Review: Thursday Black Motorcycle Jacket

Thursday's leather jackets combine classic style with quality materials at a great price point. The motorcycle jacket is a great jacket for first-time buyers.

I've been meaning to buy a leather jacket for a long time. One, I like jackets (that should be obvious by now). And two, there's something about a leather jacket that just makes you feel like a badass. Similar to cocaine, putting on a leather jack gives you an immediate sense of confidence and prestige - plus it turns out that it's cheaper to cover your torso in leather than cocaine. The problem is, leather jackets are pretty expensive. After all the research I've done on denim and boots, I've gained an appreciation for the craft that goes into selecting, (tanning), designing, and sewing raw materials into finished products. As such, I knew that I wasn't going to walk into Levis (or even All Saints) and buy the first leather jacket I saw.

Around October of 2018, Thursday (the boot company that you might recognize from some of my other posts) released three different leather jacket styles in a variety of colors. Some strong hints, and one Christmas present later, I was the proud owner of their black motorcycle jacket - the classic double rider style.

In this post I want to give a candid review of this Thursday jacket. I've drawn a lot from an article I read during my searches - linked here. Rather than a guide for how to buy your first leather jacket (the article I linked does that way better than I could), I want to review this particular jacket in the context of price, leather type and quality, topstitching, cut and fit, details, zipper quality, and sleeve and body lining. Also check out my video review on YouTube!

Price

Unless you've got cash to burn, I think one of the most important considerations when buying your first leather jacket is going to be the price. Leather goods are not cheap - especially quality leather goods. So finding a piece that you like and that's in your budget can be a real challenge. That's where Thursday really stands out amount the competition. Thursday has built a solid brand out of delivering quality products for an affordable price point and they keep delivering with these jackets

Source: Thursdayboots.com

They've managed to produce a full-grain leather, steer hide jacket (the natural color is made from Horween leather!) for less than $500. Before this jacket came onto my radar, one of my top options was the $750 Schott Perfecto. So Thursday gets a 10/10 in the price category.

Leather

Leather jackets can be made from a variety of animal hides; from bovine (steer hide, calfskin) to lambskin, to more exotic leathers like deerskin and even snakeskin. Likewise, you'll see a variety of leather qualities from top-grain, to full-grain, to suede. Thursday made their jacket from full-grain steer hide from two different tanneries. The natural color is made from Horween's Chromexel natural leather from the famed Horween Leather Company of Chicago. The black color comes from leather tanned in Leon, Mexico. Leon has come to be known as the "boot-making capital of the world," due to the sheer amount of boots, belts, jackets, and other leather goods come from the craftsmen there. I reached out to Thursday for details about their black motorcycle jacket and received the following response:

"Our Black Motorcycle Jacket is made using a full grain leather that we specifically developed for jackets. The leather thickness is approximately 1.0-1.1mm, so it’s slightly thicker than your average leather jackets... It weighs about 5 to 9 pounds depending on the size. They are made in Leon, Mexico in small batches in partnership with a family owned manufacturer who makes high end jackets typically selling at the $1,000+ price point."

Overall I'm impressed with the leather on this jacket. It's not as supple as a calfskin or lambskin jacket, but it has a nice heft to it and feels like it's going to last a lifetime if not two.

Topstitching

Until I started researching leather jackets, I'll be honest, I had no idea what topstitching was. What I found is that topstitching is a decorative row of stitching along the top of garment and good topstitching can really make a piece pop.

In the picture above, you can see a row of stitching along the zipper and lapels. On this jacket there isn't a huge amount of topstitching because there isn't a huge amount of extra decoration (more on that later). But the topstitching is well done with a nice, heavyweight thread. No complaints here!

Cut and Fit

Manufacturers of cheap leather goods want to make a product that fits a wide range of body shapes. In this way, they sacrifice style for mass appeal and are able to sell more garments for a cheaper price. The most notable area where this is apparent is the armhole opening of a jacket. In order to fit as many people as possible, manufacturers of cheap jackets with cut the armholes wide and low. A well-designed jacket that fits should comfortably fit your arms with a nice snugness (leather jackets will break in, but it shouldn't be too tight).

You can see on the Thursday Jacket that the armholes don't come down too long and garment hits me in the shoulders just about right. I'd say that I'm about an average build (6', 170 lbs - and I ordered a size medium), so I would expect this jacket to fit true to size on most averagely built people. However, if you've got very broad shoulders of a super skinny build, know that you'll probably have to do some searching to find the right jacket for you.

Details

The more detail that a designer puts onto a jacket, the more expensive that jacket will be to make and, therefore, the more you'll end up paying for it. It's also worth noting that the more detail a jacket (or any garment) has, the more casual and less versatile that jacket will be.

Source: thursdayboots.com

With this particular jacket, Thursday has stayed true to the double breasted biker style and hasn't really done a lot to make this jacket stand out. In my mind that is both a pro and a con. On the one hand, this jacket isn't going to be something that people are going to recognize as specifically Thursday. For example, here's a flat lay of the Thursday jacket:

And here is a Jacket by the up-and-coming New York brand, The Arrivals (ignore the fact that this is a women's jacket for a second):

These are both technically double breasted biker jackets, but you can see that The Arrivals has but a lot of though into creating a jacket that really stands out as something all its own. My wife - the owner of the The Arrivals jacket - often get's stopped by complete strangers and complimented (I get compliments too, just not that often).

Above: me waiting for some compliments

Where this could be point on the pro side for the Thursday jacket - and something that I really like - is that Thursday hasn't over engineered this item. What the company has created is leather biker jacket that stays true to the classic style without too many bells and whistles. Because this is my first leather jacket and I'm already going with a more casual style compared to say an L1 or cafe racer, I wanted something that would have that classic look without too much complexity.

Zipper Quality

Zippers are something that we interact with every day, multiple times per day and barely think about. However, there is a wide variety of zippers and zipper qualities out there and what ends up getting used on your leather jacket can directly influence the price. There's a couple resources that I found that talk about this in detail (here and here), so I won't get too much into it now. Suffice it to say that there are two major zipper manufacturers that you'll run across: YKK and RiRi. Both are good zippers made by masters of... zipper making? And most are going to be high quality.

This particular jacket utilized something called "Star" zippers. I've never heard of this zipper maker and my online searches have come up pretty much empty on this one, so I'm assuming this is either a very niche, high-end zipper operation, or - more likely - this is a very cheap zipper source directly from some mass production shop. I'd say this is probably the worst feature of the jacket yet and time will tell if the zippers hold up.

Sleeve and Body Lining

The final consideration to take into account when purchasing your jacket is the material out of which the sleeve and body lining are made. Leather jackets, and particularly a jacket made from steer hide like this one, will last a long time. The lining that covers the interior of the body and sleeves of the jacket will most likely break down long before the leather does. For that reason it's important to find a jacket with lining that is both comfortable and durable. When it comes to linings, the most common type is polyester but you'll also find silk (which is surprisingly not the best lining for jackets) as well as something called cupro (which surprisingly is the best lining for jackets).

Behold

The Thursday jacket utilizes a standard polyester lining. Polyester linings can run a range of sartorial features from silky and smooth to more rugged and tactile. In the case of this jacket I would describe the lining as a little more tactile. It's not uncomfortable, but doesn't have the silky texture of other, finer polyester weaves or Bemberg Cupro. I wouldn't rate this a particularly bad quality of this jacket as the lining seems like it will hold up just fine. However, I think this is probably another area where Thursday cut costs in order to sell this jacket for a lower price.

At the end of the day, the pros definitely outweigh the cons on this jacket. Yes, it's not the highest quality or most expensive leather, it's not a statement piece, and the zippers are low quality. But for a first time leather jacket, I really don't know if you could find a better option for the price. This is another great piece from Thursday and I'm exciting to wear it in!

Tags: #leather #jackets #slowfashion #craft #workwear #rawdenim #mensstyle #mensfashion #thursdays #bikerjacket #doublerider #steerhide