It’s Leather Season, Baby!

All the sorts of festive fashion changes that Labor Day usually signals seem sort of meaningless this year, don’t they? Who cares about a nice new sweater, or a fancy double-faced cashmere coat? In the absence of such clear-cut trends is a material poised to dominate the fall: leather.

Last year, the leather blazer, popularized by a perfect Supreme specimen and the general greaseball charisma of Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, was the season’s could-you-or-can’t-you menswear item. In the winter, leather pants, too, became a menswear cult item. (We are far enough removed from that episode of Friends, one supposes.)

A new chapter of the leather revolution began this summer, when the British-Nigerian designer Mowalola Ogunlesi was tapped by Kanye West to lead the design team for his Gap collaboration. Those in the know were already hip to her eponymous line, which includes some of the best leather pants on the market and a hot pink leather trench coat printed with monsters from her spring 2020 collection. That show also included a number of leather suits and halter tops in jolting colors; it was slick, rich, and sort of sacrilegious. (“So this is as if I’m in a Black Woodstock festival,” Ogunlesi said at her show, “and someone has been murdered.”)