On this site we mention "collectors" from time to time, because that's where we first came from, a long time ago. One aspect of the "collector mentality" is important in what we do for its guiding principle -- many things that used to be are better than many things that are. This may surprise those who think technology necessarily an advancement.

Yet we're most gratified when someone who doesn't collect gets to experience our gear -- the vast majority of LOST WORLDS customers, by the way -- someone who just wants the best American leather jacket or rides devotedly and needs it. There are still discriminating guys who appreciate and understand quality and care of the highest caliber. This gives us greater satisfaction because these customers came without presuppositions -- only with appropriate wariness and suspicion, for who among us hasn't been burned before by spurious marketing claims and lies? The Internet facilitates rip-offs. 

Throughout the LOST WORLDS web site we try to introduce matters of history, materials, tradition and manufacturing (and the now dinosaur status of American masculinity, so rendered by political correctness) with which many  may be unfamiliar. Family, education and our debased culture no longer teach offspring anything of value, it seems. In clothing, quality, workmanship and attention to function and detail 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 thankful for employment and self-motivated to do a good job. Employment was a rare privilege. Now it's a right -- and we have Homer Simpson at the Springfield Nuclear Plant -- D'oh! 

First and second generation Americans of European extraction principally constituted the old garment work force, working for factory owners of similar cultural and religious backgrounds, so there were shared goals, experiences and assumptions. By necessity having often made and mended their own clothing, workers routinely applied this expertise, knowing no other way. Fashion was the concern  of a small rich elite almost fanatically followed in movies and newspapers. Daddy Warbucks, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton ("The Poor Little Rich Girl"), the headline hunters. The rest of 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 -- construction integrity and functionality -- was the given, not, as today, the rarest exception. Clothing was property, not fashion, except for those fortunate few.

Specialist apparel like leather motorcycle and rugged wear was clothing designed and made to do things in, to perform tasks in, not as the fashion and political statements of the various interests it later became. Original motorcycle and outdoor clothing was functional, overbuilt and necessary. The tide turned with THE WILD ONE (1954) with Marlon Brando -- the popular culture watershed that first connected motorcycle gear to the attitudes of a young middle class prosperous enough to become disenchanted: the postwar  juvenile delinquent phenomenon, introduced in Irving Shulman's THE AMBOY DUKES (1948).  In the same way people who can afford to eat all they want become diet faddists. The definition of social decadence.

Compare, similarly, old and new Levis -- in the 1950s the concept of pre-washed, pre-broken in jeans would've been ludicrous. 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 the 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 they were still linked to the soil.

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. In a similar vein we recoil when we see someone on an expensive Harley or restored Indian in some pre-distressed, baby soft, logo-driven, Asian-made alleged motorcycle jacket. The image Harley-Davidson covets? Nope, the $$$. In marked contrast LOST WORLDS jackets routinely protect riders from serious injury during accidents. Our testimonials are astonishing, and fill us with pride for a job well done. A flimsy  and often not inexpensive import keep you in one piece? Right, call us from the ER, if your arms work, unless the sacred logo's protected you! 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. The old jackets which LOST WORLDS recreates are majestically superior in design, materials and construction. Arising from a world where 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, replicant masses which put on different egos according to their moods. (Which are, scarily, all the same mood, expressed in the repugnant "Have a nice day!" Consider how in current parlance "nice" replaces "good." Good is an ethical concept, a judgment word -- remember, don't judge.)

In its forceful, no-nonsense, no-frill honesty the old motorcycle, flight and rugged outerwear is, unsurprisingly, extraordinary looking, having arrived before the hype, the commercialization, the ruin, before the accountants. Authenticity is the criterion of value and of beauty too. In things and in people. Value and beauty are interchangeable. Inauthentic people have no value, if value is defined as contribution. And are the majority. Scary. Deadly. But true.

As we point our elsewhere on this site, LOST WORLDS jackets are technically reproductions but more accurately continuations in The Great Tradition. Not dry, academic fossil recreations of interest to but a few. Instead, rediscoveries, excavated Troys, of exciting, vibrant 100% American designs of matchless art, spirit and beauty, absolutely unrelated to what's out there these days masquerading as quality behind hyped fashion labels and invented designers.

American marketing preaches sameness and uniformity as desirability -- 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? Most. Equal is the most insidiously totalitarian word there is, substituting quantity for quality. It's so much easier to oppress and to slaughter people if they're just numbers ("You're one of us, not one of them"). True quality is unique, incalculable. People of quality aren't equal but single gems incapable of duplication. They indicate the richness, the variety, not the 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.