The Hide to Seek

ORTLAND, Ore. — Jim Rice was strolling along lawyer-like in his three-piece suit one day when a tough-looking woman with a crew cut and a black leather jacket stalked toward him, going the other way. She looked mean, she looked mad. Her lip was ready to curl if he said anything.

But he risked an ice-breaker anyway.

“Nice Langlitz,” he said quietly as she passed.

Stunned, the woman broke stride and spun around. A happy grin peeled across her face. “You know a Langlitz,” she said in wonder.

Did he know a Langlitz? Rice might have looked like a three-piece-suit kind of guy--heck, he wears a bow tie more often than not--but hanging in his closet back home was a big, black Langlitz Columbia, the style with the diagonal zipper, the gun pocket in its belly and themoney compartment hidden inside a sleeve, as if anybody would try to rip off somebody wearing a Langlitz.

This is the brand that defined the genre, the inspiration for the black leather motorcycle jacket (actually, a Schott) Marlon Brando wore in “The Wild One,” the kind of garment leather sculptor Nancy Grossman described in Esquire as containing “the zipped-up potential for explosive aliveness.”

If you want one, get in line. The waiting list for a custom-fit Langlitz is now 14 months. It’s expected to top 18 months in the next few weeks. And there’s no guarantee that the $845 price tag on the basic 10-pocket Columbia ($650 without the extra pockets, $1,100 with extra options) won’t go up by the time it actually arrives.

Langlitz, arguably the finest leather jacket in the world, is no longer the leather of choice for just hard-core riders committed to a tough hide that will save their skin on long trips. In recent years, orders have erupted from all over the planet--20% of the shipments go to Japan, a large number to northern Europe--and a lot of them come from artists, lawyers, stockbrokers, anybody who looks in his wallet and finds $800 and looks inside his soul and finds a rebel.

Bruce Springsteen has one. So do Bruce Willis, Geena Davis, Kiefer Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, Jeff Goldblum and Sylvester Stallone. Neil Young outfitted his entire touring band in Langlitz.

Kilian Kerwin, a Venice screenwriter, phoned Langlitz headquarters here last month and ordered a jacket for his 18-month-old daughter.

“My first Langlitz was in ’84. I got another one in ‘87,” Kerwin says. “The idea of having a jacket that’s yours, custom-made for you. I’ve been across the world, and I can spot a Langlitz across the room. You can just tell. You know.”

Rice, now a deputy public defender in Eugene, Ore., doesn’t ride motorcycles, but he wears his Langlitz to rock concerts, atop a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

“No one bumps into you when you wear a Langlitz jacket. You know, I wear this thing, and everyone else gets kind of umphed around, but in a Langlitz, you end up with a 1-inch reserve around your body. Like the aura around the jacket literally keeps people away.”

There is also the matter of the gun pocket. Rice takes comfort in visiting some clients with a .380 Sig Sauer tucked in his Langlitz. When a staffer showed him the jacket’s features, he says, the guy explained, “ ‘This is a gun pocket. Or, it can be for a paperback book.’ And he smiles at me. ‘Depending on how you think your day’s going to be.’ ”

Even the cops wear them. The entire Portland motorcycle traffic force owns Langlitz; so does the Kent, Wash., police traffic unit, for which they are standard issue.

“The jackets just are wonderful. I’ve got my original issue, I still wear it on a regular basis. That’s 10 years,” says Kent Police Sgt. Brian Jones.

On a biker traffic stop, he says, it is a sure way to win respect. “Other than the ‘Hi, how are you?’ and ‘Why did you stop me?’ they’ll immediately say, ‘Nice coat.’ A lot of those outlaw guys, they can’t afford a Langlitz. And if they have one, we want to know how they got it.”

*

For their part, the people at Langlitz wish the jacket wasn’t quite so popular. The way they figure it, it’s made for motorcyclists, so why would anyone else want one? “I can’t tell you how many secretaries have called and said, ‘No, [the boss] just wants a nice leather jacket,’ ” says general manager David Hansen. “This one guy called from Utah and said, ‘I’m just gonna wear this four or five times a year riding around in my Miata.’ I tried to talk him out of it.”

All this newfound demand, some fear, could undermine the very cachet, the smell of something bad, with which the leather jacket has been forever imbued. “As soon as a Japanese businessman buys a leather coat, or Ned the accountant buys one, it diminishes the whole thing, it steals some of the power of it,” warns Scott Omelinuk, style writer at GQ. “We’re watching the sunset of the rebel coat, basically.”

These days, true motorcyclists, who remember the late Ross Langlitz as a savvy rider who lost a leg racing at the age of 18, tend to argue a lot about whether a synthetic riding suit like an Aerostitch isn’t better for long-distance cruising, or whether a Vanson isn’t a more practical alternative. But when it comes to which brand conveys cool, the bickering ends.

“If you really want to be cool, you cough up the big bucks and buy a Langlitz. It is a status symbol. It sets you apart as a serious biker,” explains John Hafen, a fighter pilot turned software consultant, and a longtime motorcyclist, from Bellevue, Wash.

“If you don’t believe me, try walking into the Alki Tavern [in Seattle] some summer Thursday afternoon in a blue or a green shirt and see the reaction. You may not be able to buy a beer. If you plan to walk in in a lavender shirt, you may want to call 911 beforehand. If you walk in in a Langlitz, and tell someone how long you waited for it, chances are they will commiserate with you, and they’ll buy you a beer.”

“They do business the old-fashioned way,” says BMW rider Shannon Kelley of Newberg, Ore. “They deliver a quality product in the time frame promised, stand behind their work. They only make a set number of garments a day. No more, no less. They do not work Saturdays.”

Indeed, Langlitz isn’t interested in making more than six garments a day. That would mean hiring new seamstresses (the entire staff, including the owners, stands at 15) and expanding the company’s cramped headquarters in a rundown commercial district.

They could move, but that would mean taking out a bank loan. And company founder Langlitz, who essentially invented riding leathers when he opened his first Portland shop in the 1940s, gave his daughter, Jackie Langlitz Hansen, two pieces of advice when she took over the company in ‘82: Don’t go to business school, he said. And stay out of debt.

So if you phone Langlitz, Jackie will most likely answer, or her husband, David, or her nephew Tom. They probably know the status of your order without having to look in the computer.

If your jacket needs repairing after 20 or so years of wear, or a bad slide on the pavement, it will be done fast, and it will be done right. Upon delivery of a new one, you’ll get a jacket, stamped with its own serial number, that will keep most of the Portland rain out and, unzipped, let in a lot of the L.A. sun. A jacket that rides low in the back so you don’t moon the guy behind you, and low over the wrists so you can raise the handlebars as high as you want. A jacket that will still be in one piece, along with your skin, after you slide across the pavement at 40 mph.

*

Could Langlitz guarantee that level of quality, the company wonders, if it turned out a thousand jackets a month? Worse, would the crew have to work weekends?

“As you get bigger, problems become magnified,” Hansen says. “None of us want big problems. They’re just not worth the headache.”

The offer of a bribe to speed up a delivery is not uncommon. “We get people in here who say, ‘Surely you would do this if I paid you, wouldn’t you?’ And I say, ‘No.’ They don’t believe it,” Hansen says. “The way we see it, just because you have money doesn’t make you deserve anything.”

Hansen reminds customers that half of the daily production is available off a rack in the shop at the same price as a custom fit. Beyond that, he figures, the world will just have to wait.

“It is impossible for us to sell jackets to everyone who wants them in the U.S.,” he says philosophically. “We say, there’s lots of room for everybody. All we want is to sell six a day. You figure there’s four or five thousand leather jackets sold a day, all we want is one in a thousand. That’s all.”