Club Obi Wan

So today I found myself at a meeting in London a couple of streets away from the London Belstaff store. SO I thought I'd go along and have a look.

There's one jacket in the window. It's a caramel coloured predistressed leather, a little dry looking. The details on the jacket are correct, it looks like the Indy 4 jacket and it it not overly slimmed down like the photo we've seen had suggested. The jacket has a Belstaff logo patch on the left arm and inside the jacket on the zipper facing on the right it has a metal plate with a serial number and what looks like a Lucas legal line embossed on it.

The jacket is not especially well put together. All of our vendors jackets are better.

The jacket is displayed with a bizzare little camera bag and a Dorfman. There is a little display board in front of it.

I go in to get some more information the shop is empty. I ask about the jacket, no stock yet "end of NEXT month" (June). And the price.... hold on to your AB.....





£988. that's $1,923.50 at today's exchange rate.

Ridicolous!

i must have it....KT, i'm sending you my credit card and shipping info....NOT!

i truly believe that this jacket will sell....but not to a gearhead purist. that's like 3 TN jackets......you can order an exact screen replica, one in your size, and one in blue leather with the pinstripe lining

there is a niche out there for this offering and i would hazzard a guess that it contains wealthy indiana jones fans that have yet to hear of us crazy folks or belstaff purists.

there's some parallelisms here that are at work which is kind of interesting.....how the TN customers are looking at this belstaff offering is quite similar to how the wested purists are looking at the TN offering. everything's relative i guess. very interesting scenario to say the least

As you can see, _ approves, and has ordered several for himself.

Well, maybe not....



Regards! Michaelson

Haha! Compare to the price of a Wested.... Thats brilliant.

_,

I was hoping to see those unsold Belstaff jackets make their way into Big Lot stores myself.

~Ron

$1923? What is Belstaff and Lucasfilm thinking?

But I bet someone here will buy it regardless. (And guess what? - personally, I'll be envious of that one person based solely on its exclusivity!)

A Belstaff logo patch on the left arm? On the OUTSIDE of the jacket?

I doubt any serious gearhead is gonna buy this. IMO

At that price they better buy a person a drink before they buy one and give 'em a cigarette afterwards.

Belstaff logo on the sleeve!!? I suppose someone will buy them but I just don't see why when you can get better SA and excellent quality at a fraction of the price. The Nowak is made by THE maker of the CS jacket at a relative bargain at $700.

-Nebraska

Only $2k?!?! I can't wait!

Kinda sounds to me like buying a DP fedora for $500... Ya, it would be "official" but it wouldn't look "right" and isn't a particularly good idea given an AB will cost far less. Anyone who even gives a half-hearted attempt to find the original manufacturers can do so.

That's how much Belstaff was originally asking for the HERO jacket from War of the Worlds and for the Trooper jacket from The Departed too.

Just a new over priced fashion jacket by belstaff, their prices are simply way to high... not just the Indy jacket.

I'm no math wizard, but my calculator says that you can buy an AB (with COW discount), Aldens, Wested jacket/shirt and pants combo, plus bag belts,gloves and holster from Todd's for approx. $1100.00 U.S. This leaves considerable room for a whip and socks. Of course any number of our great vendors could be thrown into the mix. This is just an example. That's full gear with many Marquee pieces for just over 1/2 the Belstaff price.

Not a judgement on Belstaff, but some perspective.

As far as licensing and Lucas goes, I'm all for anything that keeps him independent of the studios and their focus groups. Studios didn't want to green light Star Wars. Without Star Wars I fear we wouldn't have Indy.

This worries me- I'm pretty sure they'll find them hard to sell- will it mean that our great vendors might be threatened with legal action because they're impacting on the sales of these sorts of high-ticket items?

Neolithic wrote:This worries me- I'm pretty sure they'll find them hard to sell- will it mean that our great vendors might be threatened with legal action because they're impacting on the sales of these sorts of high-ticket items?

No. At present there is no copyright protection for fashion designs, at least not in the U.S. Also, a vendor such as AB or Wested that actually made gear for the movies could never be denied the ability to say they were the ones that made and supplied their products for the movie. Especially in the absence of an agreement, signed beforehand, that they would not be allowed to make those claims.

I went to the Manchester Belstaff store today and they also had the jacket on display with one of their tiny shoulder bags and an off white cowboy looking hat. They also had the Mutt jacket which was £850-something and I must confess it (the 'Mutt') looked pretty good, although not at that price.

I thought the quality of the Indy jacket looked fine and I don't agree that it didn't look 'especially' well put together as it seemed to be pretty good quality and very similar in leather to my US Wings KOTCS limited run jacket. Also, I can't imagine that it would be any less well made than their other jackets which all seem to be very good, from what I've personally seen and read about. Obviously it's a ridiculous price for what seemed a similar kind of quality to my US Wings. They thought the jackets might be in stock next week, or at least that's what they're hoping for.

There was actually a guy wandering around Manchester with a photographer from the Manchester Evening News newspaper who was wearing one of the jackets with a bad hat and what can't really be described as a whip, but rather a couple of sad looking pieces of leather trying to look like one. I snapped a couple of bad pictures with my phone and I'll try and get them on the site tonight when I get home. There will be pictures in tomorrow's paper though, which means they may well be on the paper's website tomorrow as well.

Oh, the 'Indy' pictures on the inside are pretty bad, but I don't honestly think most people would ever notice unless you decided to wear it inside out.

Wow!it's to high price!!! in italy is it is approximately 800 euro, 1.200$

I'm really not surprised as Belstaff products are usually overpriced (in my opinion anyway).

JulianK wrote:I'm really not surprised as Belstaff products are usually overpriced (in my opinion anyway).

It does seem unusually high, even for them, as it's a couple of hundred pounds more than the War of the Worlds Hero Jacket. I guess it's like people have already mentioned, the Belstaff version isn't aimed at gear collecting fans like us, but rather at the very wealthy high end fashion consumers who might like it for novelty. I imagine they will sell them quite easily, just not to anyone I know!

how close is the leather to the movie jacket? do you think belstaff sourced it from the same tannery?

if so.....there's the answer.....it costs $1200/per jacket to fly the leather over from the states. i get it now.....now it makes sense to buy one. i mean, that's about how much it costs to fly to italy from here, right? so come on, who's with me? let's all buy one and wear that non-SA belstaff patch on the sleeve with pride.........

haha!!

Belstaff is very close to here, which I thought was quite funny.



Ok, a few pics, sorry they are not great, very shiny window!!

I didn't even notice that they had a Mutt Jacket too!

Nice touch!

Selling Indiana Jones styled jackets on Hanover Street!

~Ron

Well... you'd have to pay "HANOVER" fist to get one of those things...

Tollan wrote:Well... you'd have to pay "HANOVER" fist to get one of those things...

nice

you know....that jacket doesn't look too bad at all....or maybe it's the hat that's making it look good

the colour reminds me of the veg tanned lamb that wested has....but the cut definitely looks like a belstaff. which means i'll need a XXL and need to chop the sleeves in half. so if i take say 2 inches of leather off of the sleeves, that'd be about $300 i'm throwing away.........no thanks

Here are some pictures of the guy wandering around Manchester for the local paper:





I've blurred his face as, although he said yes to the pictures, I don't want to take liberties! He kept moving around though and it was all a bit awkward, so I gave up after these two.

I thought you'd all like to see the picture of the logo on the arm though...

Wait a sec . . . are they popping the collar DB style?

I hate to say it... but that jacket actually looks quite nice. not £1000 nice... but "nice"...

nice jacket but the color seems clear too much...

Chewie Louie wrote:Wait a sec . . . are they popping the collar DB style?

That's right. They should have had the mannequins throw the DB hand signal and holding a plastic red beer cup.

SD

Looking at those pics, I just want to rip off that logo from the sleeve badly. It's an eyesore on an otherwise not too bad looking jacket.

Even the old Cooper/US Wings "officially licensed" jackets back in the day didn't have emblems/logos on the outside of the jacket.

Other than that, it doesn't look too bad. But it's gotta be the highest priced "Indy" jacket we've seen yet.

the jacket does look nice.......and SOFT too. unlike belstaff's typical treated/waterproofed leather for motorcycling.

the logo on the arm is quite offensive to me as both a gearhead and a belstaff fan though.

KT....kindly point the gentlemen towards the wested barn

why's he holding one of bob marley's locks?

Here's a link to to GQ blurb about the Belstaff jacket. Belstaff is also given credit for re-designing and making the jacket for the new movie. huh?

http://www.gqmagazine.co.uk/Features/Style_Spy/

Hmmmmm....two grand for a two hundred dollar jacket. Of course at $200.00 they would have to supply a coupon for having the left sleeve replaced free. Postage included of course. Kinda makes you admire DP. At least their IJ pin is removable.

Chewie Louie wrote:Here's a link to to GQ blurb about the Belstaff jacket. Belstaff is also given credit for re-designing and making the jacket for the new movie. huh?

http://www.gqmagazine.co.uk/Features/Style_Spy/

Spielberg's wardrobe minions on Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull turned to British brand Belstaff to redesign the classic jacket.

Technically, they never say that they manufactured the jackets for the film, and never claimed that they redesigned them for the movie... only that they redesigned the jacket. You need to parse the words so finely, it is almost Clintonian. Of course that depends on what your definition of "is" is.

Some pics taken at the Belstaff store in Rome. Prices are in euros. Indy jacket looks very thin, as usually Belstaff jackets are.