Was leather armor ever actually real?

Movie "biker" style leather armour wasn't a thing.

Rawhide armour was pretty common. In Eurasia, rawhide lamellar, rawhide scale, rawhide helmets. Beyond the usual lamellar/scale, there were things like



Outside Eurasia,


(Respectively, crocodile hide armour from Africa, and elk hide from NW Pacific coast of America (with a wooden breastplate on top of it).)

Strictly speaking, leather armour is less common. The most common leather armour was the buff coat:


The distinction between leather and rawhide is that leather has been tanned and rawhide hasn't. Tanning weakens it, so leather armour is usually less protective than rawhide armour. Some armour used half-tanned hides - leather on the outside (allowing oil/grease to penetrate to protect it from sweat and the weather) and rawhide on the inside (for strength).

There is a nice thesis out there presenting tests of leather and rawhide:
Edward Cheshire, Non-metallic armour prior to the First World War, PhD thesis, The University of Reading, 2010: ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.529983
Cheshire's conclusion is that leather is bad, and boiled rawhide is good. Therefore, he writes, cuir bouilli = boiled rawhide. (And not boiled leather, which is much worse.)

Cheshire's analysis is wrong. Specifically, Cheshire's merit index is wrong. To repeat myself from a post on myarmoury:

Cheshire briefly discusses his merit index in Appendix H (see pg 561, in V2). His merit index is the ratio (penetration depth)/(areal density). Less penetration is obviously a Good Thing, so a low merit index is good. But he divides by areal density, which means that heavier armours with the same penetration depth have a lower (and therefore better) merit index.

Thus, he concludes that boiled rawhide is the best unfaced hide armour. However, it's clear from Fig 9:12 (pg 264, V1) that boiled rawhide is worse than plain rawhide - where he tests samples with the same density, plain rawhide performs better (the 3 left-hand yellow triangles (plain rawhide) all have an approximately density-matched blue diamond (boiled rawhide) lying above them (i.e., the boiled rawhide suffers greater penetration). There's a big cluster of boiled rawhide data with similar penetration to the plain rawhide, to the right on the graph - same penetration, but higher areal density. The same protection is achieved at the cost of greater weight.

Cheshire's merit index rates boiled rawhide as twice as good as plain rawhide (half the merit index), but Fig 9:12 contradicts this.

His merit index can be fixed: take the product (i.e., (penetration depth) times (areal density)), not the ratio. Since he gives the data in Appendix H, you can do this easily enough. Doing this, plain rawhide is about 20% better than boiled.

Which casts serious doubt on his conclusion. Cuir bouilli is more probably rawhide that's been softened in hot water and shaped.

He is correct, very early armor was made from leather or similar soft materials for people all over the world. If your talking later (like 13th century) the only leather armor that is technically armor was vambraces for archers. 

Why do people refer to the movie leather armor as " biker style ". Been riding fifty plus years and have never seen any bikers wearing that stuff. This is the most common " biker style " leather I've seen.

Because it's soft and jacket-style:



AFAICT, this stereotypical idea comes from old-school RPGs.

If we wore anything that looked like that we'd be laughed off the road.   


Has a lot to do with the Mad Max crazed biker look which is also pure Hollywood fiction.

 

not sure about rawhide.
gramppa made shoe soles from some kinda leather in layers,.
no synthetics.
these were hard as can be.
i doubt a sword could get thru these.

add a few extra layers n a spear wouldn't get thru either.

This just means it's too thin. Use thicker hide, or multiple layers. 1 layer of silk provides little protection; 30 layers is different. 0.2mm of iron provides little protection; 2mm of iron is different.

For Japanese lamellar armour, the minimum thickness for lamellae was about 3mm. These overlapped side-by-side to present 2 thicknesses on each row, and the up-down overlap often gave 4 thicknesses.

Lots of different things can be made into "effective" armour if thick enough. The problem is whether or not it gets too heavy. So the weight needed to achieve effective thickness matters. Cheshire's thesis (cited upthread) suggests that rawhide is about twice as good as leather, i.e., we might need twice the weight of leather to get the same protection. (Leather boiled in water is worse, needing perhaps twice the weight again.)

Some historical examples of multilayed rawhide armour, from Damascus, c. 1300:

A helmet:


Side view of a torso armour splint:


The whole thing:


Examples from David Nicolle, "Leather armour in the Islamic world: a classic problem", orient.spbu.ru/books/tahiyyat/index.html#89

I've had the EXACT SAME idea. You can get big rawhide dog chew-bones cheap. The really big ones roll out to almost enough to cover a full size Viking shield. Tough stuff when it dries.

While leather armor may not have been the dominant choice, it certainly existed and served its purpose in different cultures and periods.