Leather after dark

November is the first month this city lets me wear what I wanted to wear in July. I've been waiting since the summer with a jacket on a hanger, like a dog at the door. I wore it on the first cold night to the diner I go to at two. Same booth, same coffee, same waitress, who has seen every look I own and comments on none of them. She put the cup down, looked at the collar and said: "that one's new." Eleven months. First review. I left a big tip, and I'm still thinking about it. This issue is about leather, because November is about leather, and because most of what gets said about it is wrong. It isn't a mood. It's a material, and it has rules. But first, where it comes from. Leather got into the wardrobe through the cold, not through fashion. Pilots wore it first, in open cockpits during the First World War, because nothing else stopped the wind at that height. The zip-front motorcycle jacket followed at the end of the twenties, cut short so it wouldn't catch on the seat. Then film did the rest. In the fifties it belonged to the boy you were warned about. By the late sixties it had moved from the garage to the evening, cut into skirts, coats and dresses. It has been changing rooms ever since. It never fully left the garage. Which is the point. Three rules. Rule one. One shine per look. Patent or satin, not both. Two shines fight, and you lose. If the skirt is satin, the leather is matte. If the boots are patent, the jacket isn't. Rule two. Matte after dark. Night light is already hard. Matte leather drinks it. Gloss throws it straight back at the camera, and at everyone across the table. In daylight you can get away with a high shine. After six, let the leather absorb the light and let one small thing reflect it. A buckle. An earring. Your eyes. Rule three. One leather piece, two at most. Head to toe only when it's one garment. A coat dress is a decision. A jacket, trousers and boots is a costume. I say that with love, to everyone who has worn the costume. I have photographs. Now, five ways. All of them are in the lookbook, and all of them are linked in the issue. The trousers. For daylight, with a colour that does the talking. Leather trousers are the easiest way in, as long as the top is soft and the colour is somewhere else. The trench. Camel, oversized, and the only shine is at the trim. That's the coat for people who say they don't wear leather. They do. They just haven't noticed yet. The coat dress. Head to toe, but one garment, so it reads as a line and not as a list. The jacket. A soft cut on a hard material. A rounded shoulder, a wrap, a waist. The leather does the toughness, so the shape doesn't have to. And the gown. Leather as a panel, satin as the rest. It's the one I'd wear to something I wasn't sure I wanted to go to. The verdict. Treat it like wool that bites back. Own one good coat, and stop apologising for it. Someone asked me this month if they can wear leather to a wedding. To the after-party, yes. To the ceremony, only if it's a skirt, it's matte, and nobody else is wearing black. Four drops this month, one every Monday. Gallery Hours on the second: a concrete gallery, sun coming in sideways before noon. Counter Service on the ninth: a chrome diner off the Strip, between one and three. Yes, that kind of diner. Spin Cycle on the sixteenth: a coin laundry three blocks from home, two in the morning, fluorescent tubes and backwards neon. And Wet Paint on the twenty-third: a painter's studio, plaster busts, north light from tall windows. The last page of this issue was shot there. I sat on a chair the wrong way round for an hour, arms folded on the backrest, with somebody's painting drying behind me. It's the most honest way to sit in leather. Nothing to smooth, nothing to pull down, nothing to pretend. One more thing. The jacket in the photograph next to my letter isn't in the lookbook. It's in this issue, and only here, until December. Keep it to yourself, or don't. See you on the first.