On this site we mention "collectors" from time to time, because that's where we first came from (ages ago). One tenet of the "collector mentality" is important to what we do -- many things that used to be are better than many things that are. This may surprise those who think technology always a step forward.  Yet, conversely, not all things in the past are better of course. And that's where LOST WORLDS comes in.

We're most gratified when someone who doesn't collect experiences LOST WORLDS gear -- the vast majority of our customers --  someone who just craves an amazing American leather jacket or rides devotedly and needs one. There are still discriminating guys who appreciate and understand quality and care of artisan caliber, made in USA by craftsmen of extraordinary skills. These customers give us greater satisfaction, coming without presuppositions -- only with appropriate wariness and suspicion, for who among us hasn't been burned by spurious marketing claims and lies? The Internet facilitates rip-offs.  (This website has been pillaged by copycat mfgs. and eBay frauds for years.)

Throughout our web site we introduce matters of history, materials, tradition and manufacturing -- against the background of the now dinosaur status of American masculinity, rendered toothless by the brainwashing of political correctness. Family, education and a debased, bottom feeding culture no longer impart values.  Quality, workmanship and attention to function and detail in clothing -- and the knowledge of such --  were infinitely more important in the past than now. The reasons, myriad, and placed in current perspective, depressing. Briefly, from the Great Depression until the 1960s people were grateful for employment and self-motivated to do a good job. Employment was a privilege. Now it's a right -- and we have Homer Simpson at the Springfield Nuclear Plant -- D'oh!  With passive middle class surrender to and empowerment of the deadbeat and un-American ... the listless, anomic, unshaven, sandaled slacker, life's perpetual spine-challenged noodle. The bubble baby victim of absent parenting, tradition, values.

Back to sanity -- first and second generation Americans of European extraction principally constituted the old garment work force, working for factory owners of shared cultural and religious backgrounds with common goals, experiences and values. By necessity having often made and mended their own clothing, workers routinely applied this expertise. Back then every mom sewed. Fashion was the concern  of the small rich elite fanatically followed in movies and newspapers. Daddy Warbucks, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton ("The Poor Little Rich Girl"), the headline hunters, Hollywood "royalty." Real America sought durability; one couldn't easily afford to replace worn or damaged clothing until the two decades of runaway prosperity following the end of WWII. Quality was a given, not, as today, the rarest exception. The old class system, so despised by current victim culture, at least provided upward goals. Now the middle and lower classes share the same nosebleed-inducing cultural rung, defined by accumulation and vulgarity.

Specialist apparel like leather motorcycle and rugged wear was made to do things in, not as the fashion and rebel-without-a-clue (to quote Tom Petty) image it later became. Original motorcycle and outdoor clothing was functional, overbuilt and necessary. The tide began turning with THE WILD ONE (1954) with Marlon Brando -- the popular culture watershed first to connect motorcycle gear to postwar disenchantment and rebellion. 

Compare, similarly, old and new denim jeans -- in the 1950s the concept of pre-washed, pre-broken in jeans would've been ludicrous, outside the mindset. Remnants of the old pioneer ethic, though fast disappearing, still resounded, if faintly: you broke in work clothing like your forebears had broken horses and soil. Jeans were still work clothing. But when people ceased to make and grow things and began service economy jobs, they adopted, as psychological compensation, jeans as the middle class uniform, as if unconsciously to assert a link to the soil (and nuclear war fear totem?). The middle class "Back to Nature" hypocrisy of the late 1960s is an extension of this mindset.

A kind of suicidal infantilism has mortally stricken America: now everything must be pre-chewed, pre-washed. (In the same way, politically correct language is sanitized pre-thought, viz. the identical descriptions of Raymond Shaw by the brainwashed GIs in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).) We recoil when we see someone on an expensive Harley or restored Indian in some pre-distressed, baby soft, logo-driven alleged motorcycle jacket. The image HD covets? Nope, the $$$. Like pre-aged Gibson Les Paul guitars for the wannabe legions. Lord! But babies need strained food.

Behold LOST WORLDS jackets -- unaged, tough as nails, uncompromising, routinely protecting riders from serious injury. Our testimonials from those forced under duress to test our claims are astonishing and fill us with pride. A flimsy (and often not inexpensive)  import or wannabe keep you in one piece? Right, call us from the ER, if your arms work, unless the sacred logo's protected you -- the scarab of uninformed (yet uniform) materialism! America today is sickeningly about image -- and the ability to afford an image, a label -- rather than substance. Life-As-Acting-Class  -- a definition of current America. Carapace Culture.

We digress (again). The classic jackets we recreate are royally superior in design, materials and construction. Arising from a lost world where vacuous Attitude didn't rule, where Men still walked the earth, their purposefulness, expressed in functional detail and faultless craft, jumps out at you. They're heavy, demand attention, a little breaking-in to show who's boss. They demand respect, but not kid gloves, quite the opposite. They express a truth, an honesty, not a fashion flavor choice for brain-dead clone masses which put on different egos according to the day of the week. (Yet which are, scarily, all the same ego, expressed in the repugnant "Have a nice day!" Consider how in current parlance "nice" replaces "good." Good is a a judgment word -- remember, don't judge.)

With forceful, no-nonsense, no-frill honesty the old motorcycle, flight and rugged outerwear is, unsurprisingly, extraordinary looking, originating before the hype, commercialization, ruin, before the accountants. Authenticity -- the criterion of value and of beauty too. In things and people. Value and beauty are interchangeable. The inauthentic has no value. (Didn't Keats write, "Truth is beauty, beauty truth...."?) And the inauthentic is, as usual, the majority. Scary. Deadly. But true. The new Holy Trinity for the masses: breed, eat, defecate.

LOST WORLDS jackets are technically reproductions but more accurately offspring of The Great Tradition. Not dry, academic fossil recreations of interest to but a few. Instead, rediscoveries, excavated Troys, of exciting, vibrant 100% American, individualistic designs of matchless art, spirit and beauty, absolutely unrelated to what's out there masquerading as quality behind hyped fashion labels and invented designers, some of whom are even given wives and families for image (like, in another sickening context, the late, unlamented Chairman, many say Chairwoman, Arafat).

American marketing preaches sameness and uniformity as desirable -- the opposite of the LOST WORLDS philosophy. If everyone's the same, unoriginal, everyone wants the same crap. The imagination-killing myth of "equality."  Who ever wanted to grow up to be a Xerox when he was a little kid? Now, most. Equal is the most insidiously totalitarian word there is, substituting quantity for quality. It's so much easier to oppress and slaughter people if just numbers ("You're one of THEM, not one of US."). True quality is unique, incalculable. People of quality are unequal, rather single gems incapable of duplication. They indicate the richness, variety, not sameness.

Our products aren't "the same things."  They're not for those who value quantity over quality. They arise from the heart, not calculator. They provoke reaction. They inspire devotion. They link to important moments. They widen the boundaries of one's self, experience and knowledge.