Leatherdale and the Leather Coat

Madam Bracegirdle’s Salon is drawn in tribute to that lost era of the early 1960s, a brief hybrid interlude between the real old and the truly new, that witnessed the proliferation of the lady’s leather coat across the United Kingdom, but especially in Scotland – ta-ra! Well, not so much the lady’s leather coat as the lady’s coat made of leather. The semantics are important as a leather fashion culture had not then developed, at least not openly. The coats were made in the same style as other ladies coats but just happened to be of leather. Throughout Britain tanneries were either manufacturing leather coats or supplying the leather to factories, large and small, to make and sell leather coats, often through mail order catalogues where they were priced in guineas. Even small, exclusive ladies fashion shops of the old fashioned kind put their labels into specially made leather garments. The reason for this relatively sudden proliferation of leatherwear is not certain. Perhaps it had something to do with the necessity of industrial diversification after the war, with the demand for war effort leather reducing. The first inkling of ladies leather fashion, coats, skirts and even dresses began in the late 1940s and remarkable colour film of a London leather fashion show from that period survives.

Prior to the war the lady’s leather coat had been almost synonymous with motoring, introduced with the first cars. There were even Edwardian lady’s leather motoring skirts (ooh-la la!) with matching coats, usually in boring brown but occasionally in more pastel colours. The erotic underground had been engaged in the private design and manufacture of leather costumes for some time but the arrival of the motor car meant that one might see an elegant lady publicly clad from head to foot in leather fashion for the first time. Rare photographs prove that leather was worn for style and not just practical purposes from the first years of the 20th Century but there is little or no social history study of this and much of the detail about how it came to be is lost or was never recorded for posterity in the first place. During the 1920s and 1930s lady’s leather coats became more popular and adopted pastel colours but were still a rarity to be seen in town and country.

The especially wonderful thing about the widespread arrival of the lady’s coat made of leather in the 1960s was that it was an era when that mysterious allure of lady’s foundation wear and the complex paraphernalia of girdle, suspenders and stockings were still worn as an everyday practicality rather than an erotic affectation. And when skirts were more common than trousers, often cinched with decorative leather belts to show off the feminine waist and to accentuate those lovely curves. Ladies really did dress up to stay at home! And if one’s business took one to the doors of various houses some remarkable sights were to be seen.

So, the gleaming new leather coats were commonly worn with pencil skirts, seamed stockings and stiletto shoes, even and especially by mature ladies. If you have never seen it, never seen those elegantly turned out matrons actually strutting the street in their sheath-like leather, don’t knock it! And it was wonderfully universal. In addition to popularity amongst what were pompously referred to at the time as “the lower orders”, the young dolly birds and scrubbers, the leather coats were worn by haughty society matrons too and those formidable, painted, mauve-haired and mock-posh, lemon sucking Mrs Slocumbe types who presided over the cosmetics and ladies wear counters in department stores and who looked as though they considered all young men to be scum deserving a good whipping. I remember them well, how much I longed to serve them and how they danced through my nocturnal emissions.

There was undoubtedly an erotic frisson to all this leather, encouraged by the emergence of The Avengers TV series, Ms Blackman’s dramatically dangerous and daring outifits and the notion of kinky boots. Did those ladies strut in ignorance of the worship fervour secretly clamouring around them? I remember hearing what were obviously fellow perverts talk about ladies leather coats in the pub, pretending social commentary but with barely disguised relish, and me turning red in the face as the conversations drifted too close for comfort. There was one yokel who was absolutely obsessed by their supposed weight, going on and on about it. The furtiveness and guilt of all that can hardly be imagined now, but it also added a mystique, an allure, a dark seductiveness and naive wonder which has been sadly lost.

To be continued . . .