PELLE PELLE AND AVIREX ARE BACK: HERE'S HOW HIP-HOP POPULARIZED LEATHER JACKETS
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This fall in Chicago and New York, groups of leather jacket enthusiasts came together to celebrate “Pelle Pelle Day.” East Harlem native Miguel Rodriguez organized the events. He’s a collector who runs an Instagram account with just over 2,500 followers called @PellePelleLeather—an archive page dedicated to documenting the history of the American leather jacket label Pelle Pelle by Marc Buchanan. At New York City’s Pelle Pelle Day in Times Square, nearly 20 collectors came from across all five boroughs to show off their rarest Pelle Pelles. One 24-year-old attendee from uptown Manhattan arrived in an all-black leather studded “Soda Club” jacket he inherited from his father. Another collector from Canarsie, Brooklyn proudly turned around to show off an intricate embroidery of three men playing Cee-lo on his back. And many of the younger enthusiasts in their 20s were awed by a 40-year-old man from South Jamaica, Queens who had on one of the oldest jackets in sight, an orange Pelle Pelle with a baseball graphic on the back that he purchased for $700 in 1998. As New York drill blasted from a set of Bluetooth speakers, collectors who never met dapped each other up, gushed over the Pelle Pelles surrounding them, and posed for pictures before coming together for a family photo.
Buchanan studied art since he was a child. He painted, made sculptures, and crafted his first garments before graduating high school. He learned how to design leather jackets by looking through old pattern books from the 1940s that his business partner acquired. When Buchanan realized that he had a better chance of becoming a successful leather jacket designer rather than an artist, he decided to quit school and sold off his stake in Gandalf to pursue freelance leather design work. Buchanan launched Pelle Pelle in 1978, which is Italian for “Leather Leather,” because he noticed a gap in the leather jacket market that he could fill. Pelle Pelle was going to make a luxurious, but affordable, high fashion leather jacket.
By 1983, Buchanan was selling his colorful Pelle Pelle jackets at trade shows like Magic. Instead of large department stores, he distributed Pelle Pelle to small specialty shops like City Blue in Philadelphia and Blue Jeans in New York because they targeted the urban audience he wanted to reach and were easier to work with.
“The hip-hop community came in, looked at what I was doing, and said: ‘Hey, we like this and we’re going to support this,’ says Buchanan. “That was great for me because I could get really creative. I don’t have to dumb stuff down because I have this community that likes this creative stuff. It was a perfect match and I could not have asked for a better customer.
John and Vic Casiano, brothers who grew up on 125th and Broadway in West Harlem during the early ‘90s, remembered being kids and seeing leather jackets on notorious drug dealers such as Alpo Martinez—one of Harlem’s most stylish drug lords who also wore custom leather jackets sewn by Dapper Dan. At the time, Avirex was one of the most distinguished American leather jacket labels out. Originally launched in 1975, Avirex was founded by a New Yorker named Jeff Clyman, an attorney who flew Warbirds in air shows during his spare time. The son of an Army Air Corps bomber pilot, Clyman noticed that whenever he wore his father’s old World War II flight jacket he was constantly asked by strangers where they could buy one like it. A military fashion enthusiast and collector of vintage military gear, Clyman originally entered the business by reselling vintage aviation jackets through his own collection. When his supply dried up, he decided to start making reproductions of them on his own under his label Avirex, which is latin for “King of air.” Clyman’s brand flourished throughout the ‘80s. Within a couple of years, the US government contracted Avirex to produce garments for the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and NASA. Eventually, Avirex began outfitting the casts of blockbuster movies like Top Gun, further pushing their leather jackets into the mainstream consciousness. By 1986, Avirex was pulling in $10 million in sales and even opened a flagship store on Broadway in SoHo, Manhattan that held a mini aviation museum with an actual World War II fighter plane displayed inside.
According to Clyman, Avirex began producing these varsity jackets to expand the label’s commercial offerings while also staying true to their holistic vision of re-creating iconic American military apparel. So Avirex began replicating stadium jackets worn by youth in the late 1930s who were a part of President Roosevelt’s Civilian Pilot Training program. Then someone in Avirex’s sales team saw an opportunity.
Along with their iconic bombers, Avirex’s varsity jackets became emblematic of ‘90s hip-hop culture. Fat Joe wore his Avirex varsity in the 1995 Hype Williams-directed music video for LL Cool J’s famous remix of “I Shot Ya.” Biggie Smalls posed for Ernie Paniccioli’s camera lens while wearing a red Avirex. And for Junior M.A.F.I.A’s “Get Money” video, he wore the label’s varsity jacket while caressing Charli Baltimore. Aside from Nas, it could be argued that no rappers wore Avirex better than Mobb Deep, who perfectly captured the brand’s military aesthetic in their music video for “Hell on Earth,” which fittingly ends with Prodigy and Havoc’s crew walking through razed city streets in Avirex leathers.
Because New York was Avirex’s hometown runway, the brand soared within the five boroughs. The New York-based brand’s flagship store was just blocks away from Hot 97’s radio station in SoHo and there was even a factory store in Long Island City—a short walk from the Queensbridge Houses. But generally, the ‘90s was a golden era for clothing brands that embraced hip-hop culture. Alongside companies like Karl Kani, Fubu, and Tommy Hilfiger, leather jacket labels also foresaw the influence of hip-hop culture long before it became a common marketing ploy. Both Avirex and Pelle Pelle seeded their garments to rappers, designed custom pieces for them free of charge, and featured them in ad campaigns that filled the pages of Vibe, XXL and The Source. Avirex highlighted rising hip-hop groups like Brand Nubian in print ads while Pelle Pelle spotlighted a young Cam’ron.
While Buchanan admits he’s shy and not one to rub shoulders with A-List rappers like prolific leather jacket designer Jeff Hamilton, Pelle Pelle remained popular long after the streetwear boom of the ‘90s because it constantly paid attention to how hip-hop fashion was changing. Odds are, if you watch a rap video from the early 2000s, anything from “Dipset Anthem” to Twista’s “Overnight Celebrity,” you’ll likely see someone wearing an oversized Pelle Pelle. But the brand’s relevance in the market at the time wasn’t just luck. It was because of employees like John Green, a marketing director for Pelle Pelle since 2002, who constantly found fresh rappers to represent the brand throughout the 2000s and early 2010s. Green was the one who got Fat Joe to wear an iconic gray “Soda Club” Pelle Pelle for the “Lean Back” music video and was behind those custom ones worn by ASAP Rocky and Ferg in recent years. But the East Tremont, Bronx native also worked closely with boutiques nationwide to make sure Pelle jackets were presented well in stores and get direct feedback from the streets, which he would share with Buchanan.
But despite their success, these leather jacket labels eventually began losing their skin. In 2006, Clyman sold Avirex to the entrepreneur Marc Ecko for an undisclosed sum. Despite Avirex being in a profitable licensing agreement with Ecko since 2004 to produce an Avirex men’s sportswear line, which was estimated to pull in as much as $80 million back in 2006, Clyman told Complex he felt Avirex “lost its soul” and was “fractured” as a label. Additionally, Avirex had previously licensed the brand to owners in Japan and Europe back in 1996 who had completely different visions for his brand “Europe was concentrating on one look, Japan on another and the USA on another,” wrote Clyman. After selling Avirex, Clyman went off to launch Cockpit USA, a leather jacket label that continues to reproduce historic American aviation apparel today.
And even though Pelle Pelle was still popular amongst rappers ranging from Dave East to Chief Keef throughout the 2010s, the brand’s sales went down from $60 million in 2002 to $40 million in 2008. By 2018, Pelle Pelle had quietly exited the market with little to no explanation. But now, Buchanan has finally revealed that the brand’s sudden disappearance was due to the challenges he faced when many of the small specialty stores he worked with began closing.
“You could see it happening in the early 2010s. Different urban stores started disappearing and going bankrupt,” says Buchanan, who refused to sell through department stores even when Pelle Pelle was struggling. “I remember when department stores got into the urban business and they began opening up urban departments within their stores. I looked at that and I said ‘That’s the end of it.’ When these people get on like a bandwagon, it’s over because they had no interest in it. They didn’t care or respect the customer. They’re just in it for the dollar.”
Although commercial leather jacket brands have struggled, the custom leather jacket business has always thrived by helping artists develop their own unique style as they grow within the industry. In the ‘90s, the Harlem-based haberdashery 5001 Flavors made custom leather jackets for Biggie Smalls that were featured on the cover of The Source and pieces worn by Cam’ron and Missy Elliott for their respective debut album covers. Recently, they made leather looks for Fat Joe to wear while he was guest-hosting The Wendy Williams Show alongside Remy Ma. But one of the label’s proudest achievements was making all the leather looks for Total and The Notorious B.I.G.‘s “Can’t You See” music video to promote the 1995 film New Jersey Drive. At the time, the stars in the video and movie were wearing leather looks by 5001 Flavors at different stages in their career. Biggie Smalls was an emerging artist, Heavy D was transitioning into acting, and Puffy was becoming a music business mogul.
“I think for hip-hop, leather has always been synonymous with a certain level of style or wealth. It bumps your picture up and makes more of a visual statement,” says 5001 Flavors’ president and CEO Sharene Wood.
Even in the 2000s, rappers would still seek out designers such as Dapper Dan for a custom leather jacket with a giant Gucci logo on the back—similar to the one Eric B. wore on the cover of 1988’s Follow The Leader. Now, post Dapper Dan’s designs hitting Gucci’s runway without any credit, customers can go to his atelier in Harlem and purchase official jackets made with fabrics supplied by the Italian luxury house.
But Buchanan would be operating in a very different market and facing competition from luxury brands in a way he never has. Artists like Jim Jones, who were hustling down prices for Pelle Pelles on 145th and Broadway in the early 2000s, can now be seen walking the runway in an all-leather look for Off-White’s recent Paris Fashion Week presentation. But it’s clear that Buchanan’s label is still well-remembered by the masses. So much so that, when the late Virgil Abloh produced leather jackets for his final Louis Vuitton collections, many people on social media compared it to Pelle Pelle. While stylists like Morrow and Bradshaw agree that most rappers today would rather buy leather jackets from high-end designer labels like Louis Vuitton rather than a brand like Pelle Pelle or Avirex, they believe that these original leather jacket labels will always hold a unique cachet within hip-hop culture.
“It was a feeling that you felt wearing those leathers. When you rocked a Pelle, it wasn’t for middle or upper-class America to look at you and go ‘Oh, nice,’” says Bradshaw. “It was for everybody else and the people who understood. You found your identity in those jackets. You felt the music and the fashion went hand in hand.”
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