Leather Culture

The leather scene - or subculture - involves practices and styles of dress organised around sexual activities and hedonistic eroticism. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this scene distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures. Leather culture is most visible in gay communities but it is also reflected in various ways in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and straight worlds.

Many people associate leather culture with BDSM practices and its many subcultures. But for others, wearing black leather clothing is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power; love of motorcycles and independence; and/or engagement in sexual kink or leather fetishism.

Perhaps no figure has more vividly represented the leather subculture in the popular imagination than the leatherman portrayed by Glenn Hughes of the Village People.