisted on wearing pink and even attached a lipstick holder to her Harley to make “people realize that not all of us are like the bearded, black-leather-jacketed hoods that the media tars us with.” 6 The contemporary members of the club tell their “favorite story” about Dot on their website. It’s from a Honda dealer in Sarasota, Florida who “chased that woman for two days, through mud and trees” but never caught her. At the end of the race, while the men hit the local bar, Dot returned to her room to clean up, eventually appearing in the bar “in a black sheath dress and a pill box hat.” The lesson for the Motor Maids? “Dot was always a lady.”7
Another way of thinking about the black leather jacket as a fetish object links it to consumerism. According to German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883), all commodities are fetishes. The things we buy exist in our minds apart from the human labor that constructed them. We mistakenly value the thing, independently of the human work that created it. Things appear in the stores as if by magic and become entities endowed with special properties.
Marx distinguishes in his book Capital between a commodity’s “use value” and its “exchange value.” “Use value” refers to the fact that, as an external object, as a thing, a product satisfies certain needs. A leather jacket keeps you warm and protects you from the elements. A product only becomes a commodity when it is “transferred to [another] person, for whom it serves as a use value, through the medium of exchange.”8 Its “exchange value” refers to what the object can be exchanged for in the market, that is, what you’d be willing to pay for the jacket. This value is independent of its utility and instead is shaped by its value within the economy.
The jacket is not simply pieces of leather that someone has stitched together. If it were, the only difference among jackets might be the quality of the leather, the degree of artistry visible in its construction, or the amount of time the seamstress labored to produce it. Instead, in our minds we endow some jackets with additional value that cannot be easily measured in terms of the amount of fabric or the hours of labor. Some of us, for instance, are willing to pay more for a jacket with the Harley-Davidson insignia than one without.
Marx argues that “a commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (p. 163). He offers the example of a wooden table. By his labor, a man shapes a material from nature, wood, into a useful object. But “the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing” (p. 163). However, once we buy it and put it in our living room, “it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will” (pp. 163–64). It’s hard reading this not to envision some Disney-esque animated table dancing around the living room! But the table’s magical properties are not the fantasy of an animator but a product of our own minds. The table has an independent existence in our brains, colored by its associations to other objects, such as the couch and chairs that surround it, and separate from the natural material and the human labor that produced it. It becomes, for instance, just the thing to bring the whole room together!
Marx offers the analogy of religion: “There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race” (p. 165). Like the gods that peopled the brains of the Greeks, commodities acquire a power that we invest in them apart from their usefulness or the skill or artistry of their producer.
Branded with the Harley-Davidson insignia, for example, the biker’s jacket becomes not only a symbol of masculine power but acquires the particular qualities consumers associate with the company, such as Americanness and rugged individualism. The distinctive orange-and-black color scheme announces that this is not a motorcycle jacket but a Harley product. It’s not a simple protective garment but a fetish object, calling to mind images of tough leather-clad riders cruising the roads on their Harleys.
The case of the nonrider is even more interesting. Anyone can walk into a motorcycle store and buy the products associated with riding simply to look as if they ride. Completely divorced from the actual rider or the motorcycle, the jacket branded with the H-D logo stands in for motorcycling itself. The jacket then becomes a magical object, capable of transferring to its wearer the properties of aggression, independence, and anti-authoritarianism, to name just a few. Simply by purchasing products, ordinary middle-class consumers can pose as rebels without taking the actual risks of riding.
Marketers cash in on motorcycling culture by selling the mystique—even to those who cannot ride. Young consumers-in-training can buy their Harley Ken or Bratz Boy Cade, each sporting his own miniature jacket. (Apparently, the biker chick passenger shown on the box is not included.) Motorcycling itself is marketed to children as a masculine pursuit, which, even though the boys themselves could probably not care less at this age, will eventually get them girls.
At its extreme as a commodity fetish, biker gear becomes fashion totally removed from motorcycling. In the early 1990s, a spread in Vogue called “Biker Chic” featured a gaggle of supermodels wearing short skirts, clunky motorcycle boots, leather jackets and Brando-esque caps. In the image, they stand close together, blocking two motorcycles posed behind them, their wheels visible only at the edges of the frame. The motorcycles are completely beside the point, which is the sale of leather clothing designed by Claude Montana, Calvin Klein, and others. No wonder that, in 1991, the Council of Fashion Designers of America recognized Harley-Davidson for its influence on fashion.
The motorcycle jacket has become so common in fashion design, in fact, that in 2004 it earned its own exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibit surveyed how fashion designers, such as Karl Lagerfeld, Roberto Cavalli, Moschino, and Dolce & Gabbana, have interpreted the “look of the motorcycle jacket in their creations.” While jackets themselves were on display—including one custom tailored for Elvis Presley—the focus was more on the “look,” on how the jacket has been reconfigured by designers. Another highlight of the exhibit was a Bob Mackie ensemble worn by Cher in Las Vegas in the 1980s, Swarovski crystals and all. In the words of the exhibit’s promoters, “Here, biker style is off-road and center stage.”9 Off-road, indeed.
At the extreme of fetishism, motorcycles themselves become merely fashion accessories, props in ads to sell Skechers sneakers or Soft&Dri deodorant. The bike featured now is not typically the cruiser associated with the dominant image of the motorcyclist emerging in the 1950s. Instead, it is the sport bike, the “crotch rocket” chosen for speed and associated with an altered image of the biker.
As commodities, motorcycles themselves are subject to changes in design. They are aesthetic objects equally subject to the vicissitudes of fashion. To many young riders, the cruiser is now inseparable from its forty-plus-something demographic—it’s old. Instead, the sleek design of the sport bike captures the pace of youth. Biker Boyz and Torque have supplanted the Wild One in the popular imagination of at least younger riders.
Leather—now colored, not black—links the rider to the bike. It’s common practice to select riding gear to match the motorcycle—even the helmet, which, it could be argued, is worn more for style than protection. As a result, the rider merges with the machine in a blur of color from head to wheel. In full racing leathers, the rider appears androgynous—neither male nor female—nor even a person but an extension of the machine itself.
Uncoupled from its associations with a tough and rebellious male rider, the sport bike appears to stand for speed and youth. It’s the new fashion in motorcycling. Advertisers are cashing in on its sexiness in a different sense—as new and popular, not necessarily erotic. (After all, deodorant is hardly sexy.)
In fact, motorcycling itself has become fashionable. As motorcycling has become more mainstream, its associations with rebellion and toughness have diminished. As a result, the cultural messages about gender and sexuality biker fashion once powerfully conveyed have been muted, which only proves that fashion is synonymous with change.
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1 For a good overview of the development and possible approaches to modern fashion see Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
2 Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 154.
3 Ironically, some male bikers who saw The Wild One did not identify with the leather-clad Johnny (Brando), but with his film buddy Chino (Lee Marvin), who wore a black and yellow striped shirt. The head of the Los Angeles Hells Angels actually left the film to buy his “bumblebee” shirt.
4 André Pieyre de Mandiargues, The Motorcycle (La Motocyclette, 1963).
5 For feminist readings, see essays by Emily Apter, Jann Matlock, Naomi Schor, and Elizabeth Grosz, in Emily Apter and William Pietz, ed., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Also see Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism (New York: NYU Press, 1994, 1995); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
6 Quoted in Ann Ferrar, Hear Me Roar: Women, Motorcycle and the Rapture of the Road, second edition (North Conway:Whitehorse Press, 2001), p. 29.
7 Motor Maids, Inc., “Dot Robinson, Co-Founder of the Motor Maids,” http://www.motormaids.org/dotlady.html
8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 131. Subsequent page references are included in the text.
9 Phoenix Art Museum website, Past Exhibitions, “Motorcycle Jacket,” www.phxart.org/pastexhibitions/motorcyclejacket.asp.