Noir Leather is a Detroit-area leather and fetish gear shop that has been a regional cultural icon since September 1981. Owned and operated from the start by Keith Howarth, it began as a wholesale leather business and grew into a storefront on 3rd Street in Royal Oak, Michigan, opening 17 December 1983. For Midwestern kink and goth communities, Noir has long been more than a retail counter: it is a design workshop, event sponsor, and nightlife brand that kept S&M-inspired leather visible in a city better known for cars and Motown than for dungeon couture.
From Wholesale Punk Leather to Multi-Store Peak
Howarth’s shop advertised aggressively and stayed deep in the local fetish and goth scenes. In the mid-1990s the brand expanded to four outlets: Noir Leather, Vintage Noir, Faith Couture, and Noir Windsor in Canada. The wholesale division hired young punk-rock creatives who designed and built S&M- and punk-inspired leather goods—collars, wristbands, boot straps, belts—plus a gothic jewelry line of necklaces, cross earrings, rosaries, and bracelets. Those products shipped to punk shops across North America, Asia, and Europe. In the same era Howarth staged live fashion shows at Detroit’s State Theatre that drew crowds upward of 2,500 people—fetish runway as public spectacle.
Consolidation and Community Support
Over time the multi-store “empire” consolidated into a single brick-and-mortar boutique at the original Vintage Noir address: 124 W 4th St, Royal Oak, MI 48067. The shop runs six days a week (closed Tuesdays). Noir still sponsors local fetish events and hosts its well-known Hellbound fetish parties and erotic fashion shows—keeping a physical club-adjacent identity in an age when many leather retailers exist only as web carts.
For BDSM equipment history, Noir Leather is a case study in regional fetish infrastructure: wholesale manufacturing of collars and straps, gothic jewelry as everyday scene fashion, and party culture that turns a shop into a community hub. Detroit’s kink map still runs through that Royal Oak counter.
