This is the extraordinary story of the leather jacket worn by Bruce Springsteen on the cover of Born to Run, the masterpiece released 50 years ago. As Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the new biopic on the Boss, opens in the United States, the New York Post has retraced the almost unbelievable tale of the leather jacket worn by the American rocker on the iconic sleeve of his 1975 album. Bought for just $30, today the jacket could be worth more than $1 million.
Rock and leather
The Born to Run jacket is just one of many leather jackets that have shaped music history. They were staples in the wardrobes of Elvis Presley, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Jimi Hendrix and, more recently, Madonna and Michael Jackson. These are just a handful of examples—there are hundreds more. Yet the Born to Run jacket has a particularly curious backstory, pieced together half a century later.
The Born to Run jacket
In 1975, Springsteen’s then-manager Mike Appel unearthed an old leather jacket from his attic and handed it to the 25-year-old rocker. It was a perfect fit. The Boss wore it during the photoshoot for the album cover (the booklet of the 2005 special edition includes three outtakes from the session) and kept it on throughout the tour. Then, the jacket vanished. It reappeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in 2010 at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nobody seemed to know how it got there.
An incredible journey
At first glance, the Born to Run jacket looked like a Schott NYC creation, the label favoured by rockers. But according to The New York Post, it was most likely a generic leather design made by a manufacturer for the Montgomery Ward department stores. Springsteen later admitted to his manager that he had given the jacket to a girlfriend at the time, Joy Hannan.
Though the two eventually went their separate ways, Joy kept the jacket safe for decades, never once tempted to sell it for what could have been up to $1 million. In 2010, she donated it to the Cleveland museum. Twelve years later, however, she asked to borrow it briefly in order to return it, in person, to the Boss. After a commemorative photo, the jacket—originally bought for no more than $30 by Mike Appel’s mother—was handed back to the museum. For now, the daring tale of the Born to Run leather jacket ends there.
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