It is 47 degrees when I leave the house in October and 64 by the time I ride home. That spread is the entire problem with fall gloves. Winter gloves turn my hands into oven mitts by two in the afternoon and I cannot feel the front brake lever. Summer deerskin leaves my fingertips aching at the first stoplight of the morning. Neither one is wrong. They are just built for the ends of the year, and October lives in the middle. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Most riders solve this by buying a third pair of gloves, and about half of them buy the wrong third pair. The shoulder season does not need a warmer glove so much as it needs an adjustable one, and the adjustment is usually cheaper than a new pair. This is how I have sorted it out over roughly a dozen autumns in the upper Midwest, where 45 to 60 degrees describes about ten weeks of riding a year. Why This Band Is Harder Than Winter Winter is easy because it is honestly cold. You put on the warmest thing you own and accept the loss of feel. Fall is deceptive because the air temperature lies to you. At 55 degrees standing still, bare hands are fine. At 55 degrees doing 65 miles an hour, the moving air pulls heat off your knuckles fast enough that the effective feel lands in the mid 30s within about fifteen minutes. Your hands are the only part of you sticking straight out into that airstream with no bodywork in front of them. Two more things stack on top. Wind exposure at the wrist gap matters more than glove thickness: a half inch of bare skin between cuff and sleeve will make a warm glove feel cold, every time. And your hands are working. Clutch, brake, and throttle inputs restrict blood flow through the fingers, which is why the pinky and ring finger go numb first even in a glove that feels warm enough on the back of the hand. Unlined Deerskin, and Exactly Where It Quits Unlined deerskin is the best three-season glove leather I have used. It is thin enough to feel the levers, it molds to your hand inside a week, and it blocks wind well above its weight. What it does not do is insulate, because there is nothing in there to trap air. My working numbers: comfortable down to about 58 degrees at highway speed with no complaints, usable from 50 to 58 for rides under 45 minutes, and genuinely unpleasant below 50. Below 45 I would not ride in them at all past a half hour. Legendary publishes a deerskin glove temperature guide that lines up closely with what I have measured, which is more than I can say for most gear charts. Be clear on what this is: unlined, unarmored deerskin, it carries no CE rating, and it is not armor. It is abrasion and wind protection. One free improvement before you spend anything: switch from a short wrist cuff to a longer cuff or a gauntlet. Closing the wrist gap is worth roughly 6 to 8 degrees of perceived warmth in my experience, and it costs nothing extra if you are buying gloves anyway. Fleece-Lined Gloves and What They Cost You A fleece-lined deerskin glove picks up roughly 10 to 12 degrees of downward range. Mine are comfortable to about 40 and survivable into the mid 30s. That solves the cold morning cleanly. Here is the honest trade. Lever feel drops noticeably. Not dangerously, but you will notice the throttle is less precise for the first few rides until you recalibrate. They get sweaty above about 62 degrees, and damp hands get cold faster than dry ones on the ride home. This is the exact failure mode of wearing winter gloves in fall. Break-in takes longer, because the lining stops the leather from molding directly to your hand. Bulk at the cuff makes them harder to get over a jacket sleeve, which sounds trivial until you are doing it in a gas station parking lot with cold fingers. Liners Are the Cheap Fix Nobody Mentions A separate thin liner worn under gloves you already own is the answer for most riders, and it runs $19 to $25 rather than $120. A thin liner adds about 8 to 10 degrees of range without permanently thickening the glove, and you can pull them out at lunch when it hits 65. Two practical notes. Buy your gloves with liners in mind or size up half a step, because a liner inside a snug glove compresses the insulation and makes your hands colder, not warmer. And skip cotton. Cotton liners hold sweat and turn into a cold wet layer by the second hour. Thin synthetic or wool blend liners are what you want, and they wash in a sink. The USA made glove range has both liners and gloves cut with enough room to take them. What I Actually Carry From September to November One pair of longer cuff unlined deerskin gloves, one pair of liners in the tank bag, and a fleece-lined pair that stays home unless the forecast low is under 42. That covers 38 to 70 degrees with two purchases instead of four. The liners go on for the ride out and come off at whatever stop happens after the sun has been up two hours. The rider who ends up frustrated is the one who buys a single glove for the average temperature. There is no glove that is right at both 47 and 64 degrees. There is only a system that adjusts, and the adjustable part should be the cheap part. Editor's Picks Four items that between them cover the whole shoulder season. Gloves are sized by hand measurement across the knuckles, so check the glove size chart before ordering, and size with a liner in mind if you plan to use one. All the leather here is unlined or fleece-lined deerskin with no CE rating and no armor. Classic Longer Cuff Deerskin Gloves, $120. The core fall glove. The longer cuff closes the wrist gap, which is the single biggest fix in this temperature band, and the touchscreen index finger saves you taking them off at every stop. Fleece-Lined Deerskin Gloves, $120. The 3M fleece lining buys you the 38 to 50 degree mornings. Same price as the unlined pair, which makes the decision about range rather than budget. Gators Skin Glove Liners, $25. Thin enough to fit inside gloves you already own and the fastest way to extend a summer glove into October. G.I. Military Glove Liners, from $18.99. The budget option. Buy two pairs so one is always dry, and keep the spare in the saddlebag. Where Held Is the Better Buy If your priority in this temperature range is protection rather than feel, buy Held instead. The German-made gloves are genuinely CE-rated, they use kangaroo palms and hard knuckle protection, and their three-season models are built with real impact and abrasion performance that no unarmored deerskin glove can claim. You will pay considerably more and the break-in is stiffer. What deerskin gives you back is dexterity, a glove that fits like it was made for your hand after a week, and a price that lets you own two pairs. Both answers are defensible. Prices verified August 2026. The Bottom Line If you own one pair of gloves and it is unlined, buy liners first. Twenty-five dollars extends your existing gloves down to roughly 45 degrees, and you may find you never need a second pair at all. If your commute regularly starts below 42, add the fleece-lined pair and keep the unlined ones for the ride home. If you are starting from nothing, buy the longer cuff unlined deerskin at $120 and a set of liners in the same order. That combination handles the 45 to 60 band better than any single glove I have tried, and it leaves you a summer glove for July rather than a winter glove gathering dust for nine months. More options are on the glove buying guide if you want to compare cuffs first.

A leather motorcycle vest is one of the few pieces of gear you buy once and wear for decades, so getting the size right matters more than with almost anything else in your kit. The most common mistake I see is ordering by a T-shirt or jacket size instead of an actual chest measurement. Here is how to get it right the first time. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Measure your chest, not your ego Wrap a flexible tape around the fullest part of your chest, keeping it level across your back and under your arms. Wear the shirt or light layer you actually plan to ride in. That number is your starting point. A vest should sit close but comfortable over that layer, with roughly 2 to 3 inches of ease so it lies flush against your torso without straining the snaps. The chest size chart Most quality American vest makers size to measured chest like this: XS 34 to 36 in, S 36 to 38, M 38 to 40, L 40 to 42, XL 42 to 44, XXL 44 to 46, XXXL 46 to 48, 4XL 48 to 50. If your measurement lands between two sizes, size up. Side laces can bring a vest in an inch or two, but nothing can make it larger. Big and tall, and layering If you carry width through the shoulders and back, or you plan to wear the vest over a hoodie or flannel, size up a full size. A hoodie adds roughly 2 to 4 inches of effective chest. For big and tall builds, also check the vest length so it covers your waistband by an inch or two. Does leather stretch? A little. Full-grain leather relaxes and molds to your torso with wear, but it will not grow a full size. Horsehide, used in BECK vests, is especially stable and holds its shape for decades. Buy snug rather than loose and rely on the side laces for fine adjustment. Where the good American vests are For horsehide, BECK Northeaster Flying Togs has been building in the USA since 1928, and their vests run true to a measured chest with riding ease already built in. Legendary USA carries the full BECK line and its own LowLife leather vests, and its vest buyer's guide has a full size chart through 4XL plus fit notes for club, riding, and concealed-carry cuts. First MFG is another widely available option if you want more sizes and price points. Whichever brand you choose, measure first, order to the chart, and size up when in doubt. MotoGearRater is reader-supported and may earn commissions from partners including Legendary USA. We only recommend gear we would ride in ourselves. Sizes in Hand: The Vests We Rate Charts get you close, but some vests are simply easier to fit than others. After measuring and comparing size runs, these are the picks we rate for getting the fit right on the first order. Legendary Club Vest with Side Lacing ($179.99). Our top pick for fit insurance: the side laces give you a real inch or two of adjustment in either direction, and the size run goes S to 5XL plus a Long length for taller torsos. Made in the USA. Legendary Ole Blue Denim Vest ($65). The budget option, sized S to 5XL. If you are between sizes and unsure which way to go, denim at this price is a low-risk way to confirm your measured chest before you commit to leather. BECK 566 Horsehide Motorcycle Vest (from $440). Horsehide barely relaxes, so order this one straight to your measured chest with your riding layer on. It carries the made in USA since 1928 label and holds its shape for decades. If you want another American-made route, Fox Creek Leather in Independence, Virginia backs its vests with a lifetime guarantee and is a credible alternative worth measuring for. Prices verified July 2026. If Your Measurement Lands Above 2XL Standard charts stop being useful right when a lot of riders need them most. Legendary USA's big and tall motorcycle vest sizing guide picks up where those charts end, covering numbered sizing to a 56 inch chest and a separate Long body length option that adds length without adding width.

I once pulled the collar tag on a $600 jacket at a swap meet and found the phrase "Designed and finished in the USA". The seller had spent ten minutes telling me it was American made. Both statements were technically true and they meant almost nothing in common. The jacket was cut and sewn overseas, shipped in, and had its lining and hardware fitted here. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Made in USA is not a vibe or a marketing mood. It is a legal claim with an enforceable standard behind it, and the standard is stricter than most riders realize. Once you know how it works you can read a hangtag in about four seconds and know exactly what you are buying, which matters a lot when the price gap between a domestic jacket and an import can run $400. The FTC Standard, in Plain English The Federal Trade Commission enforces the Made in USA claim, and the test is that a product must be "all or virtually all" made in the United States. In practice that means final assembly happens here, and all significant processing that goes into the product happens here, and any foreign content is negligible. It is a high bar. A company that says Made in USA without qualification is making a claim it has to be able to defend. Anything short of that has to be qualified, and qualified claims are where the language games happen. "Assembled in USA" means the last substantial transformation happened here, which is a much weaker statement. "Made in USA of imported leather" is honest and legal and tells you exactly what you need to know. "Designed in USA" tells you where somebody drew it and nothing at all about who sewed it. Separately, imported goods have to be marked with their country of origin under Section 304 of the Tariff Act, which is why a jacket cut and sewn in Pakistan or China will say so somewhere, usually on a small tag inside a pocket rather than at the collar. If you cannot find any country marking at all on a leather jacket, look harder before you assume it is domestic. Where the Hide Comes From Is a Separate Question This is the part that trips people up. A jacket can be legitimately Made in USA under the FTC standard and still be built from leather tanned somewhere else, as long as the maker qualifies the claim properly. Raw material sourcing and manufacturing are two different links in the chain. There is a practical reason for this. American tanning capacity for heavy garment horsehide is small. Cattle hide tanning still happens here at scale, but horsehide is a specialty product, and a lot of the front-quarter horsehide that American jacket makers use is tanned in Japan or Europe where that trade never went away. Deerskin is the opposite case: American whitetail is abundant and gets tanned domestically, which is why the domestic glove trade is so much simpler to verify than the jacket trade. So when you ask a maker "is this made in USA", you are really asking two questions. Where was it cut and sewn, and where was the hide tanned. A good maker will answer both without hedging. If you get a vague answer on the second one, that usually tells you what you need to know. Why the Distinction Actually Matters It is not just flag waving. Where the jacket is sewn changes what happens to you as an owner over fifteen years. Repairs. A domestic shop that built your jacket can usually reline it, replace a zipper, or let out a shoulder. I have had two relines done at roughly $180 to $260 each on jackets that would cost over $800 to replace. That relationship does not exist with a container-shipped import. Sizing consistency. Small domestic runs use the same patterns year over year. A 44 from a domestic maker in 2019 is a 44 in 2026. Offshore contract manufacturing changes factories and the fit drifts. Hardware. Domestic builders tend to spec brass or nickel-plated zippers that can be individually replaced. Cheaper imports often use proprietary pulls that cannot be sourced once the model is discontinued. Leather weight honesty. A jacket built to 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide costs real money in material. Import pricing pressure usually shows up as thinner leather, often 0.9mm to 1.1mm, described with the same words. Three Makers Worth Using as Reference Points BECK, sold under the Northeaster Flying Togs name, has been building in the United States since 1928. It is a separate American business that Legendary USA carries as an authorized dealer, not an in-house line, and the distinction matters if you ever need to talk to the people who made your jacket. The 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide is the spec I use as a benchmark for what a serious jacket should feel like in the hand. Worth repeating, since this is a safety-adjacent category: BECK horsehide is unarmored and not CE certified. It is abrasion and wind protection. Cockpit USA is the other reference point, a separate brand that Legendary also carries. Their business is military pattern flight jackets, the G-1 and the A-2, built to the original mil-spec patterns rather than a fashion interpretation of them. If you want to see how much variation exists inside one category, spend ten minutes in the Cockpit USA collection comparing a goatskin A-2 to a horsehide one. And then there is Legendary's own USA-made line, which sits at a different price point and is worth looking at specifically because it shows what domestic construction costs when the leather is cattle hide rather than horsehide. The USA-made jackets collection is the honest middle of this market. Editor's Picks Three domestic jackets at three very different prices, chosen to show what the label actually buys you as you move up. BECK 777 Northeaster Horsehide Jacket, from $815. The benchmark. Built in the US by a maker that has been at it since 1928, with the heavy front-quarter horsehide that thin import leather imitates in language only. Cockpit USA Horsehide A-2 Flight Jacket, from $755. Mil-spec pattern rather than a fashion copy of one, from a separate American brand with a long contract history. The A-2 cut rides shorter, which suits a forward riding position. Legendary Black Hills Men's Leather Motorcycle Jacket, from $675. Domestic construction at a cruiser-oriented cut and a lower entry price than the horsehide options. Also unarmored, so layer accordingly. Vanson is the honest competitor here and it beats all three on one specific thing: made-to-measure. If your build is between sizes, Vanson will cut a jacket to your measurements in Massachusetts and that solves a problem no off-the-rack domestic jacket can. They also run a repair program that will take a twenty year old jacket back. Prices verified August 2026. The Bottom Line Treat Made in USA as a question with two halves and ask both of them. Where was it cut and sewn, and where was the hide tanned. An unqualified Made in USA claim is a real legal statement and you can lean on it. A qualified claim like "Made in USA of imported leather" is not a red flag, it is a maker telling you the truth about a supply chain that does not have a domestic option at that spec. What should actually change your purchase decision is repairability and pattern consistency, not the flag. If you plan to own the jacket for fifteen years, buy from a maker whose shop still exists and will take the garment back for a reline. That is the practical value of domestic manufacturing, and it is worth the $300 premium far more often than the sentiment is.

A pair of deerskin gloves that fit perfectly on day one will feel roughly a half size larger by the end of the first month. That is not a defect and it is not bad tanning. It is the material doing exactly what deerskin does, and if nobody tells you in advance, you buy the wrong size and end up with gloves that slide on the grip by August. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money I have gone through this the expensive way. My first pair of deerskin gloves felt great in the box, which should have been the warning. Four hundred miles later the palm had opened up enough that I could pinch a fold of leather at the base of my thumb, and the fingertips had gone from snug to about three-eighths of an inch of dead space. Here is what is actually happening in the hide, and what genuinely slows it down. What Deer Hide Is Doing Differently All leather is a network of collagen fiber bundles. What separates one hide from another is how thick those bundles are, how tightly they are woven together, and at what angle they sit relative to the surface. Cattle hide has thick bundles packed at a fairly steep angle, which is why cowhide is stiff and resists elongation. Horsehide, especially the front quarter, is denser still, which is the whole reason it is used for jackets meant to last decades. Deer hide is the opposite end of the range. The fiber bundles are finer, and more importantly they are woven loosely and at a shallow angle, with more open space between them. That structure is what makes deerskin feel soft straight out of the box with no break-in period. It is also what lets the fibers slide past one another under load instead of resisting, which is stretch. Softness and stretch are the same property described from two directions. You cannot buy one without the other. For comparison, goatskin has a tight, densely interlocked fiber network and natural lanolin. It is nearly as supple as deerskin at first touch but holds its dimensions far better under repeated load, which is why plenty of racing gloves use goat. Deerskin trades that stability for comfort, and for a lot of riders it is the right trade. Where the Stretch Actually Shows Up Stretch is not uniform, and knowing where it goes tells you how to size. The overwhelming majority of it happens in palm circumference, because that is the axis carrying load every time you close your hand on a grip. Expect the palm to open up meaningfully in the first 200 to 500 miles, then slow down and mostly settle by around 1,000. Finger length grows too, but less, and from a different mechanism. You are pulling the fingertip seam away from your nail every time you flex rather than stretching the leather down the finger. On a glove with a proper fourchette (the strip between the fingers) that is limited. On a cheap single-piece finger it is not. The place stretch never helps you is the cuff. A short wrist opening that relaxes stops holding the glove on your hand, which is the failure that turns a good glove into a spare. The Sizing Rule That Follows From This Buy deerskin snug. Not painful, snug. When new, your fingertips should just reach the ends of the finger stalls with no air, the palm should feel firm across the widest point, and making a fist should take a small amount of effort. If a new pair of deerskin gloves feels comfortable and roomy in your kitchen, they are one size too big and they will be sloppy in a month. Measure rather than guess. Wrap a tape around your palm at the widest point below the knuckles, thumb excluded, and read the inches. That number is your size. Gloves are sized by hand measurement, not by gender or shirt size, and the glove size chart lists both circumference and finger length so you can check the second dimension if your fingers run long. If you land between sizes on deerskin, go down. On cowhide you would go up. A note on what these gloves are. Unlined deerskin is abrasion and wind protection. It is not CE-certified and it is not armor, so do not let a snug fit convince you that you are wearing safety equipment. If you want the fuller version of how the different cuts and linings compare, the motorcycle glove buying guide runs through it. What Actually Slows It Down You cannot stop deerskin from stretching. You can cut the rate of it substantially, and most of the difference comes from four or five habits rather than any product. Keep them dry, and dry them right. Wet collagen fibers slide much more freely, so a rainy 200 mile day does more stretching than a dry 1,000. If they soak, stuff them loosely with paper and dry at room temperature, away from heaters and vents. Heat-dried leather comes back stiff, shrunken in odd places, and permanently weaker. Condition sparingly. This is the mistake most riders make trying to be conscientious. Oil and wax lubricate the fiber network, which is exactly what you want on a stiff jacket and exactly what you do not want on gloves that are already too willing to move. Two or three light applications a season is plenty. Work it in with your fingers, not a soaked rag, and let it sit overnight. A beeswax-based conditioner used thinly is better here than an oil-heavy dressing. Rotate two pairs. Leather recovers a small amount of its dimension when it rests dry and unloaded. A pair worn every day never gets to do that. Alternating pairs is the single cheapest thing on this list and it also doubles the total life you get. Take them off by the fingers, not the cuff. Peel each finger loose first, then slide the glove off. Yanking at the cuff drags the whole glove over the widest part of your hand under tension, and that is a stretching cycle you are performing on purpose twice a day. Store them flat. Balled up in a jacket pocket, the leather sets in whatever shape it was crushed into. Flat in a drawer, or laid over the mirror stalk, costs nothing. Buy construction that fights back. Welted seams, an aramid or reinforced palm layer, and outseam construction all restrain the leather mechanically. A lined palm in particular acts as a limit on how far the deerskin under it can travel. Editor's Picks If stretch is your main concern, these are the four I would look at, ranked by how much structure they put around the hide. Haymakers Super Welted Deerskin Gloves, $125. The fat welted seams are not just a look. A welt puts a folded, stitched leather rib along every seam line, which restrains the panels either side of it. These hold their shape longer than any plain-seam deerskin I have worn. Aramid Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $125. The aramid palm liner does double duty. It adds abrasion resistance and it physically limits how far the palm leather can open up, which is where most of your stretch was going to happen. Bad Billy Black Goatskin Gloves, $99.99. The honest alternative if the stretch genuinely bothers you. Goatskin gives up a little of the immediate softness and gives back dimensional stability. If you have already stretched out two pairs of deerskin, try this instead of buying a third. Classic Longer Cuff Deerskin Gloves, $120. The longer cuff keeps the glove anchored on your wrist even after the opening has relaxed, which is the specific failure that ends most short-wrist deerskin gloves before the leather is worn out. Alpinestars deserves the comparison here. Their gloves use goat and kangaroo with pre-curved patterning and stretch panels placed deliberately, so the fit is engineered rather than earned through break-in, and it does not drift the way deerskin does. For a rider who wants a glove that fits identically at mile 10,000 as it did new, that is the better approach. Prices verified August 2026. The Bottom Line Deerskin stretches because its fiber bundles are fine, loose, and shallow-angled, and that same structure is the reason it feels good on the first ride with no break-in misery. Trying to eliminate the stretch means buying a different leather. What you can do is start a half size tighter than feels natural, keep them out of the rain, condition lightly rather than generously, rotate two pairs, and pick construction with welts or a lined palm. Do that and a $120 pair of deerskin gloves will hold a usable fit for three or four seasons instead of one. Skip it and you will be buying replacements every spring, which is how most riders end up believing deerskin is a low-quality material. It is not. It just has an owner's manual that nobody hands you at the register. If you want to compare care products before you commit, the leather care range is a short and unglamorous list, which is a good sign.

Every April someone messages me a photo of a leather jacket they found for $220 and asks whether it is enough to start riding in. The straight answer is that an unarmored leather jacket at $220 protects a new rider less well than a $260 textile jacket with CE Level 2 shoulder and elbow inserts. That is an awkward thing to say on a site that spends most of its time reviewing leather, but it is what the physics says. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money So: no, you do not need a leather jacket to ride. What you need is abrasion resistance and impact management, and those are two separate jobs done by two different parts of a garment. Leather has been good at the first job for a hundred years. It does nothing about the second unless somebody sewed armor pockets into it, and most classic leather, including the American made jackets I personally wear most, has no armor pockets at all. The Two Jobs a Riding Jacket Has Abrasion is what happens between you and the pavement once you are already down and sliding. A get-off at 45 mph puts you in contact with asphalt for roughly three to four seconds before you stop. In that window the only thing that matters is whether the outer shell stays intact. Thick leather is excellent here. So is a heavy 500D or 600D textile shell with reinforcement panels at the shoulders, elbows, and hips. Impact is a different event entirely, and it happens in the first tenth of a second, before any sliding starts. This is your shoulder hitting a curb or your elbow hitting the road at a right angle. No thickness of leather absorbs that. Armor does, by crushing. Under the EN 1621-1 standard, a Level 1 limb protector has to keep the average transmitted force under 35 kN and a Level 2 protector under 20 kN. A leather panel with nothing behind it transmits essentially all of it. Here is the practical split, which is worth having in your head before you spend money: Abrasion: leather wins on a per-millimeter basis, but good textile with reinforcement panels is close enough that the difference rarely changes an outcome at street speeds. Impact: armor wins, and there is no substitute. An unarmored jacket of any material scores zero on this job. Heat: textile with mesh panels wins badly. Leather at 92 degrees is a genuine safety problem because riders take it off. Lifespan: leather wins by an order of magnitude. A textile jacket is worn out at six or seven years. Horsehide is barely broken in. Why Textile Usually Wins the First Season A new rider has a fixed budget and no idea yet what kind of riding they will actually do. At the $250 to $350 tier, a textile jacket gives you armor in the shoulders and elbows, a pocket for a back protector, zip vents, a removable thermal liner, and a shell you can put in a washing machine. At the same price, leather gives you a shell and nothing else. That is not a close call for someone commuting twenty minutes each way in changing weather. There is also the wear-rate problem. The best jacket is the one you actually have on. In my experience the single most common reason a jacket ends up bungeed to the seat is heat, and unlined leather at 90 degrees in stop and go traffic is genuinely miserable. A vented textile jacket gets worn in July. A leather jacket at the same temperature very often does not. If you want armor now and leather later, the cheapest honest path is armored gear under whatever you already own. The Bohn line that Legendary carries is a separate brand and it is actually CE armored, unlike the leather on the rest of the site. Their riding pants put hip and knee armor under your jeans for less than a leather jacket costs. You can browse the armored options in the Bohn collection and decide whether pants or a shirt shell is the bigger gap in your kit. What Leather Genuinely Does Better None of the above means leather is a costume. Once you are past the first year and know what riding you do, leather earns its place for reasons armor does not cover. It does not melt. Synthetic fabric under enough friction heat can glaze and stick, and a nylon shell that has been ground through in one spot is done. Leather abrades away gradually and keeps working while it does. It also takes wind far better than any textile I have used. At 70 mph on a naked bike in 48 degree air, a 1.3mm horsehide front quarter simply stops the wind dead, and no amount of textile windproofing quite matches that feeling. Then there is the part nobody puts in a spec sheet: leather gets better. A textile jacket is at its best the day you buy it and declines from there. Horsehide takes about 800 to 1,000 miles to stop fighting you and then molds to your shoulders permanently. I have a jacket going on fourteen years that has been relined once and had one zipper replaced, which is roughly $180 of repairs against a garment that would cost well over $800 to replace. Nothing in textile has that economics. The USA made jackets Legendary stocks are built around exactly this idea. Worth saying plainly, since this is the kind of post people quote: the classic American leather in this category, including BECK horsehide, is not CE certified and contains no armor. It is abrasion and wind protection. Treat it as that and it is excellent. Treat it as a substitute for armor and you have made a mistake. The Setup Most Long-Term Riders End Up With Ask riders with twenty seasons what they wear and you get a layered answer rather than a single jacket. The common pattern is an armored base layer or armored shirt underneath, with leather over the top of it. You get impact protection where it matters, abrasion protection on the outside, and a jacket you will still own in 2040. That approach also solves the summer problem, because you can drop the leather and ride in the armored shell alone on the hottest days. Legendary's armored shirts and flannels page is the shortest way to see what that layer looks like. It costs less than replacing a jacket every four years and it is how I have ridden since about 2016. Editor's Picks Two of these are armor and one is leather, and that ordering is deliberate. If you are buying your first serious piece of gear, buy from the top of this list, not the bottom. Notice what is not on it: a cheap leather jacket. There is no such thing in this catalog. American leather here opens at $415 with the Flying Fortress A-2 and the jackets built for riding start higher still, which is most of the reason a first $400 belongs in armor rather than in hide. Bohn All-Season Original Armored Riding Pants, from $214.99. Actual CE armor at the hips and knees under your normal jeans, which is the protection gap most new riders leave wide open while they shop for jackets. Bohn Cool-Air Mesh Armored Riding Pants, $214.99. The summer version of the same idea, for riders whose honest reason for skipping gear is heat. BECK 732 Northeaster Horsehide Jacket, from $815. BECK is a separate American maker going back to 1928 that Legendary carries. This is the buy-once jacket, with 1.3mm front-quarter horsehide, and again it is abrasion and wind protection rather than armor. If you want armor and leather in one garment with a certification behind it, Alpinestars and Dainese do that better than anyone here. Their armored leather and textile jackets come with CE rated inserts fitted from the factory and tested as a system, which is exactly what classic American leather does not offer. Prices verified August 2026. What I'd Actually Buy If this is your first riding season and you have $400 total, do not spend it on a leather jacket. Spend $215 on armored pants or an armored shirt shell and put the rest into a vented textile jacket with Level 2 inserts. You will be better protected, more comfortable in August, and you will not have guessed wrong about a garment you have to live with for a decade. If you already have armor sorted and you are choosing a second layer, buy the leather, and buy it once. The math on a $815 horsehide jacket that lasts fifteen years and can be repaired is better than four textile jackets at $300, and it is a far nicer thing to own. Just be clear with yourself about which of the two jobs it is doing.

I pulled a pair of deerskin gloves out of a saddlebag one April and found them shaped like a fist. Curled fingers, a hard ridge across the palm, and a gray bloom on the thumb that turned out to be mold. They had gone in damp in November and sat sealed in a zip bag for five months. Nothing was wrong with the leather. I ruined them by putting them away wrong, and it cost me a $120 pair to learn a routine that takes fifteen minutes. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Off-season storage is the cheapest gear maintenance there is, and it is the easiest to get wrong, because every failure happens slowly and silently in a dark closet. Come spring you either have the gloves you put away or a stiff shell that never fits your hand the same way again. What follows is what actually causes the damage and the routine I use now. The Three Ways Gloves Die in a Closet Trapped moisture is the first and the fastest. Deerskin absorbs sweat, and sweat leaves salt behind in the palm and the finger channels. Salt pulls water out of the air, so a glove that feels dry to your hand in November can sit above 70 percent surface humidity all winter. That is the range where mold gets going, and it eats the stitching thread before it does anything visible to the hide. Heat is the second. Leather carries oils that keep the fiber bundles sliding past each other, and heat drives them out. A garage attic in a hot climate runs past 120 F for weeks, and gloves stored up there come down stiff and papery in a way no conditioner fully reverses. A closet on an interior wall almost never has that problem. Shape is the third, and it is the one riders dismiss. Leather takes a set. A glove crushed flat under a helmet, or curled in the toe of a boot, spends five months learning that position. Deerskin is soft enough that it will mostly relax, but the crease across the knuckle line stays and it becomes the place the finish cracks two seasons later. What a Plastic Bag Actually Does Sealing gloves in a plastic bag is the most common storage mistake I see, and the logic behind it is reasonable. Keep out dust, keep out damp, keep the pair together. The problem is that leather is roughly 10 to 15 percent water by weight and it needs to trade that moisture with the air around it. Seal it in plastic and the little air in there comes to equilibrium with the glove itself. Then the temperature swings. A closet that runs 68 F by day and 58 F at night pushes that trapped air past its dew point every single night, and the water condenses on the inside of the bag and goes straight back into the leather. Over a winter that is roughly 150 cycles of wet and less wet against a salted surface. That is not storage, it is a mold incubator with a zipper. Use anything that breathes. A cotton pillowcase, a paper grocery bag with the top folded once, an open shoebox, or a bare closet shelf all work. If dust is your worry, the pillowcase solves it for nothing. Vacuum bags are worse than zip bags because they add crushing pressure to the list of problems. The Routine That Works Do this on a weekend afternoon at the end of the season, not on the last cold ride when you are tired and want them out of sight. The conditioning step needs to sit overnight. Clean them first, while you still remember which pair got rained on. A dedicated leather cleaner such as Obenauf's Cleanit lifts salt and road grime without stripping the hide the way dish soap does. Dry them at room temperature for 24 to 48 hours, fingers uncurled, away from any heat source. A heat vent or a sunny sill will shrink deerskin and harden the palm, and that damage is permanent. Condition lightly once they are fully dry. A thin coat of Obenauf's Heavy Duty LP worked in with warm hands is plenty. Deerskin does not want saturation, and a heavy application will darken it and slow the glove down for a month of riding. Stuff each hand so it holds its shape. Clean cotton socks, acid free tissue, or a rolled paper towel all work. Skip newspaper, because the ink transfers onto light colored hide. Lay them flat, palms down, fingers straight, one pair per layer. Nothing stacked on top. If shelf space is short, a shoebox with the lid off holds two pairs without pressure. Pick the location on numbers, not habit. Between 55 and 75 F and 40 to 55 percent relative humidity is the target, which usually means an interior closet rather than a garage, basement floor, or attic. A $12 hygrometer ends the argument in one night. Look at them once in midwinter. Two minutes, one sniff, one flex. Mold caught in January is a wipe down. Mold found in April is a new pair. The Spring Check, and When to Retire a Pair Before the first real ride, give the pair twenty minutes of wear indoors while you do something with your hands. Deerskin that has been still for months feels tight for the first ten minutes and then gives. That is normal. What you are looking for is what does not come back. Run a thumbnail along the palm seam and pull gently across it. Healthy thread resists and springs; thread that has been through mold or heat feels dusty and parts with almost no force. Flex the knuckle line and look at the grain in raking light for cracks rather than creases. Check that any strap or snap still seats without wobble. And smell the inside, because a musty glove that has been aired for a week and still smells is telling you the growth is inside the fiber, not on the surface. If the seam thread is going, retire them. This part is worth saying plainly: unlined deerskin gloves are not CE certified and they are not armor. They are abrasion and wind protection, and a glove that opens at the seam under light hand pressure is not delivering even that. Cheap insurance to replace, expensive to be wrong about. Editor's Picks Two care products that earn their spot in the box, and two pairs worth storing properly in the first place. The full leather care lineup is small on purpose, which I take as a good sign. Obenauf's Cleanit Natural Leather Cleaner, $15.99. Step one of the routine. Pulls salt and grime out of the palm without the stripping you get from household soap, and one bottle lasts several seasons. Obenauf's Heavy Duty LP Conditioner, $15.99. Beeswax and propolis base, so it sits in the hide instead of on it. Use it thin on gloves. It is the same tub that saves a pair of boots, which makes the price easy. Haymakers Super Welted Deerskin Gloves, $125. The fat welted seams sit proud of the wear surface, which is exactly the construction that survives a storage mistake or two. My pick for a rider who is hard on gear. Fleece-Lined Deerskin Gloves, $120. The winter pair that most needs this routine, since the 3M fleece holds sweat far longer than an unlined glove. Dry these an extra day before they go on the shelf. Where the Competition Is Better If the spring check goes badly and you need to replace a pair fast, RevZilla is the better place to shop. Their return window and the sheer number of brands on one page mean you can order two sizes, keep the one that fits, and be riding by the weekend. No specialist maker matches that, and pretending otherwise would be silly. Where the smaller American makers win is on the thing this whole article is about: hide and construction that reward being looked after. A $120 deerskin glove that gets cleaned, conditioned, and stored flat can run six or seven seasons. Prices verified August 2026. The Short Version Clean, dry slowly, condition thin, stuff the hands, lay them flat, and keep them somewhere that breathes between 55 and 75 F. That is the whole method, and it costs one afternoon plus about $32 of product that will outlast several pairs of gloves. The only rule I would call non negotiable is the bag. Whatever else you skip, do not seal leather gloves in plastic for a winter. Everything else on this list is optimization. That one is the difference between opening a drawer in April and finding your gloves, or finding what used to be your gloves.

Watch a new rider at a gear counter and you can predict the mistake before it happens. They pick up a large, slide it on, flex their fingers a couple of times, and say it feels good. It does feel good. That is the problem. A riding glove that feels good on your hand standing in a shop is usually a size too big, and 600 miles later it will be rotating on the grip and bunching in the palm. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Glove fit gets less attention than helmet fit, and it should get more, because you interact with a glove through two levers and a throttle every second you are moving. I have thrown away two pairs I bought wrong and given away a third. These are the specific errors, in the order they cost people money. Mistake One: Thinking Gloves Have a Gender Gloves are sized by hand measurement. Not by gender, not by shirt size, not by how tall you are. The number that matters is the circumference of your palm at its widest point, measured just below the knuckles with the thumb excluded, in inches. A hand that measures 8 inches around is a size 8, and every glove in the world that fits an 8 inch hand fits it the same way regardless of what the marketing copy on the box says. This trips people up in both directions. A rider with small hands walks past whole racks assuming nothing there will fit, when the size run starts lower than they think. A rider with wide hands buys by category instead of by number and ends up in something two sizes off. Take the tape measure, get your number, and then shop by number. The Legendary glove size chart gives you both hand circumference and finger length, which is the pair of numbers you actually need. Finger length is the dimension almost everyone forgets. Two hands can measure identically around the palm and differ by half an inch in middle finger length. If your fingers run long for your palm, a glove sized purely on circumference will pull the fingertip seams tight and feel short before the palm is even snug. That is not a manufacturing flaw. It means you need the size chart's second column. Mistake Two: Trusting How It Feels Standing Still A glove that is comfortable with your hand relaxed and flat is being evaluated in a position you never use on a motorcycle. Your riding hand is closed around a 1 inch bar with the wrist rolled forward. That position pulls leather across the back of the hand, stretches the web between thumb and index finger, and puts every seam under tension. Test in that position or you are not testing. The practical version: put the glove on, make a fist as if gripping the throttle, and hold it. If you feel a pinch at the base of the thumb or the knuckles feel restricted at 30 seconds, it is too small. If you can rotate the glove around your palm with your other hand while making a fist, it is too big. Correct is somewhere between mildly firm and slightly annoying. Then check the wrist. On a short cuff glove, the opening should grip your wrist enough that the glove does not slide down when you shake your hand. On a gauntlet, the cuff has to actually close over your jacket sleeve, not tuck under it. A gauntlet worn inside the sleeve funnels air straight up your arm, which defeats the entire purpose of buying one. Mistake Three: Expecting Break-In to Fix a Bad Size Break-in is real, and it is directional. Leather gets larger and softer. It does not get smaller and it does not get longer in any useful way. So a glove that is slightly too tight in the palm will come right within a couple of hundred miles. A glove that is too long in the fingers will be too long in the fingers forever, and a glove that is loose on day one becomes sloppy on day thirty. The amount of break-in depends heavily on the leather. Deerskin is the softest common glove leather and it moves the most, so buy it snug and expect roughly a half size of relaxation over the first 200 to 500 miles. Goatskin holds its dimensions much better, so buy it closer to true. Cowhide starts stiff, breaks in slowly, and needs the most patience. Wearing the same numeric size across all three without adjusting is a common and expensive assumption. There is also a difference between break-in and breaking down. Break-in is the fibers relaxing into your hand shape over the first month. Breaking down is the palm going thin and glazed and the seams starting to open, which happens years later. If a new glove feels like it is already broken in, you are feeling a size problem, not quality. How to Get It Right the First Time The whole process takes five minutes and one tape measure. Do it once and write the numbers in your phone. Measure your dominant hand. Wrap the tape around the palm at the widest point below the knuckles, thumb excluded. Round up to the nearest half inch. That is your base size. Measure your middle finger from the base crease to the tip. Compare it against the chart's finger length column, not just the circumference. Adjust for the leather. Deerskin, size down if you are between. Goatskin, buy true. Cowhide, buy true and be patient. Adjust for liners. If you plan to run a thin liner underneath in cold weather, that pair needs a half size of room. Do not buy one size for both jobs. Test in riding position. Fist closed as if on the grip, held for 30 seconds. Then check the cuff against your actual jacket sleeve. Accept one exchange. Even measured correctly, patterns differ between makers. Buy from somewhere that will swap a size without an argument. Editor's Picks Four honest starting points for a rider who has just measured their hand and wants a first pair that will teach them what correct feels like. Tan Short Wrist Deerskin Gloves, $115. A clean, unfussy short cuff at the low end of the deerskin range. Buy it snug, ride it 300 miles, and you will know exactly what a correctly sized glove feels like before and after break-in. Ventilated Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $120. For hot-weather riding, where a loose glove is worse because sweat makes it slide. The perforation keeps your hand cooler and the touchscreen finger keeps you from pulling it off at every stop. Churchill Short Wrist Deerskin Gloves, $120. Churchill is a separate brand Legendary carries, cut on a different pattern. Worth knowing about if you measure between sizes, because a different maker's proportions can be the thing that solves it. Check the chart again rather than assuming your number carries over. Fingerless Deerskin Gloves, $72.99. The cheapest way to learn how a brand's palm sizing runs on your hand, since finger length drops out of the equation entirely. Understand that fingerless means no abrasion cover on your fingers at all, which is a real trade, not a style choice. RevZilla is the honest name to mention here. Their catalog is far deeper than any single retailer's house range, and their return and exchange handling is genuinely painless, which matters more in gloves than in almost any other category because sizing between makers is inconsistent. If you are unsure of your size and want to order two and send one back, that is where to do it. Prices verified August 2026. What I'd Actually Do Measure once, write it down, and then buy deerskin one notch tighter than feels reasonable. That single decision fixes most of what goes wrong. If the first ten minutes are slightly uncomfortable in the palm and the fingertips are firmly against the ends, you are in the right place. If it feels like a favorite pair of gloves the moment you put it on, send it back. One more thing worth saying plainly, because new riders often assume otherwise. Unlined deerskin gloves are abrasion and wind protection. They are not CE-certified and they are not armor. A perfect fit makes them more useful and more comfortable, and it does not change what they are. If you want the longer version of how cuts, linings, and leathers compare, the motorcycle glove guide covers it, and the rest of the USA-made glove range is easier to shop once you have your number.

I kept a pair of deerskin gloves two seasons longer than I should have because they fit perfectly and I was attached to them. The palm had gone thin enough that I could see the shape of my hand through the leather when I held it up to a window. That is the state most riders are in without knowing it, because gloves fail slowly and your hands adapt to the failure a little at a time. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money There is no mileage figure that tells you when to replace gloves. A commuter who rides 8,000 miles a year in one pair will wear them out in two seasons. Somebody who rotates three pairs might get eight years out of each. What matters is condition, and condition shows up in five specific places. Here is exactly what to look for and what each one means. Sign One: Seam Separation, Usually at the Fourchettes The fourchettes are the narrow strips of leather between your fingers. They flex on every single grip and they carry the most stitch stress in the glove. Turn a glove inside out under a lamp and look at those seams. What you want to see is unbroken thread with no gaps. What kills a glove is a run of three or four stitches gone, which shows as a small mouth opening between panels when you spread your fingers. One broken stitch is nothing. A gap you can slide a fingernail into is the end of that glove, because seams unzip along their length once they start and the leather next to the failed stitching is already stretched. Also check the thumb crotch, which is the other place that goes early. This is a real repair on an expensive pair, and it is not worth paying for on a $100 glove. Sign Two: Palm Thinning You Can See Through Grip pressure and throttle friction thin the palm and the pad below the thumb long before anything else looks worn. New deerskin runs somewhere around 0.8mm to 1.0mm. By the time a palm is worn to roughly half that, it is doing very little for you in a slide. The test takes ten seconds. Hold the glove up to a bright window and look through the palm. If light comes through as a pale patch where the throttle sits, the leather is thin. Then pinch that spot between thumb and forefinger and compare it to the back of the hand on the same glove. If the palm feels like half the thickness of the back, replace them. Once light passes through, the abrasion protection you bought the gloves for is mostly gone even though the glove still looks fine from the outside. Sign Three: Leather That Has Gone Hard Leather gets stiff for two reasons and only one is fixable. Ordinary dryness from sun and heat responds to cleaning and a light conditioner. Gloves that have been soaked and then dried on a heater vent, or repeatedly sweated through and never cleaned, go hard in a different way: the fibers themselves are damaged and no amount of conditioner brings them back. Tell them apart with the crumple test. Ball the glove in your fist and release it. A healthy glove springs back and the creases relax within a few seconds. A dried out but salvageable glove relaxes slowly. A dead glove holds the creases like paper and you will hear a faint crackle when you squeeze it. Try one cleaning and conditioning cycle with something like Obenauf's Cleanit followed by a thin coat of conditioner. If it is still crackling a week later, it is finished. Hardened leather also cracks under impact instead of stretching, which is exactly the wrong behavior in the one moment it matters. Sign Four: A Cuff That No Longer Closes The cuff is the part nobody inspects. Elastic loses tension after roughly 300 to 400 pull-on cycles, which is one commuting season, and snap closures wear oval so they pop open under wind pressure at highway speed. A glove that will not stay on your wrist is not a functioning glove, whatever the rest of it looks like. Check it this way: put the glove on, close it, and pull firmly at the fingertips as if somebody were tugging the glove off. If it slides at all, the retention is gone. On the road, a cuff that no longer seals also lets cold air run up your sleeve, which is why gloves that used to be fine at 50 degrees suddenly are not. A stretched cuff on an otherwise sound glove is one of the few failures worth taking to a leather shop, but only on a pair over about $130. Sign Five: Dexterity You Lost Without Noticing This one is gradual and it is the reason most riders keep dead gloves. Leather stretches unevenly, seams stiffen, and the glove slowly stops tracking your hand. You compensate by gripping harder, which is fatiguing and slows down your control inputs. Run these three checks with the gloves on. Pick a coin off a flat surface. If you cannot do it in two attempts, the fingertips have stretched past where your actual fingers end. Work the turn signal switch and the horn without looking. Hesitation here is a fit problem, not a habit problem. Cover the front brake lever with two fingers and squeeze. If the bunched leather at the knuckles fights you, the glove is now costing you brake feel. Make a full fist. If the back of the glove pulls the cuff halfway up your wrist, the panels have stretched out of shape. Editor's Picks If one of the five signs applies, here is what I would replace with, chosen for the specific failure. All of these are unlined deerskin or goatskin, unarmored, with no CE rating. They are abrasion and wind protection, not impact protection. Measure across your knuckles and check the glove size chart before ordering, since a replacement that fits loose repeats the dexterity problem you just solved. Classic Short Wrist Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $120. The straight replacement for a worn out daily pair. Nothing unusual about them, which is the point. Haymakers Super Welted Deerskin Gloves, $125. Buy these if your last pair failed at the seams. The fat welted seams put more leather and thread into the exact joints that separate first. ILL DOZER Outseam Gloves, $140. Outseam construction moves the seams to the outside, so nothing presses into your fingers, and perforation keeps sweat out of the leather, which is what hardens gloves in the first place. Bad Billy Black Goatskin Gloves, $99.99. Goatskin is more abrasion resistant per millimeter than deerskin and a little less supple. The right call if your last pair wore through the palm early. Where RevZilla Has the Advantage Buying a replacement glove sight unseen is the hardest part of this, and RevZilla is honestly better at it than anybody. Their return policy on gloves means you can order two sizes, keep the one that fits, and send the other back without an argument, and their catalog covers armored and CE-rated brands alongside plain leather. If you are between sizes or switching styles, order from them and take the guesswork out. Where a specialist retailer earns its keep instead is depth in one category: more cuff lengths and seam constructions in American deerskin than a general shop stocks. Prices verified August 2026. The Bottom Line Run all five checks tonight. It takes about four minutes with a lamp and a window. Any one of seam separation, see-through palm, crackling leather, or a cuff that slides means the pair is done, and lost dexterity means it is done even if it looks perfect. Rotating two pairs is the cheapest way to double the life of both, because sweat is what kills gloves and a glove that gets 48 hours to dry between rides lasts far longer. My default replacement is the plain short wrist deerskin at $120, and if the old pair split at the seams I go to the welted Haymakers at $125 instead. Both outlive what they replace if you clean them twice a season. There are more options and cuff comparisons on the glove buying guide and across the USA made glove collection.

A new leather club vest does not drape. It stands. Mine sat off my chest by a good half inch at the placket, the armholes dug into the back of my shoulders every time I reached for the bars, and the back panel creaked when I turned my head to clear a lane. That is normal behavior for 1.2mm to 1.4mm cowhide. It is not a defect and it is not a sizing error. The hide was tanned, dyed, and cut flat, and it has never once been asked to bend in a specific place. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money The real question is how long it takes and what actually helps. Break-in is measured in wearing hours, not in tricks, and most of the tricks people repeat in forum threads cost you either the finish or the fit. I have broken in six vests over fifteen years and wrecked one with a well meaning shortcut. What Break-In Actually Is Leather does not stretch evenly like a knit sweater. The collagen fiber bundles compress and realign only where you repeatedly flex them, under warmth and pressure. A vest does not get bigger during break-in. It gets shaped. If it was too tight in the chest on day one, it will still be too tight in month six, just with softer armholes. Fit problems do not resolve themselves, which is why the vest size chart matters more than anything you do afterward. A vest breaks in at five places: both armholes, the shoulder yoke, the back panel just above your belt line, and the front placket where snaps or lacing pull. Everywhere else stays about as stiff as the day it arrived. That is fine. You do not bend there. The Real Timeline in Wearing Hours I started counting hours because the advice online is either "a couple of rides" or "a couple of years" and neither helps anybody. Tracked across three vests, the pattern held closely enough to write down. Convert that to your calendar. Two hours every Saturday is roughly 100 hours across a riding season, so a weekend rider is looking at one summer. A commuter with a 40 minute round trip clears 100 hours in six to eight weeks. Weight shifts it too: a 1.2mm cowhide vest around $125 to $180 lands at the fast end, while a dense horsehide vest takes 140 to 160 hours before it stops arguing with you. Thinner softens quickly and wears out sooner. Heavier costs you a season and then lasts twenty years. 0 to 10 hours: still standing off your torso. Snaps take two hands. The collar will not lie down. Nothing has changed and you will be convinced you ordered the wrong size. 10 to 25 hours: the armholes give first. You stop noticing them when you reach forward. This is the biggest single comfort jump and it arrives sooner than most people expect. 25 to 60 hours: the back panel starts following your shoulders instead of fighting them. The placket stops standing proud when the vest is fastened. 60 to 100 hours: broken in. The leather takes a set to your posture, creases stay where you put them, and the vest holds your shape when it is hanging on a chair. What Actually Speeds It Up None of this is dramatic. Together these habits cut the timeline noticeably, and none of them put the hide at risk. Wear it in 70 to 85 degree weather. Body heat is the softening agent. A vest worn in October at 45 degrees barely moves. The same vest in August traffic softens twice as fast. Wear it over one layer, not three. A t-shirt puts your body heat right against the lining. A hoodie plus a flannel insulates the leather from the only heat source that matters. Fasten it every single time. An unsnapped vest flaps and creases at random. A fastened vest takes a set around your actual torso, which is the entire point. Work the armholes by hand while you watch television. Roll the leather over itself, thumb against forefinger, along the seam and the shoulder curve. Ten minutes twice a week. This is the one manual technique that does anything. Hang it on a wide wooden hanger, never a wire one. Wire leaves two permanent shoulder dents that never come out and look exactly like what they are. The Conditioning Mistakes I ruined a vest by conditioning it in week one. A new vest already carries tanning oils. Piling a heavy conditioner on top does not soften the fibers, it fills the surface, and you end up with a vest that is heavier, slicker, two shades darker than the product photo, and no faster to break in. The darkening does not reverse. The schedule that has worked for me: nothing at all for the first three months unless the vest got soaked. After that, a thin coat of Obenauf's Heavy Duty LP, from $15.99, twice a year in spring and fall. Amount matters more than brand. A fingertip's worth covers an entire back panel. If the leather still looks wet ten minutes after application, you used too much, and the excess just sits there collecting road grit. Skip the household improvisations. Mink oil is heavier than most vest leather wants and softens structural seams over time. Olive oil goes rancid inside the fibers and you will smell it within a year. Saddle soap is a cleaner, not a conditioner. If a vest is genuinely dirty, clean it first with a product made for the job from the leather care shelf, let it dry completely, then condition. Why You Should Not Soak It The soak and wear trick migrated over from raw denim and work boots, and it does not translate. Water swells the fiber bundles, and as it evaporates it carries tanning oils toward the surface and out of the hide. What comes back is a vest with hard patches, visible tide lines across the panels, and roughly one to two percent of shrink through the chest. On a size 44 that is close to a half inch, and you feel it immediately. I did it once, to a vest I liked, on the advice of a guy at a rally. It dried a half size smaller in the chest with a papery feel across the shoulders that never went away. I handed it to a smaller friend a year later. Rain is different, and it will happen. When weather soaks a vest, hang it on a broad hanger at room temperature, away from any heater vent, radiator, or hair dryer. Anything above 100 degrees cooks the fibers and makes the stiffness permanent. Give it 24 to 48 hours to dry through, seam allowances included, then apply one light conditioner coat. Handled that way a storm is a nonissue. Handled with heat, one storm can end a vest. Editor's Picks Break-in effort scales with hide weight, so choose based on how patient you honestly are. These four sit across that range. All of them are unarmored leather. They are wind and abrasion protection and a place to carry patches, not crash gear, and none of them carry a CE rating. The wider range sits on the USA made vest page. Legendary Dixon Men's Leather Motorcycle Vest, $125. The fastest break-in on this list, and the one I hand to riders who want a vest that feels normal by the third weekend. Legendary Men's Leather Club Motorcycle Vest, $179.99. Side lacing gives you real adjustment while the hide is still stiff, which is the difference between riding through that phase and hanging the vest in a closet. Legendary Reckless Outlaw Aged Leather Vest, $239. Arrives pre-distressed, so the first 25 hours feel like somebody already did them for you. Worth the premium if you hate the stiff phase. BECK 588 Horsehide Motorcycle Vest, from $365. The longest break-in here by a wide margin and the last vest most riders buy. BECK is a separate American maker that Legendary carries as a dealer. Where Fox Creek Has the Edge Fox Creek Leather earns an honest mention here. Their vests are American made and they publish hide weights and flat measurements plainly enough that you can predict the break-in curve before you order, which genuinely helps when stiffness is your worry. If thickness per dollar and measurement transparency are your criteria, buy from them. Prices verified August 2026. What I'd Actually Do Buy the vest that fits correctly on day one, wear it in warm weather over a single layer, snap it every time, and leave the conditioner in the cabinet until fall. That is the whole method. The riders who end up disappointed are the ones who tried to compress a two month process into a weekend using water, heat, or a jar of grease. If you are deciding right now and you expect to keep this vest for a decade, take the heavier hide and accept the longer break-in. If you want to actually enjoy it this season, the Dixon at $125 gets you comfortable in about three weeks of normal riding and leaves enough in the budget for a decent pair of gloves.

Quick answer: The Indian Pursuit Dark Horse costs $32,499 and the Harley Street Glide Limited costs $32,999, so a thousand mile week starts as a five hundred dollar decision. Both carry 6 gallons, a genuine tie and the most important number in a post about distance. Harley publishes 106 HP, 131 ft-lb at 3,250 rpm and 893 lb in running order. Indian publishes 122 hp, 128 ft-lbs at 3,800 rpm and 937 lb in running order, and it is fully liquid-cooled where the Harley liquid cools its heads only. Take the Harley if you want the lighter bike and torque 550 rpm lower. Take the Pursuit if the week includes July, traffic or mountain passes, because sixteen more horsepower, a full cooling system and 33 degrees of lean are things Harley does not answer in this class. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money MotoGearRater does not run endurance tests and holds no long-haul data of its own. Where we do have a view worth having is on what a rider wears for seven consecutive days, and our reference point for that is Legendary USA. The gear section below is measured against it, the bike figures are the makers' own, and each maker's disclosure gaps are named rather than filled in. All prices quoted here are base MSRP and exclude freight, destination and dealer charges. The numbers, side by side Engine. Street Glide Limited: Milwaukee-Eight VVT 117, 117 cubic inches, liquid-cooled heads with a centre-mounted radiator. Pursuit Dark Horse: PowerPlus, 108 cubic inches, 1,768cc, liquid-cooled. Output. Harley lists 106 HP and 131 ft-lb at 3,250 rpm on its own J1349 method. Indian lists 122 hp and 128 ft-lbs at 3,800 rpm, and PowerPlus is one of only two families for which Indian publishes horsepower at all. Both sides print a figure here, which is not true when a Harley is set against an Indian Thunderstroke, and the sixteen horsepower between them goes to the Indian. Weight. Street Glide Limited 893 lb in running order. Pursuit Dark Horse 937 lb in running order, and 901 lb dry. Running order to running order, the Harley is 44 lb lighter. Seat height. Harley lists 27.5 in laden. Indian lists a single unlabelled 26.5 in. Those are not the same basis, so treat the inch as indicative rather than measured. Fuel. Both 6 gallons. Neither company publishes a consumption figure, so this does not convert into a range in miles and we are not going to convert it. Lean angle, right. Street Glide Limited 31 degrees. Pursuit Dark Horse 33 degrees. Price. Pursuit Dark Horse $32,499. Street Glide Limited $32,999. What a thousand miles a week does to those numbers Over one afternoon, 44 lb and two degrees of lean are trivia. Over seven days they are not. The Harley's weight advantage shows every time you back it out of a hotel space with a full tank, and it shows at the end of the day rather than the start, which is when a heavy bike gets dropped. The Pursuit's two extra degrees matter in one specific place, a road with corners taken at touring pace with luggage and a passenger. A loaded bagger compresses its suspension, and 33 degrees against 31 is the margin before something touches down. If your thousand miles are interstate, that is worth nothing. If they cross a mountain range, it is worth a lot. Cooling is the difference riders expect to decide this, and it does not decide it the way the folklore says. Harley's own page describes the Milwaukee-Eight 117 as delivering its output with liquid-cooled heads and a centre-mounted radiator, so the Street Glide Limited is not the air-cooled machine it is usually cast as. The Pursuit runs a fully liquid-cooled PowerPlus. That is a difference of degree rather than of kind, and it is a far narrower gap than the one between either of these and an air-cooled Thunderstroke dresser like the Roadmaster. Neither company publishes a temperature figure and we do not measure one, so it is not a specification result either way. Torque placement is the one that clearly favours Harley: 131 ft-lb at 3,250 rpm against 128 ft-lbs at 3,800 rpm is slightly more, slightly earlier, and earlier is the useful half of that sentence. Kit for a thousand mile week Seven days changes what gear has to do. A jacket that is comfortable for three hours is not automatically comfortable for nine, and kit that is fine on Saturday can be unbearable by Wednesday if it does not breathe, does not dry overnight, or does not stay where you put it. BECK 501 Trucker Horsehide Motorcycle Jacket, $725. Horsehide is the denser, heavier hide, and on a week-long ride that is a feature rather than a penalty, because it blocks wind without a liner and it does not go soft and shapeless after four wet days. This is cut for a rider sitting upright behind a fairing, which is exactly the posture both of these motorcycles put you in. BECK is Legendary's own house line, not a third party label. No armour and no certification, which is the honest description of what it is. Churchill Classic Deerskin Gloves, $99. Seven days is seven mornings, and on a fully faired bagger your hands are the part of you the fairing does not protect, out past the edge in cold air for the first two hours every day. Deerskin survives being soaked and dried repeatedly without stiffening, which is the specific failure mode of a week on the road. Churchill is a Legendary line. Made in the USA. No armour and no certification. Legendary Peacemaker Leather Vest with Buffalo Nickel Snaps, $210. Over a week you will add and remove a layer perhaps forty times, and doing that with a jacket is a production while doing it with a vest is not. On a 6 gallon bike you are stopping every couple of hours anyway, and this is the layer that makes each stop thirty seconds rather than five minutes. Made in the USA. Worth knowing about the two jacket lines. BECK is Legendary's in-house label. Cockpit USA is a separate maker that Legendary carries as a genuine dealer, and its Cockpit USA Victory Rider Horsehide Leather Jacket, from $940, is the heavier alternative if you want a different cut in the same hide. We draw the distinction because plenty of retailers do not. None of the above is CE rated and none of it is armoured. On a thousand mile week that deserves stating plainly rather than in a footnote. A rider whose priority is impact protection should be shopping Held, Alpinestars or Dainese, all of whom build armoured touring kit aimed at exactly this mileage. Harley's own MotorClothes range is the dealership default and is worth pricing against this list, and Vanson is the closer cross-shop if American made leather is what you are after. What Indian publishes and Harley does not For a long-haul buyer this asymmetry matters. Indian publishes 5.1 in of front suspension travel and 4.5 in at the rear for the Pursuit, with 5.4 in of ground clearance, a 65.7 in wheelbase, Brembo calipers on dual 320 mm semi-floating front rotors, and a two year unlimited mileage factory warranty. Harley's spec block for the Street Glide Limited carries none of those lines, so there is no side-by-side on suspension, brakes or warranty, and we are not importing third party measurements to manufacture one. What Harley publishes and Indian does not is a rake figure, 26 degrees across the Touring range. It is the same problem from the other direction. And neither Harley-Davidson nor Polaris publishes model-level unit sales, so treat any ranking a salesperson offers as consensus rather than measurement. Which one to buy Buy the Street Glide Limited if your thousand miles are mostly interstate and you want the lighter machine. 893 lb in running order against 937 lb is a real 44 lb, 131 ft-lb arrives 550 rpm earlier, and the tank matches the Indian's at 6 gallons. The condition is that you give up sixteen horsepower and accept head-only liquid cooling for the July stretch of the week. Buy the Pursuit Dark Horse if the week includes heat, traffic or corners, and if sixteen more published horsepower is worth five hundred dollars to you. At $32,499 it is the cheaper bike, leans two degrees further on the right, is the only fully liquid-cooled machine in this class from either company, and publishes suspension and brake specifications Harley does not. The condition is 44 lb more to move around a car park at the end of a long day. If the fairing matters more than the badge, decide between Harley's batwing and sharknose first. The Road Glide Limited is the same $32,999 and the same 131 ft-lb at 3,250 rpm on the same 27.5 in laden seat, but 919 lb in running order rather than 893 lb. Related reading on MotoGearRater: the Harley Street Glide review and rating, Indian Challenger vs Harley Road Glide, and Indian Chieftain vs Harley Street Glide.

Looking for the full 2026 comparison? We have replaced our older head-to-head coverage with one deeply researched reference: 2026 Road Glide vs Street Glide: The Complete Spec-by-Spec Comparison. It carries every published specification for all eleven 2026 Grand American Touring and Trike models, the current NHTSA recall, and more than fifty answered buyer questions. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Should you buy the 2026 Road Glide? Yes, if you want the most capable long-haul platform Harley builds and you prefer a fairing that stays planted in crosswinds. The frame-mounted sharknose, the Milwaukee-Eight 117, and adjustable ergonomics justify the $25,999 starting price for serious mileage riders. We rate it 9.34 out of 10. This is an editorial research verdict. We have not test-ridden this bike; our rating is grounded in verified manufacturer specifications, published pricing, and recurring themes in real owner feedback. MotoGearRater has no affiliation with Harley-Davidson. MGR Rating: 9.34/10 Engine and performance: 9.5/10. The liquid-cooled-head Milwaukee-Eight 117 delivers a claimed 105 hp and 130 ft-lbs at 3,250 rpm, ample for two-up touring with loaded bags. Comfort and ergonomics: 9.4/10. The frame-mounted fairing keeps steering light and wind stable, the bars offer 27 degrees of adjustability, and the 26.6 in laden seat height keeps the bike manageable at stops. Value for money: 8.8/10. From $25,999 it costs real money, and options push it higher, but you are paying for the best touring chassis in the lineup and it delivers on that money. Custom potential: 9.7/10. The Road Glide is the default canvas of the modern bagger scene, from audio builds to full club-style conversions, with an aftermarket deeper than any rival. Reliability reputation: 9.3/10. The M-8 platform is proven and the liquid-cooled heads manage heat well; the common gripes in owner forums are infotainment software updates, not hard parts. Spec Card (Verified) Engine: Milwaukee-Eight 117, 117 cubic inches, liquid-cooled cylinder heads Claimed power: 105 hp at 4,600 rpm Claimed torque: 130 ft-lbs at 3,250 rpm Seat height: 26.6 in laden Weight: 838 lb in running order Fuel capacity: 6 gallons Tech: 12.3 in Skyline OS display with embedded navigation and Apple CarPlay, adjustable handlebars, cornering ABS and traction control, all-LED lighting MSRP: from $25,999; check current dealer pricing for freight, color, and options Who It Is For, Who Should Skip It Buy it if you ride serious distance, especially in windy country, because the frame-mounted sharknose sends buffeting into the chassis instead of the handlebars. It is also the pick for riders who plan to build: the club-style and performance bagger worlds are built around this bike. Skip it if this is your first motorcycle, since 838 lb forgives nothing in a parking lot. Skip it if you ride mostly short urban hops, and consider the Low Rider ST if you love the fixed-fairing concept but want 120 lb less bike and a sportier chassis. Strengths and Weaknesses Strengths The best wind management in the Harley lineup; the sharknose does not push the bars around in gusts Adjustable handlebars with 27 degrees of range let riders actually dial in fit Massive, mature aftermarket; our club-style Road Glide build cost guide shows how far this platform goes Strong resale driven by relentless demand for used Road Glides Weaknesses At 838 lb in running order it is the heaviest bike in this comparison set, and it feels it below 5 mph The wide fairing limits lane filtering and tight garage storage Riders continue to voice that rear suspension travel is the platform's comfort ceiling on broken pavement Real-world transaction prices land well above the $25,999 base once paint and freight are in Buying Advice Buy the current generation if you can: the 2024-onward redesign brought the CFD-shaped fairing, the 12.3 in display, and the liquid-cooled 117, and those are the features that will define used values for the next decade. A lightly used 2024 or 2025 is the smart value play. If you are shopping used builds, be careful with heavily modified club-style bikes: they can be excellent, but audio and suspension work needs receipts. Our Street Glide vs Road Glide modification comparison breaks down which platform mods pay off. What to Wear on It Long interstate days behind a fixed fairing still leave your hands in the wind. Gauntlets earn their keep here: our gauntlet versus short cuff guide covers the tradeoffs, and the Classic American Whitetail Deerskin Gauntlets from Legendary USA are $145 at the time of writing if you want US-made deerskin. Many Road Glide riders run a leather vest over a long-sleeve base in summer; our guide to how a motorcycle vest should fit explains the club, riding, and CCW fit differences, and the Legendary Brotherhood vest is $329 at the time of writing. FAQ Is the Road Glide reliable? The Milwaukee-Eight has a solid track record since 2017, and the liquid-cooled heads on the current 117 handle sustained heat better than the older air-cooled tourers. Owner complaints today center on infotainment software more than mechanicals. Is the Road Glide good for shorter riders? Seat height is a manageable 26.6 in laden, so most riders get solid footing. The real question is confidence with 838 lb at walking pace; shorter riders handle Road Glides every day, but low-speed technique matters more than inseam. Is the Road Glide good for beginners? No. It is heavy, wide, powerful, and expensive to insure and repair. Learn on something smaller, then move up; the bike will still be here. How is Road Glide resale value? Excellent by industry standards. The Road Glide is arguably the most in-demand used Harley platform right now, and clean examples of the current generation should stay liquid for years. What are the service intervals? General guidance for Harley touring models is a first service around 1,000 miles and routine service at roughly 5,000-mile intervals. Confirm exact requirements in the owner's manual and with your dealer. Road Glide or Street Glide? The Road Glide steers lighter and handles wind better; the Street Glide looks and feels more traditional with its bar-mounted batwing. Drivetrains are identical. Fit and style should decide it, and we say that as fans of both. Sources Harley-Davidson: 2026 Road Glide Torquepedia: Harley-Davidson Road Glide 2026 specs MGR research note: club-style Road Glide build costs Last updated: August 6, 2026

Quick answer: Big and tall riders in 2026 have real options, verified on live retail sites: the HJC i10 helmet runs XS to 5XL, the Legendary USA LowLife leather club vest is stocked S to 5XL from $425, Bohn Body Armor makes armored underlayers to 4X and beyond, and specialists like Ghost Rider Leather carry leather to 12XL. Disclosure: MotoGearRater and Legendary USA have the same owner. Links to legendaryusa.com in this article go to our owner’s store, and are marked as sponsored. How we make money Why Extended Sizing Needs Verification Plenty of gear pages claim big sizes that are perpetually out of stock. Every size range below was checked on the seller's live site in August 2026. If a pick says 5XL, that size was actually listed for sale, not just printed on a chart. MotoGearRater has covered American-made vests for big and tall riders before; this guide covers the whole kit. The Picks Helmet: HJC i10, about $160, sizes XS to 5XL. MGR Rating 9.0/10 Nine sizes with real shell differentiation, MSRP $159.99 to $169.99. One honest caveat: the i10 is Snell M2020D certified in the standard range, but the 3XL to 5XL sizes are DOT only, per Helmet House's listing. That still makes it one of the very few quality lids sold in true 4XL and 5XL, and the price is fair. Leather Vest: Legendary USA LowLife Club Vest, From $425, sizes S to 5XL. MGR Rating 9.1/10 Verified in stock S through 5XL on the live product page. It is 1.4mm naked cowhide, heavier than the 1.2mm hides used in lighter vests, with a single-panel back built for patches. The cut is fitted and cropped, so check the size chart against a chest measurement rather than defaulting to your t-shirt size. Club style vests are built for the real ones; if you ride with a club, the single-panel back is the point. It is heritage leather, not CE-rated armor, and it does not pretend otherwise. Armored Underlayers: Bohn Body Armor, sizes to 4X standard, 5X and 6X in select styles. MGR Rating 8.6/10 Bohn builds armored shirts and pants in stretch fabrics with men's big sizes 1X to 4X as standard stock, 5X in select styles, and 6X rolling out. For a bigger rider who cannot find an armored jacket that fits right, wearing the armor as a base layer under a leather vest or roomy shell is a genuinely good system, not a compromise. Gloves: Sized by Hand, Not by Height Gloves are sized by hand measurement around the knuckles, so a 4XL jacket wearer may take an XL glove. The Legendary USA Bad Billy goatskin gloves at $99.99 run S to 2XL, and the 2XL fits knuckle circumferences of 11 to 12 inches, which covers most large hands. MGR Rating 8.8/10. The Classic touchscreen deerskin gloves at $120 use the same measurement-based sizing. Both are unarmored heritage leather; if you want certified knuckle protection, Alpinestars and REV'IT armored gloves also run to 3XL in many models. Beyond 5XL: The Specialists. MGR Rating 8.2/10 When 5XL is not enough, two retailers actually stock bigger: Ghost Rider Leather lists vests, chaps, and jackets from 3XL up to 12XL, and Eagle Leather maintains a dedicated big and tall collection. Quality varies more at import-heavy specialists than at heritage makers, so read the leather weight specs, but availability is real. Category Pick Verified size range Price MGR Rating Helmet HJC i10 XS to 5XL about $160 9.0/10 Leather vest Legendary USA LowLife S to 5XL From $425 9.1/10 Armored underlayer Bohn Body Armor shirts and pants to 4X standard, 5X and 6X select varies 8.6/10 Gloves Legendary USA Bad Billy S to 2XL, 11 to 12 inch knuckle at 2XL $99.99 8.8/10 Gloves (touchscreen) Legendary USA Classic touchscreen deerskin S to 2XL by hand measurement $120 8.7/10 Beyond 5XL Ghost Rider Leather and Eagle Leather to 12XL (Ghost Rider) varies 8.2/10 How We Chose We verified size availability directly on live product pages and manufacturer size charts in August 2026, then weighed price, materials, and certification against that verified availability. No physical testing is claimed; ratings reflect published specifications, verified sizing, and value. Honest Limits Extended sizing narrows your choices, and this list reflects that honestly. Snell certification above 2XL is nearly nonexistent, so the biggest helmet sizes are DOT only. Heritage leather vests carry no impact armor. And big sizing is not tall sizing: a 5XL vest fits a broad chest but will not add torso length, so tall riders should compare garment length measurements, not just chest size, before ordering. Frequently Asked Questions Do motorcycle helmets really come in 4XL and 5XL? Yes, but the list is short. The HJC i10 is the standout, sold in true 3XL, 4XL, and 5XL shells at around $160. Expect DOT rather than Snell certification in those sizes. Do leather motorcycle vests come in 5XL without special ordering? Yes. The Legendary USA LowLife club vest was verified in stock S to 5XL from $425 on its live product page in August 2026. Should big riders size up in motorcycle gloves? No. Gloves are sized by measuring around the knuckles, excluding the thumb. Measure first; leather snugs in as it breaks in, so between sizes most makers advise going by the chart rather than guessing large. What if I need bigger than 5XL? Ghost Rider Leather stocks leather vests, jackets, and chaps up to 12XL, and Eagle Leather runs a dedicated big and tall collection. Bohn Body Armor also builds armored base layers to 4X standard with 5X and 6X in select styles. Is a vest a real option instead of a jacket for a big rider? It can be, especially in heat, and especially paired with an armored underlayer that actually fits. The vest brings abrasion-resistant leather and carry capacity; the underlayer brings the impact protection the vest does not have. Do tall riders need different gear than big riders? Often, yes. Tall sizing adds sleeve and torso length; big sizing adds circumference. Check garment length specs, and favor makers that publish full measurement charts instead of S through 5XL labels alone. Related Reading Best American-Made Leather Motorcycle Vests for Big and Tall Riders Motorcycle Vest Sizing Guide: How to Measure and What Size to Buy Do You Need a Vest Extender? How to Tell Before You Buy One Sources Helmet House: HJC i10 sizes and certifications Legendary USA: LowLife leather club vest, S to 5XL Bohn Body Armor: Big, Tall, Petite and Plus gear Ghost Rider Leather: Big and Tall, 3XL to 12XL Eagle Leather: Big and Tall collection RevZilla: Sizing and buying big and tall motorcycle gear Last updated August 6, 2026. Where Vest Sizing Actually Stops Vests are where big and tall riders hit the wall most often, because plenty of size charts simply end at 2XL. They do not have to. Legendary USA's big and tall motorcycle vest sizing guide documents lettered styles through 5XL, numbered styles to a 56 inch chest, and a separate Long body length option for riders who need length rather than width.