The black leather jacket - Mick Farren

Ever since Marlon Brando slouched across the screen wearing a black leather jacket in The Wild One, the mixture of animal magnetism and sexual aberration which the leather jacket manages to convey has ensured it a best-selling place in the catalogue of cool. Using more than a hundred evocative photographs, The Black Leather Jacket traces its popularity through the Hells Angels of the forties; the beats of the fifties; the counter-culture of the sixties; the sexual excesses of the seventies; the punk explosion, begun by the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and the Clash; the heavy metal and rock groups of the eighties; to the present day, where the black leather jacket is a potent part of 21st century consciousness.