Leather jackets were initially developed in World War I to be worn by German fighter pilots. During the 1920s, they became fashionable, and the earliest example of a jacket designed for fashion was created by Irving Schott in 1928. Worn to keep people warm and protected, whilst they rode in automobiles and motorcycles, Taiga Takahashi found a 1930s example of a leather jacket through a vintage dealer in New York, U.S.A. Awed by the patina of the leather that had endured 90 years of wear, Takahashi wanted to create a jacket where the leather would grow to have a similar texture and depth. The Automobile Coat is made from vegetable-tanned horsehide leather and is dyed using ancient mud dyeing technique from the island of Amami Oshima. This process involves many steps, where the leather is steeped in a dye made from the bark of a tree and then buried in mud resulting in a deep earthy brown.