This $600 Leather Blazer Is the Perfect Fall Jacket

For more leather blazer intel, here’s every other supple cowhide stunner worth your dollars.

Dressing down a blazer is a lot easier to get wrong than right. Pick a bad shirt—too starchy, too stiff, too shiny—and you’ll wind up looking like you delivered the least successful keynote address in Davos history. Pick bad pants and you’ll wind up looking like a recently-divorced dad trying to get back out there, also unsuccessfully.

More often than not, the blazer itself is the main issue. Not all blazers belong in the casual zone, and trying to force them there tends to land you in the not-so-rarefied realm of smug policy wonks and sad, lonely dads. The solution is simple: find a blazer that not only excels in casual contexts, but was expressly designed for ‘em. Enter Banana Republic’s nubuck leather blazer.

Gerald is wearing a Banana Republic leather blazer, a vintage Abercrombie & Fitch sweater, vintage Levi’s jeans, and Our Legacy mules.

Bowen Fernie

If a leather blazer sounds way fancier than one of its woolen counterparts, think of the differences in terms of metal and plastic straws: they’re heavier, more durable, and, obviously, more expensive. Crucially, leather blazers are also more casual—hell, we’d go so far as to say a leather blazer shares more DNA with a trucker jacket than a sport coat. A leather blazer is a lone wolf, after all; it roams unaccompanied by matching trousers, which means it’s always eager to hang out with your jeans, à la Michael Keaton, or dress pants, à la Harold Ratner. When you wear a leather blazer, nobody will deign to ask why you’re so dressed up, which ranks only below “nice haircut!” on a list of words all menswear fans dread to hear.

BR’s version is crafted from a luxe nubuck with a shorter nep and a smoother hand than traditional suede, but it promises to patinate more beautifully than Japanese selvedge. It’s relaxed enough to layer over a sweater in a charmingly ‘90s-era heartthrob way. It’s simultaneously rugged and chic, a combination that’s usually more like oil and water.

Speaking of water: remember all the straw talk from a moment ago? Metal is usually more expensive than plastic, and leather is usually more expensive than, uh, anything else. This joint, though, is the rare exception to the rule. Banana Republic offers up all that luscious, primo nubuck for $600, a not-inconsiderable sum when you divorce it from all those aforementioned qualities—and an absolute pittance when you factor ‘em in. Now that’s a mic drop even the most jaded Economic Forum regulars can appreciate.