The Trashy, Expensive, Contradictory Reputation of Leopard Print (2024)

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I’m hardly to the first person to proclaim that leopard is a neutral. The black-and-tan pattern looks great with almost any color palette — jewel tones, neons, black, camel. It can be dressed up or down, it flatters every skin tone, and it pops up on runways so often that it hardly seems fair to call it a trend.

And yet, what leopard conveys in Western fashion is highly mutable — especially when it comes to signifying class.

Think about Jackie Kennedy’s leopard-print Oleg Cassini coat, or Bob Dylan singing about Edie Sedgwick’s “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Consider Diane von Furstenberg’s office-friendly leopard-print wrap dresses. All of these images evoke a kind of old-money femininity bolstered by the kind of unimpeachable confidence that comes from having a great investment portfolio.

Photo: Tim Boxer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

But leopard print is also a signal of poor taste and of “trashiness,” which really means that it represents the sexually available lower-class woman. Picture Peg Bundy in leopard-print spandex on Married... with Children, or Fran Drescher in a tiny leopard-print mini skirt on The Nanny, or Lil’ Kim squatting with her legs spread in that infamous 1996 promotional photo, her crotch barely covered by a leopard-print thong. Peg Bundy is a low-class sybarite, but Fran Drescher and Lil’ Kim are cut from a different (sorry) cloth. They are not content to stay in Queens and Brooklyn, respectively. They are women on the move, using their wits and sexuality to slink into lives of luxury.

While talking about leopard print, I would be remiss to ignore the pattern’s true progenitors: actual leopards.

“If you’re being a nerd, leopards don’t really have spots,” Craig Saffoe, the curator of Great Cats at the National Zoo in Washington says. “They have what we call a rosette. Leopards have a rosette, cheetahs have spots all over, and jaguars have a rosette with a spot inside.”

Photo: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images

Saffoe speculates that leopards evolved their spots as a form of camouflage to help them hunt.

“What we know about black leopards is that they are found in higher-density, deeper forests. Being solid black in a dark environment would certainly help you conceal yourself,” he says.

Jo Weldon is a burlesque dancer who has spent the past three years researching the history of leopard print for her forthcoming book Fierce: The History of Leopard Print.

“Leopards are independent, they’re adaptable, they’re in every environment,” Weldon says. “They sleep in trees, they can swim in the water, they’re born to single moms. They’re these very powerful, independent, beautiful animals. I think we have a primal identification with the animals.”

Humans have long borrowed from leopards in both fashion and iconography. Usually, this involved killing the animals and wearing their fur or skins. Seshat, the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, was shown clad in leopard skins. Dionysus, the the Greek god of wine, was associated with the leopard, and was sometimes depicted wearing their fur. The Anatolian goddess Cybele was often depicted near leopards. Leopard fur was prized everywhere the animal lived, and leopard print appeared on textiles used in 18th-century French and Italian clothing.

Photo: Ron Galella/WireImage/Getty

But Weldon says that none of these things explain how leopard fur and leopard print entered mainstream Western fashion. The proliferation of leopard print in particular is mainly due to the rise of the mass production of clothing and the development of synthetic materials.

Before the 1930s, most clothing was made to order, and was relatively expensive. People who were not wealthy had small, functional wardrobes, and were largely shut out of the world of fashion. But in the early 20th century, changes in technology and the economy created cheaper, mass-produced clothing that the middle and lower classes could afford.

“The rise of the Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements inspired people to use animal motifs and then stylized animal motifs,” Weldon says. “The rise of synthetics made it affordable and accessible.”

Clothing ads in the 1930s promoted velvetine and chenille as affordable alternatives to leopard fur. Around this time, Lanvin made silk and rayon crepe dresses emblazoned with leopard patterns. But leopard print really hit the mainstream in 1947, when Christian Dior included it in his debut “New Look” collection. Dior used leopard not as a fur or a faux fur, but as a print. Fashion critic Alexander Fury at T Magazine called leopard print a “house leitmotif” at Dior, noting that the designer’s muse Mitzah Bricard often wore the pattern.

In the 1950s, the American lingerie brand Vanity Fair began selling leopard-print underwear. Leopard print started showing up regularly in mass-produced lingerie collections, and then in swimwear, contributing to the pattern’s association with female sexuality.

Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Leopard print was a favorite of Eartha Kitt. In one photo — which Weldon cites as an early inspiration for her obsession with the pattern — Kitt wears a leopard coat over a leopard-print dress, and holds a cheetah on a leash. The print seems perfect for Eartha, who embodied feline qualities even before she played Catwoman, and who sang songs about using her feminine wiles to court wealthy men.

In 1962, Jackie Kennedy wore an Oleg Cassini leopard-skin coat. The coat was a sensation, but it caused a spike in demand for real leopard skin, leading to the death of as many as 250,000 leopards. Cassini spent the rest of his life wracked with guilt over the harm he had caused the animal population.

In 1966, the song “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” appeared on Bob Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde. The song was putatively about Edie Sedgwick. I’ve only seen one photo of Edie in leopard print, but it strikes me as something she would wear, as a Mayflower-descendant heiress who found fame in the grimy worlds of ’60s New York counterculture.

Émilie Régnier is a photographer whose 2017 show “From Mobutu to Beyoncé,” at the Bronx Documentary Center, featured a portrait series of people wearing the print. In one photo, an African woman in a leopard-print bikini top clutches her belly on the beach in Gabon. In Texas, Larry the Leopard Man reclines nude on a couch, showing the bluish leopard spots tattooed across nearly every inch of his body.

“People who wear leopard told me they feel beautiful, they feel strong, they feel powerful, they feel sexy,” Régnier says.

Photo: Ben Gabbe/Getty Images for Stuart Weitzman

Régnier says that the idea for the series came to her when she was visiting the Chateau Rouge — a large African market — during an art residency in Paris in the fall of 2014. A woman with a large red afro caught her eye, and Régnier invited her to her studio to be photographed.

“She arrived wearing this beautiful leopard-print boubou,” Régnier says. “A few days after, I happened to be in a party in the Rive Gauche and there was this beautiful kind of bourgeois or wealthy blonde, young, mother-like woman wearing leopard. And I was like, okay, from this African neighborhood in Paris to this most bourgeoisie place, leopard is kind of crossing the bridges.”

Régnier stresses that leopard skin has its own separate history in Africa. CIA-funded Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was famous for his leopard-skin cap. And vestments of the the Shembe church in South Africa traditionally included leopard fur, though church leaders switched to faux fur in 2014. To Régnier, leopard has provided a medium for dialogue between African fashion, European haute couture, and streetwear.

“Leopard [has a] sexual or at least eroti[c] connotation, because it was linked to Africa,” Régnier says. “If a woman was wearing leopard, it means that she has a savage or wild sexuality. It became one of the most used prints in haute couture, and from haute couture it became democratized to streetwear, and it went back to the African continent free of its initial symbolism.”

Photo: Keystone/Getty Images

In the United States, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 banned the importation and sale of leopard skin, which meant that leopard print took over. Despite the law, poaching is still rampant for the purpose of selling leopard skin and parts. Leopards are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List as “threatened,” and according to Saffoe, poaching rates are similar to those of tigers.

“We’re going to kill species off if we keep that up,” Saffoe says. “Cats are in a lot of trouble with the amount that they’re being poached.”

By the 1970s in the United States, leopard print had developed associations with the tacky and the tawdry. So it was no surprise that the pattern found many fans in the nascent punk movement. Iggy Pop performed shirtless in leather pants and an unzipped leopard-print jacket. Sid Vicious occasionally wore a leopard-print vest. But it was Poison Ivy from the Cramps who perfected the marriage of leopard print and punk. She matched leopard-print onesies with vinyl go-go boots, shiny red lipstick, and a teased red bouffant, resulting in a sort of nightmare Peggy Bundy effect a decade before Married… with Children hit the airwaves.

Speaking of Peggy Bundy, one trope Weldon kept noticing in her research is that of “the bad mother” who wears leopard.

Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios

“The obvious one is Anne Bancroft in The Graduate,” she says. “Then there’s Ann-Margret in Tommy; the mother who’s played by Rosalind Russell in Oh Dad, Poor Dad; Katherine Helmond in Brazil, where she’s wearing that Schiaparelli-esque cheetah shoe on her head. Peg Bundy. You see over and over, this mother who’s bad because she’s either indulging or repressing sexual power.”

In 1991, leopard was again elevated by Azzedine Alaïa, whose fall/winter collection that year featured supermodels including Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Nadège du Bospertus in head-to-toe leopard print — corsets, coats, bodysuits, dresses, stiletto boots, berets. The collection was maximalist and crazy, but sexy and sophisticated.

The ’90s marched on. Kurt Cobain famously paired a faux leopard jacket with a ratty T-shirt, a hunting cap, and white bug-eye sunglasses. Scary Spice incorporated leopard print into her costumes. Enid Coleslaw wore a leopard-print mini skirt to visit a sex shop in Ghost World.

“People have such strong, strong reactions to it,” Weldon says. “They love it or hate it. Most of the people that I’ve had tell me they hate it, they’ll say something about the kind of woman they think wears it. There’s an association with women who behave badly, usually sexually.”

During the Obama years, Michelle Obama occasionally wore the print — on cardigans, on a sheath dress. She made leopard print approachable; something your friend’s cool mom would wear. Sure, there was a nod to Jacqueline Kennedy, and perhaps to Eartha Kitt, but also to the J.Crew of Jenna Lyons, of which the first lady was famously a fan.

“I don’t know if you ever wear leopard,” Régnier says, and I tell her I do. “It’s a print that you wear because you want to project some sort of image to the world. I think we see fashion [as] consumption, but it’s a way to choose second skin. We didn’t choose the skin we are born in, but we can choose the skin we are showing.”