The black leather jacket seems to be the cool gals cover up for all seasons. Be it with tassels, studs, gold hardware, silver hardware, thrown over a pretty dress to give the look some OOMPH or full on rocked out with ripped jeans and a burn out tshirt the black leather jacket takes a leaf out of Taylor Swift’s book and never goes out of style. 

Sometimes black can look a bit stark when the sun is a-shining and when it’s hotter than a Nelly music video you can be quite loathe to throw on such a sunlight attracting garment and cause internal organ melting.

This perforated white leather jacket* from the plus size brand Xandres Xline available at House of Fraser is the perfect summer alternative to your black leather jacket.  “A white leather jacket?  Surely this is the tacky jacket equivalent of the white high heels of Essex?” you may think, and I most certainly did.  In fact, when I was offered the chance to review a piece from the ever expanding and quite frankly, pretty damn good plus size rang at House of Fraser that was exactly what I thought.

I don’t know about you, but in this age of uber fashionable bloggers of all shapes and sizes, when I want to decide whether I’ll be able to carry of such and such piece of clothing (be it a body con dress, dungarees or a sombrero) I head to Google and type the item of clothing in followed by the word “blogger” or “plus size blogger” and hit search.  This usually brings me up a plethora of expertly styled outfits featuring the item in question and I can get a bit of inspiration/decide on a scale of one to ten how ridiculous I’ll look in said item.

I expected “white leather jacket, blogger” to pull up some atrocities but what I was greeted with was pleasantly surprising.  Simple and structured outfits with the jacket as the “key” piece seemed to be the norm, paired with jeans or dressed down with denim shorts for those who aren’t afraid to go bare legged with some little boots.

Sometimes plus size clothing can be guilty of purely upsizing straight sizes and now allowing for the additional curves and shape of a plus size figure.  The lightweight leather of this jacket has a bit of a stretch to it and several vertical seams and a slight peplum detailing at the back makes for a fluid and flattering fit.  There’s a concealed hook and eye fastening to the front of the jacket for a streamline look (although I prefer it unfastened as I feel a little bit like Shirley from Eastenders whenever I fasten up a jacket).

To complete the outfit I added a pair of bright blue stretch jeggings* from the New Look Inspire range that I took the scissors to for some oh so trendy they hurt knee rips, a bardot neckline black top from the New Look sale, this beautiful tassel’d powder pink bag from H&M, cut out peep toe booties from GLAMOROUS, oversized sunnies* from New Look* (because no summer outfit is complete without them) and a good old statement necklace from Primark.