A poor student might wear the same leather jacket for years... or you could have caught him in a lie. Both are very believable!
If someone wore the same leather jacket for years, it would show obvious signs of wear after a while. Does the jacket show signs of wear an any of these photos, I will have to look.
I’m still wearing a cheap jacket I bought 25+ years ago and have no desire to retire it yet.
As potlatch said, leather jackets can last a long time.
I own two quality leather jackets; one is a motorcycle jacket and the other is a dress jacket. Both were worn regularly for many years, the first beginning sometime between 1988 and 1989 (I was wrong in my last post; I think I got the motorcycle jacket in 1988 rather than early 1989) and the second beginning in 2004. I still have both jackets and both are in good condition, though living in the South I don't have reason to wear them as much as I did when I was in the North and needed heavy jackets with warm linings during winter months.
Close inspection would show signs of wear between 1989 and 2012, but I don't think a photo of me taken in 1989, 2004, and 2012 would show much difference unless it was a close-up photo.
However, it's not just leather jackets.
Leather is designed to last much better than most clothing. Granted, I do take care of my personal property better than a lot of people, but one of my suits was purchased more than two decades ago and it's one I still wear from time to time for formal occasions. It's been repaired several times in places — the suit coat lining, some reweaving of the fabric in the pants — but those are not places that would normally be seen in photographs unless I had the suit coat off and was carrying it in a way that exposed the lining, or somebody was shooting from a really strange camera angle at the pants. Because I take care of my clothes, there would be no way to notice most wear-and-tear on the suit even though it is now more than two decades old.
Photos of me appeared in a news magazine in the early 1990s wearing the same black suit that I wore at my wedding reception in the late 1990s and also wore to church a few weeks ago. I'd hate to have someone try to argue that the photos from the early 1990s were photoshopped when I know for a fact that the magazine and wedding photographer were still using film cameras, not digital, when the photos were taken. However, the original film probably no longer exists in either case.
Again, I'm not trying to defend Obama here, just saying we need better evidence to prove photoshopping. At most, this is an indicator of a need to look more closely for other problems.