Fashion
Jeans vs. Leather
LEATHER AND DENIM
Those who successfully pull off denim and leather are usually style chameleons, like the perpetually-reinvented Madonna, but there are others who combine the two fabrics once, only for it to become a lifelong habit.
The Ramones: The Wild Ones
The music of punk's founding fathers represented something completely new when it first shook the world in the mid '70s, but their sound and look had roots in early music genres like doo wop, and took influence from girl groups like the Ronettes. Their leather-jacket-and-jeans-look could have been straight out of Brando's smoldering 1953 film The Wild One. Once they'd found their sound and look, they stuck to them steadfastly, never altering the formula through line-up changes, cultural shifts, and the ups and downs of their 22 year career.
Madonna: Go West
No one works both denim and leather like the queen of pop reinvention herself. Madonna's most recent leather moment came in the June issue of W, when Steven Klein photographed her engaging in some kinky horseplay while wearing cowhide. On the denim side, Madonna's Music album from 2000 featured her in full rhinestone cowboy mode. The "Don't Tell Me" video from the same album saw the ultimate marriage of dangerous leather and Americana denim—for the line dancing sequence she wore a tight Western-style black leather shirt with jeans.
Janet Jackson: Busting Loose
The pop-soul diva has used leather and denim to great, often revealing, effect. On her 1993 Rolling Stone cover Jackson confirmed her hard-bodied sex goddess status by posing in jeans with a man's hands covering her bare breasts. In 2004, the infamous Super Bowl incident with Justin Timberlake once again put Jackson's breasts on display. When her leather bustier "malfunctioned," it revealed, instead of a bra, a nipple shield. Jackson—who mysteriously received more criticism than the equally culpable Timberlake—apologized, calling it an accident, but, unlike Jackson's breasts, the truth is unlikely to ever be revealed.
