The Café Racer

Nothing about my relationship to leather jackets makes any sense.  I’ve long come to grips with that.  I’m going to have the next one, another one, and the reason I want that one is that I have spent my entire life, at least since 8:13pm on February 9^th 1964---when The Beatles came on The Ed Sullivan Show---wanting to be cool.  Granted a leather jacket is more Stones than Beatles but you get the idea.  

 

Whatever purpose a leather jacket serves, it’s got to be cool.  Cool may not be the only point but it’s never not the point.  And just when is cool anything other than the point?  That question I answered on that fateful February night when I was but seven years old.  There is more than one Coolest Leather Jacket but there is none cooler than the Café Racer.  (Now do take this entire diatribe with tongue planted firmly in cheek.  Where else do you keep yours?  Laugh with me a little here.)

Just ‘cause you’ve owned a lot of leather jackets and now lived a long time---and it’s starting really to feel like a long time---doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about.  The more you know the more you know how much you don’t know.  Wisdom measures the horizons of your ignorance, not necessarily better understanding of life’s complexities.

 

The only thing as hard as sizing your boots is figuring out your leathers.  Telling you that I’ve been at this since my own personal Birth of Cool moment may not matter much to you---but just to be clear, the Birth of Cool is your Saul on the Road to Damascus, Bruce on the cover of Born to Run, and Brando being Johnny moment, the instant in your life when you realized that you wanted some very personal part of being cool.  Please don’t tell me that something like this has never happened to you.  

 

In fuller disclosure I got my first leather in 1975, a Schott Perfecto J-24-style jacket that I stole from my elder brother.  That jacket was soon stolen from me but I have since with intention, dedication, and above all obsession carried forward my Quest.

Such a range of experiences confer no privilege nor particular prerogative but it does leave you with opinions.  I mean to share some.  It is also merely to say that I have likely made more mistakes than you and paid handsomely for them.  This piece is help you make your own mistakes rather than repeat mine.

I want to talk about “traditional” styles again and really only one very specific style, the Café Racer.   I want to point out a few things about what happens when you buy into tradition, how makers are informed by particulars, and so what you can and maybe should expect as a potential pigeon owner.  I’ll try to stick today to the Café Racer style because that was my second jacket when it should have been my first.  

To be clear the Café Racer shouldn’ta’ been first because it’s somehow the essential, the one you need to have, or could be your only one.  It’s the first you should have because I think it shouldn’t be your only one.   I will argue here for why it’s first but don’t take that too seriously.  I’m not here to make up your mind anymore than mine.

Also: ‘Not going to rehearse here the history of the CR as it refers to racing your sup’ed up moto to the café though I will applaud your proper use of the l'accent aigu.   

 

The Café Racer is no longer a jacket for café racing even if for some reason you do that.  (More power to ya’.)  Its principle purpose is to look cool.  And here’s the second even more important point: anything more than looking cool is merely a bonus, not a feature.  Admit that and you are half way to figuring out why it should be your first jacket.  

 

To be cool you need to be able to woo, to charm, beguile, transport, hex, and otherwise enrapture with your natural good looks (so wear yourself first).  To make yourself as cool as Keats add music, poetry, and style.  It can help to have nice wheels, a clean driving record, and the sense to know when to stop drinking but if you want to bring cool to next level then looking cool has got to be a priority.  No leather jacket, not even the J-24 or even the deeper, wilder, harder flex J-31, is more cool than the Café Racer.  The CR is Coolness 101 and, trust me, never take advanced Sanskrit (cf., the J-31) before you take 101.  

 

A Café is not the most practical or sensible jacket.  The most traditional will retain two important and very impractical features.  First, it will not have side pockets.  Fergittaboutit.  Not supposed to happen.  You see these Café Racers were first shirts and not jackets.  You were to wear it close and there is no pocket either to carry a map or  a gun, maybe, just maybe your cigs.  More about that soon.

There are plenty of ersatzCR nowadays that are sorta’ the leather version of a CPO but cut properly short at the waist like a traditional CR.   But the most traditional versions have no side pockets.  And no inside pockets.  Just those top breast spocket that is not wide enough for a modern cell phone or a wallet nor of much good for anything to man nor beast, and like I said, maybe for your cigs and you shouldn’t be smoking anymore either.  Okay?

That said, the CR is a leather shirt cut to a v-shape down the torso to the waist where it either slightly flares brilliantly (see Himel’s Kensington and Dave’s always amazing video story) or it proper splays so that you can sit down on your bike and then be encircled with a jacket hem coming over your belt.  Now, properly speaking this is obviously not like a traditional shirt hem but the hem is for being comfortable seated but it is kinda’ short, cut for higher rise jeans but not long.

If you want to see the perfect, iconic, exemplary, paradigmatic, epochal, quintessential and seminal, prototypical, archetypal, downright Audubon Society PERFECT pheasant version of The Café Racer then you want to make a close study of The Real McCoy’s replica of the Buco J-100.   And of course that perfection isn’t the only one because Himel’s Kensington is just as cool and maybe more.  But let’s for here’s sake stick to the J-100 because the Buco is the exemplar.

I’m not going to pause to tell you any more about the Jos. Buegeleisen Compay when this guy will tell you more than you need to know: http://vintageleatherjackets.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-origins-of-buco.html.  This guy also goes straight to J-24 and I am assuming just going by the numbas’ that the J-100 didn’t come first? I think that is an interesting fact that doesn’t interest me here.  We are trying to get to the café, and when we get there we are just starting.  (Do read the all of David Himel's blogspot on Vintage Leather Jackets.  He knows as much about jackets as anyone, ever.)

 

I will say further that if I ever make it to Livonia, Michigan I plan on stopping at 

Beth El Memorial Park to place a stone upon the stone of the grave of Mr. Buegeleisen because few others in history have contributed more directly or materially to the definition of cool than he.

 

So first thing about coolness fit equals J-100: this is a snug fit even if you are not all that slim a person it will flatter and when you zip it closed, which is principally riding or damn it’s cold position it will be almost corset-like.  Don’t do this unless you have to. 

 

The key to testing fit is not crossing your arms or reaching in front too far but just reaching as if you were touching the near handlebars of your bike or moving to touch her or his hand on the bar.  You see, you’re reaching for your beer while you are telling this beautiful person next to you how their eyes are the most amazing thing you’ve seen since that night with Juliet Capulet.

 

I don’t mean to spoil it but with a “real” CR you would lean into the bike if the reach were that long and as for raising your arms in victory or surrender over your head, this is no way to test for fit much less to live your life.  The shoulders of the jacket need to be right on the corner and not over, so that the sleeve comes straight off the shoulder.  No wings, no break.

On a J-24 (D-pocket style) you get a little more latitude to have the top of the shoulder extend out and lead the sleeve, but not on the J-100.  You want the shoulder of the J-100 to be your  shoulder and it’s good not to have the jacket look like it came from a Romulan Centurion.

 

Now that said there is a padded  J-100 version and is naturally going to, umm, pad up your shoulders.  But now you are back to having a rider’s jacket, I mean a real rider, someone buying this jacket to ride.  If that is you, you are already a cooler, better person than I.  I once rode but got my first CR to look cool, not do its purported job.  The unpadded “normal” CR jacket fits right when you are standing there feeling held and holding forth, you are a better self, as if you are in a second skin of your own.  But wait, this can also take a while.

 

If you are zipping this CR all the way up and buttoning the top signature banded collar button then you are riding and its cold or you are wearing the wrong jacket for the weather on 9^thAvenue in that wind.  Be clear with yourself: this jacket off the bike is to look cool, not to stay warm.  Staying warm has nothing to do with looking cool.  President Kennedy knew that at his inauguration and we should always know that Jack was many other things but always cool.  If your CR keeps you warm: that’s a bonus, not the point.  The snug fit will be warm anyways but you are likely not fully zipped about 98% of the time.  

Because the Buco is in proper horsehide, another J-100 traditionalism that others might modify to use steer or bovine or something else, that sense of second skin is going to take quite a bit of wear.  With The Real McCoys version, given the superb quality of the leather and its aniline dye veg-tanned process, this jacket can take years to develop serious patina and come to fit like a second skin, showing through its brown underbody.  Don’t expect a Real McCoy’s Buco to give up much even if you wear it aplenty.  This is one tough, thick fit.  That thickness can be thinned out either by thinning the hide or by removing the lining, which is how The Real McCoys distinguish their jacket J-100 from their shirt J-100. 

The true shirt version of TRMC Buco, currently with the number BJ19001, seems a lot less available and not always made even when it is shown in yearly catalogues.  For the record too, making an unlined leather shirt-jacket is in technique harder than adding a lining and isn’t nearly as comfortable for getting into and wearing into shape.  Leather on skin makes that rayon lining in the “regular” J-100 seem like a very good idea.

You d0 get the two horizontal breast pockets that should have chain zippers and the signature sleeve talon style zippers, the latter with leather pulls to make them easier.  I always take off the leather pulls because it’s cooler not to be flapping around even though it would be a very good idea if you were zipping and un- while riding an actual bike.  Your coolness is your own but I say take off the leather pulls and put them in your breast pocket because neither of those pockets is worth a damn pocket-wise and look waaay better zipped closed.

 

So at the risk of sounding like the pirate’s monoglot parrot, if you are not a café racer then the Café Racer is for swagger, sashay, and saunter.  It is a way of brandishing cool and parading with insouciant gasconade while bringing no particular attention to yourself.  You will not need to bring attention to yourself because a proper CR that is as exquisitely made as say the Himel Bros Kensington or the Real McCoy’s J-100 is doing all the heavy lifting for you.  All you have to do is leave your shades on when you walk into the bar, unzip the coat, and let your clean white tee announce that you want to be thisguy.  If you don’t then don’t.  But I am confident anyone can pull this off because, well, I have no problem wearing mine.

But if you do get yourself a proper CR, know that you will need another leather jacket to be warmer, more practical, more comfortable moving around more. You might want to try an A-2 or even a Cossack that has more blouse like, much roomier fit because it wasn’t designed as a shirt that’s made of horse.

 

A CR is for a night on the town, it makes you Chair of the Dead Poet’s Society at the bar, it’s for leaning into the opening chords of Start Me Up in the company of octogenarian rock n’ rollers.  You are the true CR, you see?  It’s for rock n’ roll, finding true love on that one night and maybe only for one night; it’s for flounce, frisk and romp, it’s not for comfort, not for sitting in the car for hours on a road trip with the kids, it’s not for being sensible.  The Café Racer might have once made perfect sense but its purpose is to get us to stop making sense and love life enough to wear a jacket this cool.  And if you get the right one, one that fits you, it will be comfortable, fun, and even do what a jacket is also supposed to do.