In March, Brandon Mahler took a pair of thrifted leather pants and spliced them into shorts. Holding the results, Mr. Mahler, a fashion consultant in New York, had to acknowledge that he’d crossed the line of sartorial sanity.
“When are you wearing leather shorts?” Mr. Mahler said, speaking with a Hyde-like clarity about this Jekyll-esque tailoring experiment. “They don’t make sense.”
On other leather items, Mr. Mahler, 33, doesn’t hesitate. He owns three pairs of leather pants, several leather jackets and a prized Zegna leather blazer that called out to him at a secondhand store like a lustrous needle in the cotton haystack.
“Maybe it’s this rebel bad uzunluk thing,” he said of his tendency to dress like an oil slick.
Mr. Mahler typifies a cohort of men — often younger, yes, but also unbothered by the material’s many clichés — that have leaned into leather.
There’s Shaboozey, the country-rap warbler who appeared on “Saturday Night Live” this month outfitted in leather from his boots to his bolo tie; Timothée Chalamet, putting a fine point on his rocker pivot by wearing a black leather Prada blazer on the “A Complete Unknown” red carpet; and the Memphis Grizzlies player Jaren Jackson Jr., who arrived at a recent game in inky leather pants and a matching leather tank top.
