Guy Baldwin. On Leather Pants.

A title in 1989

International Mr. Leather is an annual contest held in Chicago. Each year it chooses someone to represent the leather community for the coming year, a wide and diverse community that shares leather clothing as a common sign.

In 1989, Guy Baldwin won the title. The same year he was also Mr. National Leather Association. He is the only person ever to hold both titles at once.

Baldwin was more than a face on a stage. From the early 1970s he worked as a counsellor and educator, and wrote widely for his community. His book Ties That Bind, published in 1993, is a collection of essays on relationships within leather culture. In 2012 he was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame.

So when Baldwin talks about a pair of leather pants, he speaks as someone who had lived inside that language for decades.

Leather as material

Before it is a symbol, a pair of leather pants is an object. Tanned hide is thick and heavy, and does not stretch the way cloth does. Worn tight, it follows every line of the body. It makes a faint sound as you move. Under lights, it catches long streaks of shine.

Black is the most common colour. It absorbs light on flat planes and reflects it at the folds, so the wearer's shape reads more clearly than in any other material. From a distance, leather pants are an outline. Up close, a surface full of creases.

Leather also changes with its wearer. It stretches here, wears there, darkens with sweat and the oil of hands. No two old pairs are alike. This is what Baldwin touches on when he says wearing leather sets you apart from the crowd: the material itself refuses to be a uniform.

A language of its own

For Baldwin, leather pants are more than fashion. They declare that you stand with a community. They are a code, a sign of belonging that insiders read at once and outsiders may not read at all.

He calls them a kind of armour. Erotic armour, but armour in the protective sense too. Worn with confidence, they speak of masculinity, defiance, closeness and pride.

Baldwin points out that during the worst years of the AIDS crisis, leather culture became a way for many gay men to be visible. While the community was losing so much, standing in the street in leather was a way of saying: we are still here. It held vulnerability and strength at the same time.

Why a pair of pants belongs in a museum

In 2017 the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened Items: Is Fashion Modern?, an exhibition of 111 garments and accessories that shaped the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Leather pants were among them, beside familiar things like jeans and the white T shirt. Baldwin was one of the voices invited to speak about them.

Putting leather pants in a design museum admits that clothing does more than cover the body. It carries feeling, politics, and the history of people who had to live at the margins. The design of a garment lies not only in its seams but in what people use it to say.

Baldwin's view makes that point with a very concrete example. A hide, cut into the shape of a pair of pants, worn on a body. And from it, an answer to the question: who am I.