8 Coolest Leather Jackets in Movie History

Every time I talk about leather jackets on my YouTube channel, I start with the words, “No item of clothing is cooler than a leather jacket.” And it’s still true!

And one of many reasons why leather jackets aren’t just cool, but the world’s coolest clothing item, is because you’ve seen the coolest characters in cinematic history doing cool things in them.

So, as someone who is a complete freak for leather jackets and looks for any excuse to write about them, I put together a list of cinematic history’s greatest leather jackets. But you could also just call this article Eight Reasons Leather Jackets are so Cool.

Top Leather Jackets in Movie History

• Indiana Jones’s Leather Jacket
• Top Gun’s Leather Jacket
• The Terminator’s Leather Jacket
• Wolverine’s Leather Jacket in X-Men
• Mad Max’s Leather Jacket
• John Wick’s Leather Jacket
• Tyler Durden’s Iconic Red Leather Jacket from Fight Club

1. Indiana Jones’ Leather Jacket

I would be an absolute idiot if I didn’t put pop culture’s best-known leather jacket front and center: of course, it’s Indiana Jones.

Unfortunately, there’s no one Indiana Jones jacket; it was slightly different in each movie, though most people wouldn’t notice the differences. A few different places have managed to position themselves as the place to get the jacket, but for our money, the best is Cockpit USA’s Explorer jacket.

Created by celebrated Hollywood costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis when she was just 28 years old, Indy’s jacket is reminiscent of an A-2 flight jacket but without the elasticated cuffs and waist. (Landis went on to design Michael Jackson’s jacket in the Thriller music video.)

The brand that usually gets credit for making the jacket is England’s Wested Leather Co, who sell three jackets from each of the original trilogy. Other names that get thrown around here are Peter Botwright, who made the originals at Wested, and Berman and Nathan’s, a London costume house that was acquired in 1992.

Wested seems to have the legal right to call themselves the Indiana Jones jacket store, but then there’s US Wings, which, at one point, called their jacket an official jacket.

(Leather jacket history, as you’ll see, is surprisingly complex and often highly contested.)

Which brand makes the better jackets? Here’s the problem: Wested’s jackets are all under 400 bucks. To be fair, most of them are lambskin, which is cheaper than cowhide, but under 400 bucks is sort of too cheap for a leather jacket. I’m not basing this on anything more than a good understanding of the market, but in my experience, you shouldn’t trust a jacket that’s under $400.

Meanwhile, the US Wings jacket is made of cowhide and costs about 650 bucks, which is cheap but acceptably cheap for a leather jacket. So they get my vote of confidence.

That said, Dr. Jones’s jacket probably would have been goatskin or horsehide, and Cockpit USA actually sells an American-made horsehide jacket that is absolutely his jacket, just without officially branding it as that of Indiana Jones.

2. Top Gun’s Leather Jacket

If you like a more flashy jacket, nothing on this list is as, let’s say, ornamental as Maverick’s jacket from Top Gun.

This piece is similar to the G1 flight jacket with a shearing collar, a model that was issued to aviators in the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. It’s based on early 1960s military specs.

Cockpit USA does not have the legal right to call its Indiana Jones jacket the official one, but they do have the right to say they made the Top Gun jacket, which they’ve even treated with a secret leather-ageing technique to make it appear well-worn when you first get it. (No, Cockpit USA did not sponsor this article!)

It’s understood that Maverick’s jacket belonged to the character’s Vietnam veteran father, and the patches weren’t random: they include several Easter eggs that paid homage to real-life naval history.

Explaining them all would take forever, but one interesting tidbit is that in the 2022 sequel, the USS Galveston Far East Cruise 63 – 4 patch was replaced with an Indian Ocean Cruise 85-86 patch because the Galveston one included Japanese and Taiwanese flags, which would have probably jeopardized the film’s distribution in China.

Anyway, the Top Gun leather jacket with patches is sold at Cockpit USA here in New York City for $995, or you can get the same jacket without the patches. The unadorned jacket costs 780 bucks, which is a pretty good deal for an American-made leather jacket, especially since it’s made of vegetable-tanned goatskin, which is a long-standing leather of choice for military jackets.

Top Gun’s “Nylon” Jacket

Cockpit also supplied the government-issue CWU 36 P Nomex jacket that Tom Cruise wore in the sequel. These are the jackets that look like they’re made of nylon, but they’re technically a fire-retardant aramid polymer that’s related to nylon. (Again, people get very specific about their claims with jacket history, especially at Cockpit USA.)

3. The Terminator’s Leather Jacket

The next most iconic leather jacket is the one that the T-800 Terminator wore.

As we all know, there have been only two Terminator movies, and each of those two movies put Schwarzenegger in two similar but different asymmetric black leather motorcycle jackets that he took from two different, horribly injured motorcyclists.

The same very small California brand makes both jackets: Bates Leathers.

It’s a little bit like Schott NYC’s famous Perfecto jacket in that it has an asymmetric front, epaulettes, and a small coin pocket — but Bates Leather has the claim to fame here as the makers of the T-800’s jackets — both of them.

In the first movie, he’s wearing their model called the Highwayman, which was bought off-the-rack because that movie’s budget was too low to get custom leather jackets made for them.

But the sequel’s budget was about 20 times bigger, and they were able to ask Bates to make a unique jacket specifically for the T-800, which they just call the T2, or The Terminator.

Bates Leather is the only place to get the original pattern, and they’ll actually make it for your custom measurements for just $2,745 — or you can get the first movie’s Highwayman jacket for about $1,000 less.

4. Marlon Brando’s Leather Jacket in The Wild One

Every cool movie character wears a leather jacket, but as far as a specific jacket having a specific impact on pop culture and on leather jackets overall, I think Marlon Brando’s motorcycle jacket in The Wild One (1953) might be the most influential in cinema history.

I think it’s also the most contentious. Brando’s jacket is an incredibly controversial topic because it is “common knowledge” that he wears a Perfecto jacket from Schott NYC, who even have a picture of it in their store here in New York City.

But it’s not quite as clear-cut as that.

Brando actually wore a jacket from a brand called Durable, which doesn’t exist anymore. There are some reports that Schott bought Durable, which would kind of give them the right to say that they’re the ones who made the Brando jacket (or at least make a decent argument for it), but it’s actually weirdly hard to verify that buyout.

I asked around the leather jacket community (a thing that exists) and I heard that at one point, the late Gail Hawkins, who was the administrator of Schott NYC’s online forum, confirmed Schott didn’t buy Durable — but that post got deleted.

I’m terrified to say anything about Brando’s jacket because people argue about it so much, but whether or not you’d call Brando’s jacket a Schott or not, the Perfecto is certainly the closest you can get to buying Brando’s jacket.

This jacket’s design has grown to become one of the most influential leather jackets on Earth. Every brand that makes leather jackets sells a model that is, let’s say, inspired by this one.

5. Wolverine’s Leather Jacket in X-Men

To be honest, none of the jackets on this list is on the level of those first four. Remember, we’re talking about cinema’s most influential leather jackets and not just the most influential jackets of all time. (I already made that list of the five main kinds of leather jackets here.)

But since they’re so closely associated with motorbike-riding antiheroes, we’ve got to talk about Wolverine.

Logan has appeared in ten X-Men and X-Men-adjacent movies to date, but when we’re talking about his most powerful jacket, it’s the one he wears in the first film from 2000 and its prequel that came out in 2009, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Here, you learn its thrilling origin: it belonged to the son of the elderly couple he gets killed when he takes shelter with them after that Weapon X experiment. Sorry, elderly couple!

Between writing the draft of this article and publishing it now, the brand behind the jacket seems to have taken it down from their site. Maybe they’ll bring it back? In any case, it remains true that Vanson created Wolverine’s unusual racer-style jacket.

The jacket has three stripes on the biceps to represent his three claws and also to bring to mind the stripes on his comic costume. (I have the entire collection of the ’95 Fleer Ultra X-Men trading cards from when I was a kid.) But if you want to be really authentic, you’ll have to find a way to tear one of the stripes off on the left arm: Logan lost it somewhere between the prequel and the 2000 film.

Some underappreciated elements of Vanson’s jacket are the zippers, specifically those on his front pockets and his sleeves: they’re much longer than you’d see on a normal racer, and they look a lot more like they’ve been slashed into the jacket, which I think is pretty cool.

Vanson sold this jacket to the public for 800 bucks, which is a pretty fair price for an American-made cowhide jacket that doesn’t have a seam running across the chest. (That seam is common on cheaper jackets because it lets them use smaller pieces of leather.)

6. Mad Max’s Leather Jacket

I put the most frustrating entry last, and I’m calling it that because you can’t buy it anywhere.

I am an American citizen who was born in Australia, so who’s the best Australian-American action hero? I guess I could say Hugh Jackman here, but I am talking about Mad Max Rockatansky.

For jackets that truly embody the idea of durability, engine grease, the apocalypse, and regret, it is hard to think of a better example than Mad Max and his Main Force Patrol jacket, or MFP, which was custom-made by the film’s costumers in Australia.

Basically, they modified biker jackets with unique details for the fictional MFP. Key features include a large notched lapel collar, a diagonal zip for blocking the wind, a distinctive scalloped rear yoke seam on the back, and (if you’re looking at The Road Warrior), a quite daring one-sleeve design.

The jacket in the second and third movies differs by having two hand pockets instead of one in the first movie, but all the jackets were just made for the movies. There’s no brand selling the authentic Mad Max jacket.

7. John Wick’s Leather Jacket

One honorable mention: in the first movie, John Wick appears to have worn a brown leather jacket from Hugo Boss called the Garrin. They don’t sell it anymore, but everyone’s pretty sure it was a lambskin one from the 2013 season.

And if seeing Keanu Reeves is making you wonder, “Hey, didn’t Neo have a leather trench coat in The Matrix?” The answer is, “That’s not a jacket, that’s a trench coat.” But also: no, his trench coat was made of trench coat, not leather.

8. Tyler Durden’s Iconic Red Leather Jacket from Fight Club

One of the most recognizable pieces of movie costume history is Brad Pitt’s red leather jacket from Fight Club. It’s another jacket that’s more movie prop than functional outerwear, but the right person could pull it off, especially if you’re a figment of your own imagination.

The slim-cut, rust-red jacket was custom-made for the film, with cream-colored contrast stitching, brown plastic buttons, flap hip pockets, and a maroon lining. It’s pure 1970s-inspired chaos — the perfect reflection of Durden’s rebellious, mismatched style. The movie props were distressed by production, including chipping on one of the buttons, staining on the left chest, a broken stitch on the back, and some cracking on the sleeves.

Wrapping Up

That does it for my list of cinema’s greatest leather jackets! Maybe next I’ll do a broader list of leather jackets from pop culture that includes the influential ones that Elvis and Michael Jackson wore — but that’s an article for another day!

Since there’s a decent chance you’re reading this because you’re considering getting a leather jacket, make sure you check out this article and video I did with Schott NYC on the five main types of leather jackets that you can buy.