At last, specialist cycle clothing that does not make me look like I am wearing fancy dressBoris Johnson has made me a jacket. Or possibly it was Ken Livingstone. Whichever it was, they also made me some trousers, and one of those half-zipped semi-cardigan whatsits – I have yet to actually try those. Truly, if you want to understand the politics, in several senses, of what to wear on a
bicycle these days, there are few better starting points than the Bspoke clothing range.The Bspoke range, supported and to some extent pushed into existence by Transport for London, is
designed to look like normal clothing while behaving like specialist cycle clothing. That's not a need you might normally expect to concern a branch of the government, but it is a real need.Cycling is not kind to normal clothes. Chains and saddles can do very bad things to trousers – wheels, I'm told, can do even worse things to skirts – and pedals have a way of hammering soles. Although a standard-paced pootle is not nearly as strenuous as non-cyclists might think, a hot day or a dash to an appointment can quickly fill a shirt with sweat. While you may need rain protection, you also need peripheral vision, so anything with a hood becomes an encumbrance.On the other hand, cycling clothes are not kind to normal humans. All that close fitting – even if you avoid Lycra – and all those violent high-visibility colours will make you look, at best, like a Star Trek version of a building contractor. The cuts, in many cases, only seem entirely natural when you are hunched and pumping. Pockets, where they occur at all, are in weird places and either constricted or sack-like. What's more, conspicuous cycle clothes turn you into an unambiguous, single-purposed cyclist, impossible for a passer-by or an irritated lorry driver to picture in any more sympathetic context.All that could be tolerable for sport or leisure biking somewhere quiet, but not so much on a city street, and not if you're going into ...
Try our segmented RSS Feeds
