Full Cow: Edge Talks Leather and Kink
Join Edge as he shares his 30+ years of experience in leather, kink, and BDSM. Each episode centers around a theme, explored through several segments. In the first, Edge shares his leather journey in relation to that theme in order to draw some larger lessons about the leather community. In the second segment, the focus is on practical knowledge and history. Then, we speak with another member of the community who shares their knowledge and experience in relation to the theme. Occasionally, there will also be bonus segments, like erotic story time or kink centered meditation. Come learn more about leather, kink, and BDSM with Edge.
Full Cow: Edge Talks Leather and Kink
Covers
Welcome to Full Cow, a podcast about leather and kink where your host, Edge (he/him), shares his 30+ years of experience in the community. This time we're talking covers!
Ask Edge! Go to https://www.speakpipe.com/LTHREDGE to leave ask a question or leave feedback. Find Edge's other content on Instagram and Twitter. Also visit his archive of educational videos, Tchick-Tchick.
Let's talk about covers that you are an adult. Welcome to Full Cow, a podcast about leather, kink and BDSM. My name is Edge, my pronouns are he, him, and I am your host, and in this episode we'll be discussing that mythical, mystical hat that sits at the center of so much imagery in the leather community, the cover called by many names, worn in many ways and with many rituals surrounding it. As always, I'll start by talking about my own cover and its story and the role it has played in my journey.
Speaker 1:We'll do a little bit of a how-to when it comes to covers, which can be really quite tricky, and then we'll finish off with an Ask Edge segment. I think it's a pretty good episode, so I hope you enjoy it and let's get started. Technically, I have had three covers in my leather journey. The very first cover I ever bought was from Mr S in San Francisco and my guess is this would have been probably 1995, certainly the late 1900s and it was unique in that it was completely made of leather, which meant it was foldable, and I thought, oh, that's fantastic, that's what I want. Fantastic, that's what I want.
Speaker 1:But what I discovered is being so foldable, it also did not hold a shape particularly well and I never ended up wearing it very much, and in fact, I can't even tell you what happened to it. My primary cover, the cover I wear all the time, all the time I purchased in 1999. And actually I had to do research on this. I went through my Tumblr, and if you're not familiar with my Tumblr, well, it's a whole other story, but it basically has every photo of me I've ever taken since the beginning of my online presence.
Speaker 1:And I scrolled back years and years and years and the first time I had pictures of me wearing a cover was in 1999. And I must have bought it at Leatherman, nyc, because I was living in New Jersey at the time. I can't tell you why I bought it. I'm pretty sure at the time I had just gotten my first leather uniform, custom made for me by David Samuel Mankeys. That's reflected in the photos where I found the cover, and I'm pretty sure I bought it because it completed the uniform. There was nothing specially significant about it. It was not marking some huge moment in my journey. It was another item of gear I was acquiring Coincidentally not to feed too much into some of the mythology surrounding covers, but coincidentally, I bought it right around at the time I started to make that transition into dominance at the turn of the millennium. I've had my cover, therefore, for 25 years, and that's one of the amazing things about covers is usually you only need one because you may gain a lot of weight.
Speaker 1:You may lose a lot of weight. Your body's shape may change radically across time, but usually your head stays about the same size. I'm very happy with my cover. If anything, I feel like it's slightly too small, but I'm very pleased with it. The original badge I had on it was given to me by a local boy and I'm trying to remember if I discussed this, probably in one of the interludes, perhaps in an episode, but I ended up really doing wrong by him. Oh yeah, it was the episode on mentorship. He was one of the ones where I just really fucked up and so eventually I changed that badge out for a pretty simple pair of pilot's wings that I purchased from Leatherworks.
Speaker 1:The third cover I never wear. I don't like it. What's ironic is that it is a Muir cap, as in I actually purchased it from Muir. We'll talk about that in the next segment. I was excited to get it. I was not happy with it the moment I got it. It is not shaped well for my head. It is not proportioned well for my head. I don't love the leather they used, and now I'm kind of stuck with it because I just feel like you can't throw away a cover. What am I going to do with it. I suppose I will donate it to some local leather auction or perhaps one day I will find the Cinderella-esque boy or sir who looks good in it and I will gift it to that person.
Speaker 1:But my cover is my Leatherman NYC cover and I don't assign too much significance to it. And in fact you know I have a lot of rituals around quite a bit of my gear but I don't necessarily have any rituals around my cover. I will say I don't like when people touch it. I'm not angry about it, but I don't like it. But you know, in general I don't like it when people touch my gear without permission. But the cover does have a certain kind of you are touching my soul, please stop touching my soul. So there's that. The other thing is that when I travel with it it sort of gets its own bag. But that has less to do with the specialness of my cover and more to do with the fragility of it. Other than that it does have a special place in the gear closet there's a special cover shelf which is actually over in the play area, not in the leather area. So it has some specialness but not the sacredness that is often assigned to covers.
Speaker 1:And I'm okay with that. I place my sacredness in other places and you're welcome to place your sacredness in your cover or elsewhere. I wear it. You know, it sort of depends on the whole ensemble, right? I feel like it goes best with leather uniforms, certainly given its military background, and it's also highly temperature dependent Covers are hot Covers are sweaty.
Speaker 1:I live in Florida. I will not be wearing and I'm recording this in late June. Happy Pride everyone. It's actually June 29th Pride in many places around the country. June 29th pride in many places around the country.
Speaker 1:I will not be wearing my cover again, probably until November, because leather doesn't breathe. There's actually a plastic pocket on the inside of the cover to sort of make it even more sweaty and it just I melt, I melt, I melt in my cover all the time. There are times where I will wear it because it has a special power to it and it can transmit power to a man who's come over to serve me, for example. Otherwise, it is an occasional piece. For me. It's important.
Speaker 1:It is important because it is the only cover I have, despite the first one I bought, despite the third one I bought, which I do not like. It is my cover and it has a specialness. I treat it with a specialness but not a sacredness, and that's an interesting line to consider that it is special to me but not sacred. I don't even know how I can unpack that here in this moment, except to say that I feel it's irreplaceable. That's part of the specialness, but I don't feel it has a power in itself, and that's the sacredness that's missing power in itself, and that's the sacredness that's missing. In any case, it's not a particularly long story, is it? But that is the story of my cover, which has walked my journey with me for 25 years, has been well not around the world with me, but certainly has been to many other countries with me, countries with me.
Speaker 1:It is the cover which many men have seen me in many men have knelt before me in and very few men have touched. We're going to talk a lot more about covers in the next segment and hopefully those will give you some help and guidelines should you be looking for a cover of your own, and once you find it, I think you will find that it's yours for life. You don't need more than one. You're welcome to have more than one. I know people who have many different covers, but there is something about it that is that uniqueness, that specialness, that when you find the cover for you, it's yours for life. We should probably start by talking about what the hell I mean when I am talking about a cover. It is known by many names. Most people will know it as a Muir cap, Some people will call it a master's cap or a biker cap, but it is technically a cover.
Speaker 1:It comes from a military context. It is a military style hat. And one thing I was really surprised most people don't know which. Now you know if you've listened to the first segment it is not Muir cap A Muir cap. It is not a Muir cap. Muir is a manufacturer and so there's brand dilution. It's like calling any tissue paper a Kleenex or any bandage a Band-Aid. If you call it a Muir cap, you're you may not actually have a Muir cap. They are located in Canada. You can purchase a Muir cap from Muir. They are made to order. So have a little bit of patience. And that's an important thing to know, because I did a video on Twitter once and people were like shocked to realize that they'd been calling it this thing without realizing there was a name. Actually it was. Someone had asked where's a good place to get a Muir cap and I said, well, you could get it from Muir. And that's when people were like what? Yes, you can get it from Muir, but its origin comes from the military.
Speaker 1:And that's not at all surprising if we think about the history of our community, that we began as a leather community from the disaffected World War II veterans who returned from the horrors of World War II and purchased motorcycles and rode around the country, so they would have been familiar with covers, and that intersection of military culture and biker culture created the leather cover that we know today. Now there's been a great deal of mythology that has grown around the cover. One of them is this notion of a covering ceremony, and I'm using little air quotes around that covering ceremony where someone is recognized as an accomplished master and presented with his cover by the community. I never witnessed, I never heard of this until I was, oh goodness, maybe 20 years into my leather journey and I did a little bit of research, and I'm not alone in that. There's a notion it is presented as somehow old guard. It is not. It is not. The old guard did not have covering ceremonies, nor do we have a repository of ritualistic knowledge from the old guard. So covering ceremonies are probably a fairly new invention and that's fantastic, right. We are a living community and we are a community that is a bit like a tribe, and so we want to invent rituals. We want to invent meaning-making activities that reflect who we are and reflect our values. So there's nothing wrong with covering ceremonies.
Speaker 1:However, they are not old guard. They are probably historically new and it doesn't mean that you can't get a cover unless you're presented with it. It's also not true that only dominant peoples are allowed to wear covers. A submissive person in my service wearing a cover I don't think it immediately or exclusively signals dominance. That is a sort of. It is a correlative, not causative, right. So there, a lot of dominant people wear covers, but just because you're wearing a cover does not mean you're Don in person. There is a correlation but there is not causation. So I invite you to wear a cover. I invite you to wear as many different covers as you want.
Speaker 1:The thing that's special about covers and recognize they are clearly capacious for holding meaning, because all kinds of things get mapped onto the cover, including this community notion through a covering ceremony, including concepts of dominance, including our outsized mythology of the old guard itself. Lots of stuff can get stuck into a cover. They have a lot of room. They have a lot of capacity to hold meaning. A lot of that has not been part of my particular leather journey, but what I will say.
Speaker 1:What I find special about covers is that they tend to be as unique as a fingerprint, and that is certainly. I've seen photos where I've known who it was. Maybe their face was obscured. I knew who was in the photo because of the cover. Think about the combination of factors that go into a cover. So first there is the cover itself, which will have a distinct shape in terms of the height of its peak, the pointiness of its peak, the size of the band around, the size of the brim, whether or not the brim has a little mylar strip on the end, what the badge is. If there's a badge, the strap that goes over the top, the strap that goes in front, is it a chain? Is it leather? Is it patent leather? Is it an expansion strap? That combination creates almost infinite possibilities, and so a person's cover has a very singular combination of factors that makes it.
Speaker 2:I want to argue uniquely theirs.
Speaker 1:You can certainly find two people who have the exact same cover because they bought it from the same place and didn't do anything to it, but I think most people who purchase a cover make decisions around it. The first decision is the cover itself. I will say I strongly recommend against buying a cover online.
Speaker 1:I will say that that is contraindicated, and that's because whether or not a cover looks good on you is so dependent on not just the size but the proportion of the peak and the brim and the shaping of the cover. The proportion of that, to your head, there's no way to predict that from online. I strongly recommend that if you're shopping for a cover, you buy one in person, because you have to try it on, not just for sizing but to make sure it looks good on you. Once you've purchased it, you have a lot of decisions to make. Most covers will come with a sort of generic plasticky, patent, leathery kind of strap across the top and across the brim, shall we say. These are removable. Now, if you go inside the cap and you peel back the kind of leather band that's on the inside, you will see this little sort of wire, these two little wire prongs, which you can bend, and then you remove the little button on the sides and all the straps come off. Let me warn you now, these little button wire things are so delicate. I mean, if you bend them more than two times, they're going to break, and so you really need to maybe first of all get extras, if you can like Muir sells extras for good reason, or you really need to know exactly what you want to do, because you're really only going to be able to change it probably once. They're the most delicate pieces of wire I have ever encountered and I have had so many break when I've just sort of been bending them two or three times. However, sound right. So you fold back that inner leather liner. You find these wire prongs, you unbend them, you take the little button things out. The straps come off. Then you have a lot of decisions to make. You can get leather straps. You can keep the original patent leathery looking straps. Some people like chain. There's an expansion strap which is metal and looks like I don't know the best way to describe it is a bunch of rectangles. You need to make decisions Now. Some people like a chain in the front and a leather on top. Leather on top and expansion front. Expansion on top, leather on front. It's any combination. You want Total personal preference. There is zero meaning encoded into your choice of these straps. So you get the straps, you delicately put those wire prongs back in and you've started making the cover your own. Now.
Speaker 1:Badge Eagle is very popular and traditional. Some people will do an actual police-style badge. I've seen people get a police-style badge with their bluff member number. Mine again is pilot wings. You can get a pig pin, you can get any number of pins, and then you have to make a decision. Are you going to put it right through the band? Are you going to put it up at the peak? A lot of that will have to do with the size of the peak, the shape of the peak, the size of the pin, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera of the peak, the size of the pin, etc. Etc. Etc. You really want to think carefully about this decision, because you're about to puncture a hole into your cover and it's the kind of thing where you want to get it right the first time, because redoing it is going to leave holes that could be visible. Once you've made the decision of what sort of badge or pin you want, once you've decided on the placement and once you have kind of arduously pushed it through the leather, particularly if you're doing it through the band, it takes quite a bit of effort. That's it. The cover's yours, the cover is yours.
Speaker 1:I will say I have never done. I'm checking, I'm thinking in my head. I don't think I've ever done any care of my cover. I've never polished the brim. I don't think I've ever conditioned it. I just wear it a lot and handle it a lot. So it's picking up a lot of oils from my skin, but that's about it.
Speaker 1:Covers are pretty low maintenance and there's so many options. Now. Covers come in all kinds of colors, some with quilting, some the actual cover is quilted. I've seen some where the brim is quilted. You have a lot of options here and I would say that for some of the more nouveau options of the different colors, you might want to save that as your sort of secondary cover.
Speaker 1:I feel like much like a little black dress is universal in some fashion areas. I feel like every leather person needs a black leather cover. That's theirs, that's uniquely theirs, that's special, that is their fingerprint, with their combination of bands and badges and all that. So I'd recommend you start with the sort of standard cover before going out there, shall we say, the other thing to keep in mind is how to wear a cover. Okay, now, if you're into protocol, you're going to love covers because they come from the military and there's a gazillion, gazillion military protocols around covers about how many fingers you should be able to fit under the brim. And how many fingers? From the ear to the top of the cover? All that right, there's all that. The ear to the top of the cover? All that right, there's all that. But I will say, to wear it properly, I pick it up right Between your two hands, put your hands on the side of the cover and then place it down on your head.
Speaker 1:So the goal is, you want to make sure that the sides are perfectly parallel to the ground. The side should be straight and I've seen a lot of people. The temptation is to wear the cover tilted a little bit back so that the brim doesn't cover quite as much of your eyes. However, the power of the cover, the power of the cover, is the way it shades your eyes. For me, this is what makes a cover partially, uniquely, dominant and super powerful. If you think back to cruising, cruising always started with eye contact. Eye contact was permission to approach, and what the cover does is it allows you to control who has eye contact with you when I'm wearing my cover. If I dip my chin just a centimeter, then I will block eye contact from anyone, and if I raise my chin just a little bit, I'll make eye contact, and so part of the reason we want the cover to be perfectly parallel on the sides, perfectly straight on the sides, is so that the brim is partially covering our vision so that with just the slightest movements we can control who gets to make eye contact with us. That's the magic. That's why covers are so powerful, because you get to control who looks into your eyes, and that means you get to control whether or not people are seen. Oh goodness, because everyone wants to be seen, everyone wants to be recognized, and we do that broadly like, hey, I recognize you as a member of the community. But particularly if you are a dominant person, your ability to see a boy, slave, pup, object, to recognize them, to make eye contact, is super, super powerful and initiates the encounter. That can lead to a night of passion perhaps. So it's important to wear the cover correctly so that you can have that control of eye contact. Now, obviously it's important in military reasons too.
Speaker 1:If we go back to protocol and regulations, be aware of the fit of your cover. There shouldn't be any big gaps around the side, and this requires a little bit of patience, because covers are round, heads are oval, so you're always going to be at first. In particular, you're going to be squishing, squishing the cover into shape as you gently lower it like a crown. I will say gently lower it like a crown onto your head, but there shouldn't be any big gaps on the side. That would indicate that the cover might be a little too big.
Speaker 1:If your cover is slightly big and granted, you know hat sizes how do you measure your hat size? You put a tape measure around your head and whatever you get, that's your hat size. But they're done in like quarter inch increments, right, and your head may fall slightly between sizes. My cover is a little small for me, but I know that if I go up a size it's going to be a little big for me and I would much rather it be a little small.
Speaker 1:If your cover is a little big, you can put some moleskin or a folded up piece of cardboard inside the leather liner that runs around the inside to kind of create a little smaller size. And you want to be strategic about where that put that, because it doesn't show hugely but it is slightly noticeable. So doing it maybe at the back would close up any gaps on the sides. Just something to keep in mind Storing covers. I store mine brimmed down, because the peak of a cover is a little mushy, it is a little bit more delicate than the brim, so I simply put the cover down, and so it looks as though we're on my head, right, I don't put it upside down so that I'm trying to think of the terminology. You should not be able to see the inside of the cover when you're storing it Does that help?
Speaker 1:I hope so, and that's you know. I don't know if that's like super important. I think that's just what I absorbed from the community where I was growing up. That that's how you store a cover brim down, not brim up and you don't put it on the peak, and it makes sense. The peak is, I'm pretty sure, just shaped with cardboard. It's not the most rigorous, resilient manufacturing process and therefore it's a little more likely to lose its shape if you're storing it upside down. So that's just something to keep in mind if you're storing it upside down. So that's just something to keep in mind.
Speaker 1:Some people do like to polish the brim and you can do that just sort of, I think, with Windex. Don't quote me on that, but I feel like it's essentially plastic right. So a little bit of Windex and you can wipe off fingerprints. I'm not that fussy. I'm not that fussy about most of my leather either, though you certainly can condition a cover much as you would condition any piece of leather If you just again, if you decide to remove the bands so that you can get to all of the leather, better have some extra of those little button wire things, because they are going to break. I promise you that, and my experience again has been I've never. I've never, once, maybe once I've maybe once conditioned to break. I promise you that, and my experience again has been I've never, I've never, once, maybe once. I've maybe once conditioned by covers. I don't think it requires a lot of care. You can buy them at most leather shops. If you don't have a leather shop near you, then you can try to get to a leather event. They will certainly have them as well. I will say again I recommend buying it in person, and I think that's the introduction to covers, both sort of why we call them a cover, why they're called Muir caps, who Muir is, the different ways to make it uniquely yours and how to put it on, how to wear it and the power that comes from wearing it, on how to wear it and the power that comes from wearing it.
Speaker 1:Let me end by saying this is universally true for everything in this podcast, for everything I do in social media, so I'm going to emphasize it here because I think this is an episode where it needs emphasizing. Nothing I am saying is gospel truth. Nothing I am saying reflects any sort of quote, unquote rules at all. All I am ever doing is sharing my experience, and you can take it and do with it what you want. Maybe it reinforces your own experience, maybe it is a scaffold for you to move forward in a journey, and then you do something completely different that works for you. Maybe you're doing something different, but understanding how I got to where I'm at in something gives you new perspective on the way you're doing things.
Speaker 1:All of this is to say, take everything I've said with a grain of salt. At the end of the day. This sounds a little sacrilegious, but I'm going to say it. At the end of the day, the cover is a hat, and if the hat looks good on, you wear the hat. If the hat doesn't look good on you, don't wear the hat, and that's really what it comes down to. Regardless, I hope you find a cover that works for you and fits you and looks good on your head. I hope you make it uniquely yours and I hope you discover some of the power that is capable through controlling the gaze Not the homo—I don't mean like the gays, like the homosexuals the gaze of power, okay, thanks, power, okay, thanks. Welcome to Ask Edge, the segment where I answer questions from all of you, if you would like to submit a question. You could email it to ask.
Speaker 1:At full cow dot show or even better, leave me a voicemail at speakpipecom. Slash leatheredge. Both of those links are available in the show notes this episode. We have one question from Alex.
Speaker 2:Hi Edge, I'm Alex and my pronouns are he, him. I've had some ideas on creating new types of leather gear, but I don't yet have the skills to create them myself. Would you know any resources on working with leather? Thank you very much for creating your podcast. I've greatly enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:Well, alex, that depends in part on what kind of leather you want to make. If we're talking something like harnesses, belts, suspenders, things that require punching holes and putting in rivets, then a really wonderful resource is Tandy Leather, if you happen to have a store near you. They are located in many urban centers. It is a store that sells leather and leather crafting supplies, but they also do classes on basic leather crafting. Now, if you want to do something more like clothing, like a vest or a shirt or a pair of pants, things become a little more complicated.
Speaker 1:If we're thinking about a heavier weight leather, it actually requires a sort of heavy-duty industrial sewing machine that not everyone will have access to. If, however, you're willing to work in a lighter weight leather, something like a lambskin or a goatskin, then you might be able to do that with a regular sewing machine, in which case you might check out local craft stores to see if they have any basic lessons on pattern making and sewing. I will note that last year at Claw LA which technically is called Leather Getaway, but no one calls it Leather Getaway, we just call it LA Claw or Claw LA they had a special track of classes on leather making and actually I think they made leather vests.
Speaker 1:So you may want to pay attention to their schedule. It is in Los Angeles in late November. My guess is also that TikTok probably has a ton of resources. I've kind of drawn the line at TikTok in terms of my ability to absorb, consume and produce social media, so I don't entirely know, but I do think of it as this sort of abundant resource with all sorts of short educational videos besides other kinds of dance videos. So you may also check there. And YouTube always is just a great, abundant resource for learning things. You might also check there. But if you're looking for hands on instruction, I would recommend Tandy Leather or a local hobby shop that might teach sewing or definitely LA Claw, because I know they were doing classes. Hopefully they will repeat those.
Speaker 1:The other thing is and this probably isn't possible, but I can tell you, almost every leather store I know of is in desperate need of leather craftspeople and would be probably more than willing to take on apprentices who are willing to learn the craft in exchange for producing leather for the store. So that might also be a resource, although of course it assumes you're located in a place where there is a leather store and that that leather store does production and that that production team could use some help. I hope those offer you some avenues for exploration. I can say more broadly that as a community, we are desperate for leather makers. There are only a handful of stores left in the country and of those, an even tinier fraction produces anything like custom leather. So I really want to encourage you to find the resources you need to produce the kind of leather you need to produce, so that maybe someday I can buy some of it. I'm always looking for more gear.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for the question and I would like to encourage everyone to think about submitting a question. You know I get a lot of anecdotal notes and messages and DMs about the podcast and how much people enjoy it, but it is such a simple way to support me in this podcast by submitting a question, and it doesn't have to be a profound question like hey Edge, what's the future of leather? This is also an opportunity to get to know me better, to get to know me as a person better and not just as a figure in the leather community. So please consider submitting a question. It only takes a few seconds and it can be utterly weirdly random. So that's all we have for this episode. I'm so grateful for all of you and, as always, I hope your leather journey is utterly and profoundly blessed. And that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for joining me. Please consider subscribing, or you can send feedback to edge at fullcowshow. As always, may your leather journey be blessed.