Out at dinner one recent night, I watched the couple at the next table drift into a moment of ultralight petting. She had on a black leather motorcycle jacket, and he was toying, not quite idly, with the zipper at the cuff of its tapered right sleeve. The chain of the zipper caught the candlelight, as did the supple surface of the leather, which seemed as soft as lambskin and poorly suited for riding (let alone very suddenly not riding) a bike down the blacktop. But her cuff could zip shut to seal out the wind, and he was playing with its pull. Zip, and then unzip; he was enchanted. I had seen motorcycle jackets look sharp, hard, camp, goonish and corny, but this cuteness was new to me, and perhaps to the jacket, a garment that keeps compounding its power to activate imaginations.

The classic motorcycle jacket — double-­breasted, distinguished by an asymmetric front zipper and ample lapels — was pioneered by Irving Schott in 1928. (People tend to abuse Schott’s trademark, Perfecto, as a generic reference to any of the countless models inspired by its cut.) With its aerodynamic geometry and lavish romance of machines, the design exemplifies Art Deco values, a polished modernism no more likely to grow tiresome than the Chrysler Building. Leather seems to animate this industrial form with a primal spirit, as if we had updated ancient beliefs associating animal hides and magical powers to suit our secular rituals.

On an autumn afternoon of what fashion blogs call ‘‘leather weather,’’ I drifted south down Madison Avenue past boutiques where shopgirls who abbreviate motorcycle jacket to ‘‘moto’’ wore cropped motos on the job. At 68th Street, on a screen in the window at the luxury-­sportswear store Belstaff, David Beckham wore a mandarin-­collared racing jacket to preen through the night­scape of a promotional film. At a sidewalk cafe near 62nd, two women lunched performatively, each reflecting the other’s moto in her shades. At 61st Street, I stepped into Barneys, where motorcycle jackets priced up to $5,000 waited to seduce shoppers who were already wearing motorcycle jackets, the hardware of which coordinated with the buckles on their bootees, the chains on their purses, the gleams in their eyes.

I felt a need to put one on. What’s that jacket? Margiela, a fashion house based in Paris, intended it as a replica of a 1950s Perfecto, according to a label sewn into a quilted red lining as rich as a juicy secret. Was I trying this on or was I auditioning for it? Zipped up and belted in, cased in black calfskin, studded with silvertone snap heads, I felt armored, cosseted, insulated against the world and its mundanity. In the mirror, Narcissus was tingling. The thrust of the epaulets alone was good for a jolt of euphoria. The motorcycle jacket encour­ages a sense of confidence in its inhabitant. Foremost, it confirms the least suspicion that he has the brass to this pull off.