Schott NYC

Schott started in 1913, when Irving and Jack Schott began cutting and sewing raincoats in a tenement basement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In 1928 they made the first Perfecto, the zip-front motorcycle jacket that Marlon Brando later wore in The Wild One, and by 1930 they had a factory in South Amboy, New Jersey. The family still runs the company, and since 2012 its factory has been in Union, New Jersey, the seventh site it has used. More than 100 people work there, and the company says all its men’s leather jackets and wool coats are made there.

The catalogue is split, and Schott is candid about it. Its product pages carry an “Origin” row. The leather jackets and pea coats read “Made in USA”, while other lines, such as the 8624 cotton canvas mechanic’s jacket, read “Imported”. So the brand-level mark here is the floor, and the domestic jackets are recorded individually below.

There is a second split inside the domestic line, and it matters more. Schott is a sewing factory, not a tannery, and its product descriptions say where each leather comes from. The P613S is Horween cowhide from US hides, tanned in Chicago and sewn in Union: an American jacket all the way through. The classic 618 Perfecto is sewn in Union from US hides that are tanned in Mexico, which puts it one mark lower. Other “Made in USA” jackets use leather tanned in Italy, Argentina, New Zealand or India. If where the leather was tanned matters to you, read the “Origin” line in the description as well as the label.