How to Care for a Leather Jacket

A leather jacket is supposed to change: the shoulders mark, the elbows soften, the collar takes the shape of your neck. Care is not about preventing that — it is about making sure the leather ages instead of degrades. What follows holds for any well-made jacket, including the pieces we hand-cut and hand-finish in our ateliers in Florence and Istanbul — a craft the house has practised since 1917.

What does a leather jacket need day to day?

Three habits: wipe the jacket down after wearing, let it air, hang it on a broad hanger. A dry cloth or soft brush lifts the grit that abrades the surface, and a few hours in open air let the leather release the moisture it takes from your body.

Resist doing more: over-conditioning saturates the fibres, dulls the finish and leaves panels slack. The most useful habit is never putting the jacket away damp.

What should you do if your leather jacket gets wet?

Let it dry slowly, at room temperature, on a wide hanger, away from every heat source. Blot with a dry towel first — press, do not rub — then unzip it and leave it in moving air.

What ruins wet leather is fast drying. Leather is collagen, and wet collagen shrinks and hardens permanently at temperatures a radiator, hair dryer or car heater reaches easily — leaving a smaller, stiffer, papery panel no conditioner reverses. Heat is the one mistake in leather care that is genuinely irreversible. Once the jacket is dry, a light conditioning replaces what the water carried off.

How often should you condition a leather jacket, and why?

Twice a year suits a jacket in regular rotation, plus one after a soaking — though the leather, not the calendar, decides. Conditioning is not cosmetic. During tanning, hides are fatliquored: fats and oils are worked in between the fibre bundles so they slide against one another instead of binding, and that movement is what lets leather fold rather than crack. Those oils migrate out with wear, heat and time, and a crease cracked through the grain does not heal.

Dry indoor heating pulls moisture out fast, and stress points — elbows, the fold behind the shoulder, the hem — dry first. Waxed hides such as the cowhide on the Officina Trucker carry their own dressing and want re-waxing rather than balm. The test is tactile: press with a thumb, and if the leather springs back supple, leave it alone.

Which conditioner should you use, and what should you avoid?

Use a neutral, uncoloured, silicone-free balm made for garment leather, and test it somewhere hidden first — inside the hem or under the collar. Apply it to a cloth, not to the jacket, in thin coats, and let it absorb for hours before buffing off residue.

Four things to keep off a jacket. Pigmented creams leave tint that sits on the surface, transfers onto shirts and scarves and builds up in the seams. Silicone sprays and instant shines lay down a film that slows the leather's breathing and resists later treatment. Kitchen remedies — olive oil, alcohol wipes, baby wipes, detergent — strip the finish or leave residue that darkens in patches; olive oil turns rancid inside the fibre. Saddle soap is a genuine leather product, but it belongs on tack: an alkaline cleaner, not a conditioner, it dulls garment leather and draws oils out.

How do you deal with stains on leather?

Act fast, and treat as little of the surface as possible. Marks fall into three kinds.

Water marks are a tide line rather than a stain: as the wet patch shrinks, evaporating water carries dissolved salts, dust and some of the leather's own oils to the edge and leaves them there. Re-wetting the whole panel with a barely damp cloth and letting it dry evenly is the standard fix: the edge goes when the surface dries as one piece. On aniline and napped leathers, ask a specialist first.

Grease and oil should never be met with water. Blot immediately, cover the mark with cornflour or talc, and leave it several hours to draw the oil out before brushing it away. Repeat rather than scrub.

Ink, dye and set colour transfer are the ones to leave alone: solvents lift the leather's own colour along with the ink, and the pale halo left behind is worse than the mark.

How should you hang and store a leather jacket?

Hang it on a broad wooden hanger, with room either side, inside a breathable cotton cover — never on wire, never in plastic. A jacket carries real weight, and a thin hanger concentrates it on two points, stretching a permanent dimple into each shoulder.

Dry-cleaner bags and vinyl covers seal moisture against the hide, and leather that cannot breathe grows mould. Give the jacket space too: pressed between other garments, leather creases along the line it is compressed into, and structured pieces like the coats in our women's collection hold those creases longest.

How do you store a leather jacket for the season?

Clean it, condition it, hang it in cotton in a cool dark wardrobe. Storing a jacket dirty is the classic error: salt, sweat and body oils keep working all summer, and a mark that would have wiped off in March is set by October. Keep it out of the attic and the basement — heat and damp are what leather handles worst — and never fold it or vacuum-seal it.

Do suede, nubuck and shearling need different care?

Yes — for napped leathers the rule reverses: they are cleaned dry, not wet. Suede is the underside of the hide, or a split from it, buffed into a nap; nubuck is the grain side sanded lightly, denser but marking as readily. Both carry a raised fibre surface, which water flattens and oil darkens. Care is a rubber or brass brush to lift the nap, a suede eraser for dry marks, and a protector made for napped leather — never balm or wax, which mat the fibres into a shine that is hard to reverse.

Shearling is not two materials but one skin with the wool left on and the leather side usually finished as suede — two surfaces, each wanting something different. The wool is aired and brushed, not washed; the leather side gets the dry treatment above. A piece like the Artico Shearling wants brushing along the nap and no heat: warmth, moisture and agitation together felt wool, and felted wool does not return.

Why are aniline and light-coloured leathers more demanding?

Because they have the least between the hide and the world. Aniline leather is coloured through with soluble dyes and carries no pigment topcoat — the reason the grain stays visible and the colour has depth, and the reason it drinks water and spots easily. The aniline lambskin on the Scarlatta Moto darkens where a raindrop lands. Much of that evens out with wear; sun fading does not, so keep aniline out of direct light. Semi-aniline adds a thin pigmented topcoat and is more forgiving; fully pigmented leather is the most protected.

Light colours face a separate problem: colour transfer. Indigo from raw denim, dye from a new scarf, the seat of a dark car — all of it migrates onto pale leather at cuffs, hem and back. On a cream piece such as the Avorio Bomber, wipe those contact areas after wearing: fresh transfer often lifts with a dry cloth, set transfer does not. Embossed surfaces like the croc-embossed calfskin on the Sabbia Croco Bomber hold dust in the low points of the pattern and want a dry brush.

When should you take a leather jacket to a professional?

Whenever the repair involves colour, structure or a solvent: ink and dye stains, deep grease, mould, a tear or burn, a stretched pocket, a failed zip, and any jacket already stiffened by heat drying. Go to a leather specialist rather than a general dry cleaner, and never send a jacket through a conventional dry-cleaning cycle — those solvents strip the oils out of the hide, which is why proper leather cleaning re-fats the skin afterwards. And if you do not know what the stain is, stop.

Which habits protect leather, and which damage it?

The pattern repeats: slow, dry and neutral is safe; hot, wet and chemical is not.

Does the leather itself change the routine?

It changes the frequency and the product, not the principles. Full-grain leather keeps the hide's outer grain intact — the densest, most water-resistant layer of the skin — which is why the calfskin behind a piece like the Aquila Relief Biker is slow to dry out. Top-grain has that surface sanded back and refinished: more uniform, more stain-resistant, but the coating limits how far a conditioner reaches. Soft lambskin is thinner and marks sooner. Everything else — slow drying, no heat, a wide hanger, cotton not plastic — holds across the 30-model collection and the men's collection.

The short answer

• Daily: wipe with a dry cloth, air the jacket, hang it on a broad hanger.
• Wet: blot, hang open, dry slowly at room temperature — never near a radiator, hair dryer or sun.
• Conditioning: about twice a year, neutral silicone-free balm; no coloured creams, silicone shines or saddle soap.
• Storage: cotton cover, cool dark wardrobe, never plastic; clean and condition before a season away.
• Exceptions: suede, nubuck and shearling are cleaned dry; aniline and pale leathers need shade; ink, mould and tears go to a specialist.