The Perfecto

The cigar was a Perfecto. Tapered both ends, hand-rolled, the favorite smoke of a Lower East Side leather man named Irving Schott who, in the late winter of 1928, got asked by a Long Island Harley-Davidson dealer named Beck for a riding jacket that wouldn't come unbuttoned in a high-speed slide on a Babylon back road. Buttons, the way Irving saw it, were the problem. He'd seen the new continuous-coil fastener an engineer named Sundback had patented a few years back, and he had a hunch: what works on a tobacco pouch could work on a man's coat, if you built it heavy enough. So he sketched a jacket with an asymmetric front zipper that lay flat under a snap storm flap, set the lapels at a fighting angle, and cut the whole thing in horsehide thick enough to stop a stone. Prototype came back from the bench, and he named it for the cigar in his pocket.

The Perfecto sold to the dealer at $5.50, retailed for $14.95, and hasn't left the catalog in any form since. Marlon Brando wore one in The Wild One in 1953 and made the jacket a synonym for a certain kind of American trouble. Joey Ramone wore one in 1976 and renewed the synonym for a different generation. Bruce Springsteen wore one on the cover of Born to Run in 1975 — though full disclosure, that cover Perfecto was borrowed from a friend, and Springsteen didn't buy his own till later. The jacket has been in more American photographs than anything else ever made in Brooklyn, maybe outside the Brooks Brothers sack suit. It's the rare American product manufactured continuously, by the same family, in the same metro area, for almost a century.

That's the story. The Perfecto's the artifact. The Schott family is the story.

Russian Jews on Rivington Street

Irving and Jack Schott were the sons of a Russian Jewish leather worker who came through Ellis Island in the late 1800s and made his living, like a lot of his countrymen, in the leather and garment trades of the Lower East Side. The brothers founded Schott Bros., Inc. in 1913, a one-room shop on Rivington Street, in the dense Jewish manufacturing quarter that ran from the Bowery to the East River. They cut raincoats first, oiled cotton, the standard cheap waterproof of the day, and sold them out of the shop and on the road as their own traveling salesmen.

The leather came later. Irving had served briefly in the First World War and noticed, the way young men do, the difference between a garment that protects a man and one that doesn't. The horsehide flight jackets the Army Air Service was issuing pilots over France were, the way Irving saw it, the best functional clothing the war produced. Heavy. Warm. Wouldn't tear in a fall. He came back to Rivington Street with a hunch about leather.

The hunch matured through the '20s. The brothers added leather to the line, then made leather the line. They moved the shop a few blocks, then a few more, picking up equipment — splitters, clickers, the heavy industrial machines built for harness work — that wouldn't have looked wrong in a high-plains saddlery. By the late twenties they had the Perfecto. Within fifteen years they'd have the U.S. Army contract for the A-2 flight jacket. And the Schott name was starting the long process of becoming a noun.

Schott Bros. has the rare distinction, among American clothing makers, of having had a real war. The A-2 flight jacket Jack Schott helped supply the Army Air Forces between 1942 and 1944 was, by any honest measure, a piece of the country's eventual victory.

The Second World War made the firm. Schott built A-2 flight jackets, M-422A Navy goatskin jackets, and a range of horsehide and steerhide outerwear for the War Department, running three shifts in factories in Brooklyn and across the Hudson. The jackets came back from Europe and the Pacific with bomber-crew names painted on the backs, leather sun-faded and salt-stained, linings shredded where the parachute harnesses bit. Veterans kept them. Wore them home on farms and in machine shops and on the Detroit lines converting back from tanks to sedans. The A-2 had become a civilian garment before the country quite noticed.

The third generation, and the fourth

Irving and Jack ran it until they couldn't, then their nephews — the cousins Jack and Sal — took over, and now the cousins' sons Roz and Jason. Schott NYC is, right now, in its fourth generation of family ownership. Almost no clothing maker in the United States can say that. Almost none has, on purpose, turned down every reasonable offer to move production offshore.

The decision not to leave wasn't ideological, the Schotts will tell you. It was practical. The leather work they do — heavyweight horsehide, naked cowhide, drum-dyed steerhide, all of it heavier than what most leather-goods firms today know how to handle — needs machines and operators that exist, in any real concentration, only in the older industrial neighborhoods of the American Northeast. The harness-grade Singer 7-class machines that stitch a Perfecto's main seams are not what a contract factory in Vietnam or Bangladesh buys. The cutters who can lay a horsehide so the spine grain runs straight down the back and the belly grain falls right across the kidney panels can't be trained, even by patient teachers, in a year. The firm stayed in New York because the work, the way they do it, couldn't be done anywhere else. That's it. That's the whole reason.

The current plant sits in Union, New Jersey, where they moved from Brooklyn in the 1980s for floor space and a loading dock. Union runs maybe a hundred people on the floor at a time, and the operators average tenure measured in decades. Cutters work from oak-tag patterns on long tables. Stitchers work in cells, each operator owning a section — fronts, backs, sleeves, collars, linings — passed in a kind of patient choreography to the next station. Hardware's set by hand: the heavy nickel-plated rivets, the zinc-and-nickel zippers the firm specs from American hardware suppliers because the cheaper alloys, they've learned, don't last twenty years.

A Perfecto out of Union weighs four to five pounds depending on the cut. The leather's six to seven ounces — heavier than almost any motorcycle garment made today. The lining's heavy quilted polyester. The hardware's heavy enough to ring, faintly, when you hang the jacket on a hook. Retail runs about $850 for the standard 618 up past $1,500 for the heavier variants. That's a working-class wage's worth of clothing, and the Schotts will tell you straight: don't buy a Perfecto unless you plan to wear it for thirty years. The thing is engineered on the assumption that you will.

A word on the leather

Got to spend a paragraph on American leather, because the supply situation is shakier than you'd think.

The United States once had upwards of 150 independent tanneries. The trade clustered in eastern Pennsylvania, upstate New York, southern New England, and the Wisconsin lakes — wherever a meatpacking industry made hides and a clean cold river made the water to flush them. Over the last sixty years it contracted brutally. The EPA's strict 1970s effluent standards for the chromium and vegetable-tan processes pushed a lot of the smaller tanneries to consolidate or close. Foreign competition — Italian, Argentine, Korean, eventually Chinese — backed the rest into corners. The American tannery count now is somewhere in the low double digits. Maybe half a dozen make leather at the weights and qualities a heavy-leather maker like Schott can use. Horween, in Chicago, is the best known. Wickett & Craig, in Pennsylvania, is another. Hermann Oak, in St. Louis, supplies most of the saddle trade.

The United States once had upwards of 150 independent tanneries. The count now is somewhere in the low double digits. The supply line for American leather goods is, in a real sense, the supply line for American leather.

Schott sources mostly from American tanneries. They've admitted in interviews they'll occasionally need European or South American hides when the American supply runs short, but the strong preference — and the operating norm — is domestic leather, cut and assembled by domestic hands. Buy a Schott Perfecto and the leather, in the big majority of cases, came off an American cow or steer or horse, got flayed in an American packing plant, tanned in an American tannery, and stitched in an American factory. The garment is, supply line end to end, an artifact of an American craft tradition very few American craft traditions can still claim.

That tradition is what we're here for. The Perfecto, in 2026, is ninety-eight years old. The Schott family's in its fourth generation. The Union plant still rings faintly with hardware set by hand. The cutters still lay horsehides on the long oak tables. The garments still come off the line, and the garments still last.

A jacket a man can hand down

There's a quiet counter-argument in the long American conversation about buying stuff that's been picking up converts these last few years. It runs roughly: the country spent half a century buying clothing it can't keep, made by people it can't see, in places it can't find on a map — and what we got out of it was a closet that's somehow huge and broke at the same time. The counter-argument proposes the older American discipline instead: fewer things, better things, things made by people you can find. People call it heritage, or workwear, or nothing at all but they know it when they see it.

A Perfecto, in that light, is a thesis statement. Heavy enough to work as armor against a long winter wind. Built well enough to outlive its first owner and maybe its second. The leather scuffs and patinas and creases at the elbows and turns, over time, into a topographical map of the life the wearer lived in it. The hardware keeps working. The zippers don't quit in twenty years. It's the opposite of the disposable garment, and it has been for ninety-eight years, in the same family, in the same metro area, made by hands that in a lot of cases have been doing this longer than the wearer's been alive.

The Schotts are a quiet family in person. They don't do many interviews. They don't market hard. No celebrity ambassador, and they don't particularly want one. The product, they'll tell you, is its own argument.

The cigar was a Perfecto. The jacket has been one ever since.

— floridaman@america.cool