Use of Leather as armor

[Dan Howard]

I really do wonder why this keeps resurfacing. The use of leather as a functional armor has been clubbed to death many times before. It just has no stopping power. It is just cheap, looks cool, is much lighter then the same thickness of metal ..... and is totaly useless in real life. And yes, Maximus did use leather armor in Gladiator

Except that we know that leather was used for armour by many cultures in many times and places and it can be fashioned to stop weapons on the battlefield. The problem is that there is very little evidence for leather armour being used by the Romans (none at all for musculata or segmentata) and that, in order to provide resistance to weapons it has to be be thicker and heavier than an equivalent item made of metal. Functional armour made of leather cannot be made to look like the sculptures.