Autumn/winter designs by, from left, Prada, YSL, Rodarte, Balmain and Temperley London

Angelina Jolie on the red carpet in strapless Michael Kors. Cate Blanchett in a biker jacket posing for Interview magazine. And Kate Moss in head-to-toe Prada scaling the stairs to the Miu Miu catwalk show in Paris just last week. What fashion trend unites three of the world’s most beautiful women? Leather.

Kate Moss in a leather dress from Prada

And it makes perfect sense: leather is the ultimate hard times textile. Tougher than it is expensive, it’s one of the few materials in life that looks better with age. And, as Jolie, Blanchett and Moss prove, it can also work in the high fashion tier – for the premiere, the glossy photo shoot, or the front row.

“Leather is hugely important,” says Erin Mullaney, the buying director of Browns boutique in London. “Stefano Pilati at YSL used almost entirely leather in his first eight runway looks in this season’s collection. The most popular use of leather was motorcycle jackets and leggings. I think the trend has re-emerged as part of the 1980s revival, but there is a much sexier and more glamorous feeling to it – more Marianne Faithful in Girl on a Motorcycle than Iggy Pop.”

On the catwalk, leather was everywhere for autumn: ultra-modern at Galliano, with nipped-in waists at Temperley,in minor bondage form at Rodarte, and reworked as Brando biker jackets at Blumarine, Hussein Chalayan and Jasper Conran.

And the specialist leather companies are enjoying a lucrative period. Those who are currently influencing the high street and high fashion are Lewis Leathers, previously the go-to brand for bikers, not to mention Cate Blanchett for her Interview magazine appearance – their 1950s Bronx jacket and 1970s Lightning jacket, priced around £640, are classics – and Belstaff, which created Brad Pitt’s S.Icon Jacket for Inglourious Basterds and Bruce Wayne’s dark leather blouson in The Dark Knight .

“There’s a quest for authenticity in fashion now,” says Derek Harris, Lewis Leathers’ owner. “And that’s twinned with ‘hard times’ dressing. In Japan in the mid-1990s the magazine Free & Easy coined the term ‘Dad’s Style’, which was distinguished by vintage fashion from the 1930s to the 1980s, with a lot of leather. I think that genre is making its way into European fashion right now.”

Of all the designers working with leather, Rick Owens is perhaps the most accomplished and influential. Leather has been central to the Owens canon ever since he began working as part of a louche, underground clique in Los Angeles more than 10 years ago. Since relocating to Paris in 2004, he has established a style distinguished by layering, asymmetry and earthy tones that fall somewhere between vampish goth and stone-grey modernist.

“I’ve always loved the theatrical menace of it,” he says. “In terms of inspiration, I started out looking at fetish glamazons from Eric Stanton illustrations and ended up in leather bars. My leather work is a mixture of camp fetishism and the minimal languor of [the fashion designer] Madame Grès.” It may sound an odd combination, but while leather is traditionally stiff, Owens has transformed the fabric so it hangs like a knit, and his approach has been copied prolifically. It’s a rock ’n’ roll look that is also buttery soft and luxe, a one-two punch that justifies a jacket’s £1,800 price tag.

As Owens points out: “The generation that saw punk rock and grunge and Altamont are now in their 60s. Leather isn’t just for the youth market any more. In fact, I’m surprised young people don’t reject leather as being an ‘old’ textile.” Maybe they just think of it as adult.

www.belstaff.com
www.lewisleathers.com
www.rickowens.eu

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Moonlight becomes you

With jewellery, as with leather, context is everything. Consider, for example, the Moonlight collection from Georg Jensen, first designed at the turn of the last century in full art nouveau mode, complete with raspberries, doves, or rosebuds, but remade this season in silver with moonstones, peridots, and a perversely heavy metal/goth cast, writes Valentina Zannoni.

Todd Bracher, creative director of Georg Jensen, says: “Moonlight has a strong emotional appeal and a classic vintage look [that’s been] twisted in a fresh, colourful and modern way. The jewellery works with a classic look but also with a more wild, mixed, daring and rock’n’roll look. It is amazing that something designed and first created more than a 100 years ago, by Jensen himself, works so well in a modern context.” Paired with a biker jacket or some other tough love gear, the effect is less languorous romance than cool historical revisionism. Rock(s) on.