I just got a leather jacket for christmas from my fiance. This is the first piece of leather clothing I have ever owned. It is a black, kind of shiny finish, if that makes sense.
This morning on my way to church I realized that my left sleeve is much softer than my right sleeve, and also has a slightly different texture. It also feels like it might be more thin than the right sleeve, but that might just be my imagination because of the softer feel.
Is this the process of wear? Will my entire jacket eventually feel like the left sleeve does?
Probably not.
If the one sleeve was made of a slightly thinner leather, that could explain its more supple feel, but it will always be slightly thinner than the rest of the jacket unless you take the jacket apart and skive the thicker pieces to match. I strongly advise against doing this.
In an ideal world, the person making the jacket would have picked a different hide to cut the sleeve out of. There’s probably nothing wrong with the leather other than being just a bit different. When leather is graded, it’s assigned a weight, which roughly corresponds to thickness. Rather than confuse everyone with specifying and selling exact weights, they’re a range 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, etc. - a “3 ounce” leather can be anywhere from something like 2.75 to 3.25 ounces. If your soft sleeve was a 2.75 and the rest of the jacket was 3.25, it’s all “3 ounce” leather, but they’d be obviously different.
Such is life when dealing with materials that are grown, rather than manufactured.
Thanks for the reply. For some reason, I never considered that leather was “grown” rather than made, and that answer makes perfect sense. There is nothing wrong with the way the jacket feels, I was worried about if I had somehow damaged it without knowing. Thanks!