Eagle-eyed readers of this column may remember last year's mention of the Oratory jacket.
Designed by Brompton, makers of those oddly shaped folding bicycles, it was developed with the commuting cyclist in mind and promised the wearer could go from "bike to boardroom to bar" without having to change clothes (though a shower might have been a good idea). I was dubious at the time, though I have since seen them for sale in an Edinburgh bike shop. So yes, they really do exist.
If you plan on buying one but aren't sure what to wear on your bottom half – which, let's face it, is the bit that does all the work when you're cycling – Levi's has launched a denim line called Commuter, designed with the cyclist in mind. The jeans are still fashionably skinny but they have a high waistband you can hang a D-lock on, reflective tape on the turn-ups and are made from denim which has undergone a trademarked processes that makes it water-resistant and dirt-repellent. It also uses something called Sanitized Brand Technology which employs an anti-microbial agent to cut down on bad smells. With no trace of irony, Levi's has also tweaked its "iconic" (it says here) trucker jacket for cyclists. That basically means they've added a pocket for an iPad.
These garments just about scrape past the 10th commandment in the Cycle Chic Manifesto, as outlined by Danish photographer and blogger Mikael Colville-Anderson: "I will refrain from wearing and owning any form of 'cycle wear'."
Colville-Anderson travels the world taking photos of fashionable cyclists in places such as Barcelona, Budapest and Rio de Janeiro and the images have been collected into book form as Cycle Chic (Thames & Hudson, £14.95). The jacket and jeans look features fairly heavily but there are more outlandish fashion choices, such as the woman in evening dress being given a backie down a street by a man in a tuxedo. There's also a woman in Rio cycling along a city street in shorts, flip-flops and bikini top, bag over her handle-bars and a surfboard under one arm.
The Brazilian conforms to the second commandment – "to contribute visually to a more aesthetically pleasing urban landscape" – though it's hard to see how she meets the criteria for commandment number seven: "I will endeavour to ensure the total value of my clothes always exceeds that of my bicycle." Maybe the surfboard counts.
The headgear in Cycle Chic is equally exotic, with an abundance of flat caps, scarves, woolly hats and snoods. There's even a turban or two. The one thing nobody in the book is wearing, however, is a helmet – a safety commandment which isn't included in Colville-Anderson's manifesto. Perhaps the motorists of Denmark, Spain and Brazil are more courteous than their British counterparts – but somehow I doubt it. n
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