Alpinestars Oscar Monty Jacket - Long-Term Gear Evaluation

The market is awash with heritage-styled, logo-less motorcycle apparel options, which is a very good thing. Some call it hipster, I call this progress. Because the more options available to fit an individual’s taste, the higher chance they’ll start wearing protective gear.

However, pretty regularly these pieces aren’t up to snuff technically to be called motorcycle pieces, both from larger brands and boutique outfits. Sometimes this is in the bullet points—unfilled armor pockets from the factory, thin leather, paperweight stitching, or just a poor fit. Sometimes it’s not so easy to tell.

But there is one tool that brings these flaws to light, and that is time. Under the crushing march of airplane stank, spilled coffee, sweat, speed, and weather, true colors come out. This Alpinestars Oscar Monty Jacket has been on my shoulders since last August—both on the bike and off—and here’s how it fared.

The Oscar Collection is a segment within the Alpinestars line that offers a counterpoint to their more mainstream technical offerings. There are no race boots or one-pieces in this line, but desert boots and logo-less leather jackets. The silhouettes are a throwback to vintage motorcycling, as is the marketing and the web presences.

The Oscar Monty Jacket is a great example of this. There isn't a traditional Alpinestars logo in sight, only the Oscar Collection one. It's a mid-length, "cafe" chassis, with snap collar and zippered cuffs and slightly pre-curved arms. The marketing is peppered with tracker and cafe vernacular, but historically speaking this is an aviation jacket, engineered for use in the cockpits of WWII. Shortly after the war, this was the chosen piece of equipment for motorcyclists, and its augmentation into a "cafe racer" jacket was complete.

The jacket is built with vegetable-dyed, full grain leather chassis that is 1 - 1.2mm thick. An additional note is the leather has a “suede” treatment from the factory, which means it’s been lightly sanded. This gives a smoother appearance, but also removes the grain from the garment, giving it a sleeker, more refined look, but also at the cost of leather thickness.

Capacity wise, the Monty has an internal napoleon pocket, two internal pouch pockets, two traditional pockets on the outside, and an external chest pocket. The armor package is Alpinestars’ CE- 1 foam armor in the elbows and shoulders, and a pocket for a back protector.

It also comes equipped with a removable, mid-weight fleece liner that snaps in.

Fit is standard. I’m 5-foot-11-inches/175 lb. and found the sleeves and torso a little long, but that tradeoff is it also allows room for layering underneath. With the length, it would bunch in the full crouch position, but it also wouldn’t rise up in the back and display my pasty derriere to the world, so I’d call that a fair trade off.

From Royal Enfields, to a Thruxton R, to Tracker Sportster, to Aprillia Tuono R, to daily commutes I’ve found the fit and appearance to be perfect for hopping on for a ride, and not being out of place when you get to the end.

My biggest concern when initially receiving it was how the leather would wear. Full-grain, drum dyed jackets means utilizing the actual hide of the cow, not a UV-resistant coat of paint that has been given a fake grain. From a material durability standpoint, this is the best, since there’s no coating to flake off, and the leather’s patina ages with grace, as subtle wrinkles form over time.

The downside is if the dye used was not sufficient. Then you end up with a wholly different color jacket. Your blacks become greens, or blues, or purples, depending on how the dye reacts with the elements and sunlight over time.

The jacket has aged reasonably well, going from a deep grey out of the box, to a lighter, tinged shade over time. You can see in some spots where rain has bled the dye a touch, or where different panels are slightly different colors, or where I spilled coffee on the sleeve, but altogether, it’s fared well. This is the hallmark of every good leather jacket—one that grows with time, wearing its scars with pride.

Mechanical durability is the lynchpin of an heirloom leather jacket—how tight the stitching is, how zippers hold up, and if snaps and hardware keep doing their job. In this regard, the Monty has been good but not great. Another issue is every jacket is different, one flow does not make a bad jacket, and so these flaws are anecdotal only. About six months in a snap blew out inside the sleeve to hold the liner in, and I’ve gotten that fixed. The seams around the right cuff zipper also started to fray, but have not needed replacing.

There are no zipper stops on the sleeves to lend to its classic appearance, and those have started to “droop” (come slightly open), but not so much where it would be a cause of concern in a crash.

The Oscar Monty has been exceedingly comfortable as time has gone on, and has outperformed many of my other pieces. With leather around this thickness, often times a jacket will stretch instead of breaking in, worsening the fit over time, but that has not happened here.

It’s now very supple, and fits like a second skin. This jacket has found itself caked in mud, soaked in rain, thoroughly sweated in, and completely snowed on, and stuffed under dozens of airplane seats. With diligent conditioning and cleaning after every calamity, it has survived perfectly, with only a few runs in the dye, and only minor discoloration.

The biggest downside of the jacket is the armor. The standard foam armor is not well integrated into the design of the jacket and has very little cupping. This means your limbs don’t sit in the armor as much as on them. I also placed my own back protector in this jacket, as Alpinestars does not have one standard. I chucked the foam armor long ago and replaced it with an alternative option. Alpinestars’ Bio Armor and back protectors fit the Monty, and I would highly recommend them as an upgrade for both performance and comfort.

Another note from long-term wear is the perforation that the jacket comes with could be improved. Yes, the leather itself is perforated, but the internal polyester lining is not. When you look in Alpinestars’ technical jackets, the shell perforation is aligned with perforated lining panels. This allows air to flow through as much as possible. With the polyester liner in this jacket not perforated, air flow is significantly hampered, which I found gets stifling when temperatures creep above the 90s and humidity is at its peak.

In the end, the Monty has been a staple of mine for a year because it goes well with everything, looks good off the bike, and is super reliable. It could be made from a little thicker leather for more abrasion resistance and a better armor suite, but it occupies such a perfect sweet spot of looks, performance, and protection that I consistently find myself reaching for it when heading out.

Gear: Oscar Monty Jacket: $599.95 Contact: www.alpinestars.com