You can tell the armor's quality just by picking up the garment. So-called cosmetic armor will be soft and spongy-you will find this in low-end jackets and pants-while true impact-absorbing armor will be stiffer. You should also be able to squeeze the armor plates and feel them give slightly. Typically, these pieces of armor are made from closed-cell foam of various thicknesses and densities. The basic idea is to allow the energy of the crash to be absorbed by the armor's gradual compression; the faster the foam compresses, the more the impact will be passed on to your body.
In reality, armor can be further divided into soft and hard categories-hard armor adds a plastic or even carbon-fiber hard shell to the impact-absorbing foam sheet as a second (or third) line of defense against wear-through. You'll see hard armor on racing suits and some high-end street jackets and suits.
Back protection is another area that receives much-needed emphasis in street clothing. Again, there are really two types of spine protection-soft pads intended to help distribute impact forces, and stiffer pads (often with plastic petals or shells) intended to provide protection from penetrating objects. More is better, but we admit you can end up looking like an armadillo with all that hard armor. Check out the racers at Daytona-the ones on the track, not Main Street-and you'll see each and every one of them wearing hard back protection and, increasingly, hard torso protection.
Nonetheless, the fact that such race-derived armor has made it to street clothing is a very good thing.
A Breeze Runs Through It
Yet another recent technology that pays big dividends for street riders is ventilated gear. If you live in Scottsdale or Peachtree City, you've seen these mesh jackets around. The idea is simple-replace the body of the jacket with free-flowing mesh while retaining safety features such as shoulder and elbow padding. In general, these are great garments, but you should assume that they're not as safe overall as a full jacket-they simply can't be, because the mesh isn't as tear- or puncture-resistant as even a lightweight solid textile, and there's always the risk that you might catch the mesh on something and rip it. We've seen a few of these jackets after a crash, and they held up amazingly well, but common sense says you wouldn't want to go racing in them. For around town? Sure, you bet.
Leather: A Brief History
Wearing animal skin has been with us since humanoids stood erect, and it remains popular for a host of reasons. Properly processed and assembled, leather is durable, strong and somehow comforting in its organicness. It stretches and molds to your body shape, and it takes on a beautiful patina when worn often and dutifully cared for.
Your cool leather jacket starts with animal skins (hides) that have been specially treated in a chemical process known as tanning. Tanning makes the hide strong and flexible, in addition to preserving it. This process starts with curing, which entails drying the hide once it's been removed from the animal. (This is where you start to feel bad for the cow.) Most common is brine curing, in which the hides are placed in vats containing salt and disinfectant. This process takes 10 to 16 hours, after which the hides are soaked in water for several days to help remove salt and dirt. Next come steps that are just a tad too grisly to report here-let's just say the ex-cow's hair and skin must be removed somehow-that can take as much as two weeks to complete. Finally, the tanning process begins, with the goal of further preserving the skins and making them more pliant. So-called vegetable tanning is used for stiffer leather, while softer skins are treated to mineral tanning-using a dunk cycle in an acid/salt mixture and then immersing the skin in a chromium-sulfate tank. Finally, the skins are dyed and treated to a finishing process that gives them the desired luster.