My leather skin

 

Today's style crush : Black perfecto with sheep collar seen in Inside Llewyn Davis

What brings me here is this urge to classify, analyse, and just explore details I love in movies. The production design, the mythology of the story, and the costume design are full of these items, lines, songs, that gives identity and substance to a fictional character. I love their recurrence, especially for garments, because as opposed to those I see waiting on a rank in stores, they are active parts of a story. A type of jacket, for example, can become the symbol of a cultural heritage, as the 618 perfecto (with stars shoulders from a 613) seen in The Wild One for biker culture.

 

 

In a less historical way, who doesn't think of Nastassja Kinski in Paris Texas when seeing a girl in a red mohair sweater? These items connotation is essence of style.

Today, I often have style crushes while watching movies, and had my first during my childhood with The Addam's family and Grease.
Towards the first, I got pretty satisfied, thanks to my grandma who spent hours sewing for me my very own Morticia Addams' outfit in which I basically lived. I felt crazy mysterious with my arms wrapped up in black lace, letting my maxi dress floating around, only lacking the constant gaze framing light Morticia had. At the time I wasn't considering yet having a light engineer following me around.

Grease's style on the other hand, wasn't that easy. Until today I couldn't get my hands on a Sandy like perfectly fit catsuit. Instead, I started to rock leather jackets at age 11 with a faux bordeaux one, switching around age 14 for the feel of the real stuff. My first genuine leather jacket was my mom's old bat sleeved biker on which I had written in big red acrylic painting letters :

QUEEN OF THE HIGHWAY

I reckon what a huge of a deal picking my words was. I wasn't a T-bird or in any "gang" like in Cry baby, and a one girl gang doesn 't count! So it meant I had to find something to fit only me. So I just got the inspiration from somewhere else.

Mystery train, my first Jim Jarmusch movie in which an awesome Japanese couple, travels to Memphis to visit the Sun Records studios. Mitsuko had this really cool perfecto with "Mister Baby" written on the back. It wasn't a gang's name,  it wasn't any obvious giveaway on her secret self, it was just a vibe about who she was. Subtle and fun.

Mister Baby

At the time, I was obsessed with hitch hicking, always on the road wandering around. I also, just as every other teenager, was passionated about The Doors, and "Queen of the highway" was my anthem. This jacket became my everything. My blanket when sleeping in the streets, my armor when messing with punk's dogs, my shelter when lifting my thumb under the rain, my house on the road, my flag when crashing gigs. It ended up covered with blisters and completely shabby but I lived so many things in it that I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. It still remains somewhere at a friend's, waiting for me to get back to it in my old age, sobbing over my lost youth.

That's the thing with skin. It really absorbs memories and becomes a part of you. Since that, I changed skins several times : A classic man shaped black perfecto that I ended up trading for a bass amp, an ex lovers' reminicense (brown aviator from the 30s... the jacket, not the guy) that I can't bear anymore, a brown perfecto on which I wrote "Freak Stranger" before losing it somewhere in Vietnam, a brown male bomber that ended up on a friend's shoulders during his Australian trip, and a black lambskinned perfecto by Schott I'm wearing right now. 

A new era of my life, a new skin. Which means, to get to be loyal to a jacket I'd need to find consistancy.

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