Jonalysis

Why do many men think they cannot wear leather pants unless they belong to some particular group of people? Robert Staudhammer thinks he will never be “cool enough”:

I can’t play an instrument so I would never be part of the next giant rock band. I will never race motorcycles because it scares me. I’m too sexually conservative to follow any desire to strap on S&M gear. And I’m too rational to lose myself in the rave scene.

Rockenheimer thinks he is too old:

My arms were sore coming in to the office, but it was a good sore. I felt good, I felt awake, I didn’t feel like a sloshing barrel of junk food mixed with beer being rolled down a hallway. I already had visions of Slim Steph with his abs of steel back into place, speed bumps on a wall. [- - -] I’ll fit in my leather pants again and if I can find my biker boots I’ll be the badass rock ‘n roll machine that I was back in… aw crap, who am I kidding – what reason can I possibly come up with for wearing leather pants at 40 years of age? That’s for the young, the pretty and the studly.

Wouldn’t “because I want to” be good enough a reason?

Charlie Webster would like to wear leather pants:

If you’ve never tried on a pair you are missing out! I promise you this, you will never, ever feel as man-sexy as you do when wearing leather pants.

However, Charlie does not wear leather pants because it is not “socially acceptable”. This made me think about social acceptance. What does “socially acceptable” mean?

Social acceptance has to do with other people’s opinions on something. So let us imagine a society consisting of three persons: A, B and C. Let us also assume that everybody in this society wants to make socially acceptable clothing choices. When A wants to know whether wearing something is socially acceptable, he consults B and C about it. Correspondingly, B consults C and A about his sartorial choices and C consults A and B.

Do you already see where I’m getting at? If everybody sought social acceptance, then everybody would get to influence a person’s clothing choices but the person himself.

Marcus Wright is one of the two main characters in “Terminator: Salvation“. Marcus wears leather pants throughout the movie. But don’t get carried away: there are almost no good shots of the leather pants in the film and I could find only a couple of promotional photographs that may spark the interest of a leather lover.

The funny thing is that if you do a search for images of Marcus Wright, you seem to get a lot of good hits. However, many of them are not images of the actor Sam Worthington but images of the collectible figure by Hot Toys.

When I saw photographs of the collectible figure for the first time, it took me several seconds to realize that they were photographs of a collectible figure. That’s a long time. In a way, my slowness was quite fitting: in the film, Marcus Wright isn’t quite what he seems to be at first glance.

Andrey Nikolayevich Tolstoy will probably always be remembered as the guy in leather: he has been depicted in one-to-one scale wearing a long leather coat in his tombstone in Tolyatti, Russia.

According to the article “The world’s tackiest tombstones“, thousands of gangsters died in criminal wars that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and it is easy to find grandiose tombstones commemorating them in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

I have just the coolest wardrobe. I have the leather coat and leather pants and lots of leather. It’s very warm, but [wearing the clothes and riding on the bike] is definitely one of the coolest things that you get to do — feeling like a badass.

Cam Gigandet in an interview with MTV about filming “Priest“