You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Global warming seems to be a (very) controversial topic lately, but I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: summers are getting warmer and sporting events are getting tougher and tougher on all athletes. We are seeing it in tennis. We saw it during the World Cup, with those (very dumb) cooling breaks, and we are now seeing it in cycling. It seems to be the main topic of conversation for the sport right now. Especially in Grand Tours.

On stage one of the Tour de France this year, it was over 30 degrees. Now, we’re not sure if you’ve ever attempted to do an all out effort during a heatwave, but that sh*t can kill you. During that stage, UCI officials were pulling riders aside one at a time behind the start ramp and making them take the ice out of their jerseys.

What they were removing were ice socks, which is basically a pair of tights cut down, stuffed with ice cubes, tied off at both ends and shoved down the back of the collar so the melting water cools the blood running close to the skin. Most of the peloton uses them. It’s very prominent in the (professional) cyclosphere.

The rule the cyclists were “breaking” is Article 1.3.032, which basically says clothing cannot modify the rider’s morphology. It’s an anti-cheating rule. Nobody was arguing the ice was dangerous or unfair on health grounds. The concern was that a sock of ice fills in the gap behind a rider’s neck, and that’s a free watt or two (minimal gains!).

The commissaire’s explanation was that you have to draw the line somewhere. But do you?

It stuck for the first stage and quietly evaporated after that. Riders were using them again on stage 2 and nobody said a thing. Who’s going to say something when it’s 35C+?

I kept watching and it was the same story over and over again for three weeks. 36 degrees on stage three with wildfires 70km from the finish. Forecasts were touching 40 for the Carcassonne start. Pogacar called the whole cooling operation a logistical nightmare and said core temperatures were getting dangerous. Riders were dunking their forearms in tubs of iced water, eating frozen carbohydrate gels on the start line, spraying themselves with alcohol (not the drinking kind), squeezing bidons over their heads, warming down in ice vests. Tom Pidcock spent $995 on cooling mitts. Netcompany-Ineos had riders resting their forearms in water just above freezing temperature, which cooled the blood without cooling the leg muscles they’d just spent twenty minutes warming up.

The UCI had to adapt, so they relaxed the feed zone rules so teams could get bottles and ice out to riders more freely, and the race put another motorbike on the road purely to distribute ice and cold water bottles.

This is where it all gets interesting to me. The response to extreme temperatures was simply better hydration and ice distribution. Did anyone look at the clothing? The fabric? I don’t think so. I know that’s kinda hard to change in the moment, obviously, but it did have me thinking.

So we did some research and as it turns out, it isn’t that cycling stopped developing fabric. It develops plenty, actually. It’s just that all of it points one way.

WHAT THE INDUSTRY ACTUALLY CHASES

Cycling fabric R&D is pointed at watts. Almost all of it. Watts sell, so watts get funded.

Heat got marketed under comfort for decades. It was the kind of thing a mesh back panel would take care of, or making a zipper less jersey so thin it looks like a base layer and charging you $300 for it (looking at you, PNS). That all seemed to work until this summer, when heat turned into a race-deciding variable.

Running figured this out a little faster. Maybe that’s capitalism, or consumerism, if you want to call it that. They need to innovate in order to sell. It makes sense when you think about it. A runner has no bike to hide behind and no wheels to upgrade, so the shirt and the shorts, the fabric, is the only real variable there is. It’s the only thing they can buy and swap out.

Some of that is also due to simple physics though. Your cycling kit has to solve four problems at the same time. Shed heat, cut drag, kill friction, and hold its shape and position across loooong hours on the saddle.

And those four fight each other. Aero fabric is tightly woven, and tight weave means less air moving through it. Cooling fabric is open, and open is slower. Compression restricts breathability. Durability adds weight. There isn't a single fabric that wins in all four categories, so every garment ever made is a trade-off, and cycling has always settled that trade-off in favour of speed.

WHY IT WENT THIS WAY

Cyclists used to race in wool (imagine the chafing!). It absorbed everything, weighed a tonne wet, and was aerodynamically catastrophic. The chamois was real leather, rubbed with emollient (yuk) before every ride and dried carefully after.

Then in 1976, an engineer named Toni Maier brought a bike frame he designed into a wind tunnel in Zurich to get some real data, working with engineers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The frame was very radical for its time. It had teardrop tubes and it was made out of carbon fibre, which was a material so new and tightly controlled that Maier had to sign a letter with the manufacturer promising not to sell any of it to Russia (this was during the Cold War, after all). What the wind tunnel actually revealed was surprising to him. The biggest factor in aero performance wasn’t even the frame, it was the rider position, which led him to fit the world’s first cow-horn aero bars. But there was still a massive drag problem left to solve. The clothes. Those baggy wool clothes everyone raced in.

They tried a naked rider first, just to see what the body alone did in the tunnel. But that didn’t give them an answer, so it got them thinking about fabric. Maier’s wife, Eliane, was a trained textile technician, and she teamed up with a downhill ski clothing manufacturer to solve the same issue. Late in ‘76, the first ASSOS (of Switzerland) Lycra shorts came into existence.

The British-Dutch team Ti-Raleigh raced in them first, and by the end of the decade the whole peloton had switched to Lycra. Fignon won the 1984 Tour wearing ASSOS.

Fignon in 84, wearing Assos.

WHAT YOUR KIT IS (MOSTLY) MADE OF

Lycra, elastane and spandex are three names for the same fibre. They are not three different things. Lycra is DuPont’s brand name for it. Spandex is what Americans call it generically. Elastane is what shows up on a European tag. Chemically it's all the same polyurethane-based fibre, invented by a DuPont chemist named Joseph Shivers and hitting the shelves in 1958. It stretches five or six times its own length and snaps back, and it has to be at least 85 percent polyurethane to legally be called elastane. Decent bibs run 15 to 20 % of it, and the other 80 is basically a two-horse race between polyester and polyamide.

Polyester barely absorbs water. It absorbs about 1 percent of its own weight. Sweat never really gets inside the thread, it gets pulled along the channels between fibres by capillary action and dragged to the outside to evaporate. Polyester microfibre moves water 35mm in 60 seconds in lab testing. Which means it dries fast, costs less, and lasts a long time. The main downside is it runs warm on long efforts, and because the sweat sits on the surface, so does the bacteria. That is why your “cheap” jersey usually smells worse than your good (read: more expensive) one.

Polyamide is just nylon, with a nicer name. It absorbs water a little more at the fibre level but moves it off your skin faster. It’s softer, stretches better and has much higher abrasion resistance, which is why the seat panel on a great bib is almost always polyamide-heavy. It dries a tad bit slower and it costs more.

Good bibs sit at 80 to 85 percent polyamide. Cheap bibs flip that toward polyester to save money. You probably wouldn’t notice the difference in a ride or two, but you probably will after a dozen of them.

Then there’s knitted versus woven, which nobody bothers to explain and which might matter more than the fibre itself. Knit fabric is built from interlocking loops, which is why it stretches, that’s the whole mechanism behind every bib short and jersey fitting close to the body. Woven fabric is threads crossed over each other at right angles, tight and stable. It has almost no give unless you weave elastane straight into it. Almost all cycling fabric is knitted, for the obvious reason.

Luigi Bergamo, who founded Q36.5 (great brand, btw), went the other way and pushed woven into the sport. The point of it connects straight back to the heat problem. A membrane is what usually gets you wind protection on a knit fabric, and a membrane is also a near-solid barrier that kills breathability. Woven fabric blocks wind through the tightness of the weave itself, no membrane required, so you get the wind protection without paying for it in trapped heat.

The catch is that your average fabric mill isn’t set up to produce woven fabric for cycling, so the brands doing it are developing these fabrics at their own expense and passing that cost back to you. In simpler terms, it’s really expensive.

THE NUMBER NOBODY PRINTS

GSM. Grams per square metre. Cut a square metre, weigh it, and that’s the golden number. It’s measured under a standard called ISO 3801 so it compares across brands.

Summer jerseys sit at 120 to 160 GSM. Most team kits land at 140 to 160 GSM. Warm weather base layers go to 100. Thermal and winter jump to 200 to 280 and up. Bibs usually run heavier than jerseys because they need opacity and compression that a jersey simply doesn’t need. For reference, a standard year-round men’s wool suit runs around 280 to 300 GSM, so a decent chunk of your winter kit is built out of a fabric heavier than the suit hanging in your closet.

Neither end is better than the other, they just do different jobs. A 130 GSM jersey in November is a mistake. A 240 GSM in July and you’re dying (unless you’re heat training, and even then, you’re dying).

If the GSM is missing, hold the fabric up to a light. A proper summer jersey has an open knit and you should see through it. If you cannot, you will overheat. And be suspicious of any brand leading with fabric weight as their whole marketing pitch, GSM only tells you how heavy something is, not whether it's good quality. A cheap polyester knit and a premium polyamide weave can be the same GSM and perform nothing alike. If a brand won't tell you what the fabric actually is, or how it's woven, that's usually because the number is doing the work that the fabric can't.

HEAT

Your body is a bad engine. Something like 20 to 25 percent of the energy you put through the pedals actually turns into movement. The rest comes out as heat.

And that costs you real power, not just comfort. Studies have measured lactate threshold dropping around 6.5 percent when air temperature goes from 23 degrees to 32C. A simulation of a Tour mountain time trial up Alpe d’Huez, which is an insane way to test something if you ask us, put brain temperature at 39 degrees and leg muscle at 39.7.

The body’s mechanism for dealing with this is sweating, but the sweat itself doesn’t really do anything. It’s the evaporation that matters. Water turning to vapour pulls a serious amount of energy off your skin on the way out. Sweat that just sits there is dead weight, it makes you heavier and then makes you cold later when you stop.

So the entire job of a summer jersey comes down to getting sweat off your skin, spreading it out wide, and getting it to evaporate before it pools anywhere.

ABOUT THE BLACK JERSEY

Visma-Lease a Bike put two Gaudi-inspired jerseys to a fan vote before the Barcelona start. There were over 100,000 votes in three days, the black version won with 52 percent. Then the heatwave hit Spain and France and cycling's online community had some questions. Were they gonna overheat in it?

Mathieu Heijboer, head of performance at Visma, said the team wasn’t worried. They ran prototype Nimbl kits through climate chambers with simulated solar radiation and tested on thermal mannequins that sweat, tracking how fast temperature climbed under the fabric. His conclusion: colour made an insignificant difference to body temperature. Fabric structure, moisture release and fibre treatment mattered far more than whether the jersey was black or white.

That does line up with how fabric science actually works now. Darker colours do absorb more radiation, that part of physics hasn’t changed. What has changed is that modern fabric treatment, UV-resistant coatings that bounce radiation off the rider, structures that pull sweat away fast, has gotten good enough to outweigh the colour difference in a lot of cases.

Here’s the part that’s somewhat shaky. Cyclingnews pointed out that Heijboer never gave the one comparison that would have proven it for Visma’s own kit specifically, the exact same Nimbl fabric in a light version against a dark one. Without that test, you can’t say for certain this black jersey performs identically to the white one.

The riders weren’t fully convinced either. In the days leading to the Tour, they were training in the light jersey, which the team had already built as an official second kit, the Rest Day Jersey.

So take it for what it is. The broader claim, that fabric now matters more than colour, is real and backed by the industry. Whether Visma actually proved that for this specific jersey is a different question, and it’s one that’s still open.

WHAT RUNNING IS DOING ABOUT IT

Satisfy is a running brand going on its tenth year. They have recently released a new fabric called HeatCrush, built on a Japanese mesh, and it’s sweat-reactive, meaning it does nothing at all until you start sweating. When moisture rises through the fabric, the mesh pulls it outward, and heat goes with it. All of this is triggered by your own body rather than by any kind of ventilation.

They also did something cycling brands should be embarrassed about. They tested their fabric on a thermal mannequin, shot it with a FLIR camera, and published the numbers against a control group.

Data from Satisfy on HeatCrush fabric.

From a 33.8 degree baseline, HeatCrush dropped 8 degrees in thirty minutes, down to 25.8. Regular nylon dropped 5.3. Regular polyester dropped 3.1.

That’s the polyamide versus polyester thing from earlier, backed up with real numbers. Nylon nearly doubles polyester on cooling.

The Nike shirt is the other one, and if you’ve been online at all this summer you’ve seen it everywhere. The ACG Radical AirFlow NXT is a long-sleeve trail top that looks like it lost a fight with an industrial hole punch but the thing is, the holes are the technology. Funnel-shaped and tiered with dimpling on the inside, engineered around the Venturi effect so air speeds up as it passes through and gets pushed onto skin instead of just drifting by. Elbows and armpits are cut fully open. Recycled yarns, hydrophilic chemistry. It was all the craze.

Nike Radical Airflow shirt.

Caleb Olson wore it to within two minutes of the Western States course record on a hot day, in a race with temperatures over 35°C in the canyons. He described it as feeling "like stepping into a fridge," and said once it got wet, that cooling feeling just kept extending.

What's kinda funny is the timeline on all of this. Back in January 2025 Nike put out a hole-punched running shirt that looked a great deal like Satisfy's MothTech. Satisfy called them out real quick, they called it lazy, and pointed out that copying them was really just Nike admitting they'd shifted the conversation. Radical AirFlow is Nike coming back a year later with something they can actually own, proof that even a brand with infinite resources needed a smaller player to shame them into doing it properly.

The Venturi effect is a different piece of fluid dynamics than the boundary-layer tripping in aero fabric, but it’s the same category of thinking, using airflow behaviour deliberately instead of just hoping a mesh panel would do the job. Cycling’s been doing that kind of engineering for fifty years. Instead of directing air toward the body to cool you down, they worked air away from the body to make you more aero.

Polygiene StayCool is the third one, and it’s a treatment rather than a fabric on its own. Launched at Performance Days in Munich, it bonds a thermo-reactive polymer straight into the fibre during manufacturing rather than spraying it on afterward, so it sits inert until heat and moisture trigger it, then drops fabric temperature by 2 to 3 degrees. Improves wicking at the same time. Works with cotton, synthetics and recycled textiles.

It’s been buyable for over a year and it’s in some sportswear already. It’s just not in cycling at all.

WATTS

This part will sound a little crazy to us non pro's but it's still very relevant data. At 40km/hr on flat ground, drag is roughly 90 percent of everything holding you back, and 70% to 80% of that is you, not the bike, which means you don't need a new bike. Your clothes (and your position) are doing more aerodynamic work than your frame, your wheels, and your bars put together.

Fabric creates two kinds of drag. Pressure drag is the turbulent wake behind you, where air separates off your body. Skin friction drag is just air scraping across the surface as you move. It took the brands decades to figure out that smooth isn’t always faster.

Think of a golf ball. A smooth one looks faster, right? Well, it's not. Air flows over it clean and then just peels away early, leaving a big pocket of turbulence dragging behind the ball like a parachute. Dimple that surface instead and something weird happens, the air actually sticks to the ball longer before it lets go, which shrinks that drag pocket way down. Less drag, more distance. Those textured panels on your jersey sleeve are doing the exact same trick.

smooth vs dimpled golf ball

Researchers at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, measured 8 watts saved from optimized jersey fabric alone, another 5 from the bibs, at 50km/hr. Dan Bigham, who held the Hour Record before Ganna took it off him, claims a properly fitted aero jersey saves you 5 to 15 watts over something badly fitted. Rule 28 tested their base layer under a smooth skinsuit and got 2.8 watts head-on, 7.5 at 5 degrees of yaw, at 45kph. Now obviously these kinds of watts saved don’t affect me or you day to day, but it’s still watts saved.

Deep-section wheels are worth about 5 watts. Tucking your chin is worth 10 to 15. So the guy who dropped 3 grand on some Scope Artech wheels and rolled up in an ill-fitting jersey basically has his priorities backwards.

WHERE IT ALL COLLIDES

Cycling still hasn’t cracked heat the way it’s cracked drag. Running has already shown what’s possible, sweat-reactive fabric, engineered airflow, cooling built into the weave instead of stuffed down the back of a jersey. Cycling brands need to get there too.

Because right now the cost of not solving it gets passed straight to the rider. If a fabric only fights one of the four problems well, you end up buying separate pieces to cover everything. One kit to go really fast (aero), another base layer for heat, gloves for one thing, foot warmers for another. Every extra product is another cost and a higher barrier to just getting into this sport properly. A brand that actually solves heat the way it's solved drag isn't just making a better product. It's saving you from having to buy four different products to do one job.

Part two gets into the stuff actually touching your skin. The chamois nobody thinks about until it's wrong. The brands already building smarter fabric into real kit right now. And the ones outside cycling entirely who are doing things with fabric the sport hasn't even thought to ask for yet.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Not really sure if cyclists wore sunglasses prior to the 80s to ride their bikes. Rarely do you see the old schoolers in shades going up the Alps. Even if they did, it was not for performance. But in 1984, Oakley sent Greg LeMond a pre-production sample of something called the Factory Pilot Eyeshade. That year he wore them for the Tour. In ‘86, he won the Tour wearing them and by 1987 most of the boys in the peloton had a pair. It really did not take much for performance eyewear to become a thing. If we can say that an American winning the TDF is not much.

The Eyeshade silhouette is still the reference point. Every shield sunglass made for cycling can trace its shape back to that design from 1984. A lot has changed since then. The lens coatings, the materials, the ventilation systems. But the main idea, the idea of a wide-coverage wraparound shield sitting close to the face for protection, has not really changed because they kinda got it right the first time.

I will be honest. When I started cycling I thought large glasses were ridiculous. Large glasses were always that stereotypical style move that would get made fun of. On top of that, Geraint Thomas was super dope with those white shades, so obviously since I did not know any better, I copped the Oakley Racing Jackets. But as with every sport, the more serious you get about it the more you lean into the why behind the gear. You start riding longer. You ride in heat. Your glasses fog. You get something in your eye on a descent. You start to understand why the big shield exists and then one day you are buying exactly the thing you used to make fun of.

This list is seven pairs built on that idea. Performance first. Lens quality, coverage, fit under a helmet, how they look overall. If they look good off the bike too, that is a bonus.

Oakley MUZM Eyeshade — Cool Grey / Prizm Low Light

A direct descendant of the frame LeMond wore in 1984. Same huge shield silhouette, same DNA. The only thing that really changed is the materials and the lens technology. These are engineered for overcast and low-light riding. Will you wear them often? Maybe not. Depends how you ride and where you live. Will you look good wearing them? For sure. Cool grey O Matter frame, Prizm Low Light lens, Unobtainium nosepads for grip in wet conditions. The colourway is subtle in the best of ways. The only thing overpowering on this frame is its size. It is a BIGBOI. Limited edition, so hurry up if you want a pair.

Find them here.

Oakley Mathieu Van Der Poel Signature Series Sutro Lite Sweep

Obviously these were going on the list. MVDP is beautiful. So are his shades. A lot of wins in these so they deserve to make the list if they look this good. The gold splatter frame makes them stylistically different from everything else here. The Prizm 24K lens makes them Oakleys. The Sutro Lite Sweep is a strong race silhouette. Wide coverage, low profile on the face, the sweep lens shape borrowed from the original Eyeshade. MVDP's initials etched in the lens. If you are a fan, this is a good purchase.

Find them here.

Scicon Aerostorm — Multimirror Silver

Italian brand, engineered in Italy. Tadej has been wearing Scicon his entire career. Most importantly? I have been wearing these exact frames for a while now. That's the only endorsement you need. The Aerostorm is their flagship road sunglass. The Space Toric Vision (which takes a minute or two to get used to) lens sits on the Monolith Optics Monoblock frame, which in English means the frame and lens are one integrated piece rather than two parts assembled together. I rode 2000+ km in these, they don't fog. 32 grams and some solid color choices.

Find them here.

MAAP Halo Sunglasses — Galaxy

MAAP making sunglasses was a natural progression of things. They definitely didn't disappoint with these. Frameless shield built for the road. High-contrast silver mirror lens with a purple base, hydrophobic and anti-fog treatments, interchangeable lens included in the box. 21.8 grams and a wraparound fit with interchangeable nose bridges for dialling the fit properly. MAAP rarely misses.

Find them here.

Alba Optics Delta BLU GLS

Another Italian brand, handmade in Italy. The Delta shape takes inspo from 80s and 90s cycling eyewear and you can feel that immediately. The crystal blue TR90 frame pops and adds a good bit of colour to any fit. They weigh 26 grams, but the VZUM lens is the detail worth knowing. Alba Optics' own ventilated lens system, designed specifically to prevent fogging on long efforts in any type of conditions. There are six lens options and all of them are interchangeable but in my opinion, the BLU GLS is the one to get. Alba Optics isn't the most talked about brand in cycling but that's what makes them cool. IYKYK type deal.

Find them here.

100% Hypercraft SQ — Matte Black Smoke

These might just be the most affordable pair on this list. These might also be the ones that protect your eyes from the sun the most. The smoke lens lets in 15% of light. There are air vents at the top and bottom. Minimal and clean. Nothing extra. UltraCarbon frame and rimless construction. These go very well with the all black bike trend that's hitting the peloton right now.

Find them here.

District Vision Kohei Aero Blade Ti — Oxblood / D+ Blue Mirror

You might have to remortgage the house for these but they are definitely a vibe. Made in Japan. District Vision is technically a running brand (they are) out of New York and Tokyo. We are including these because the lens shape is drawn directly from 1980s speed cycling heritage and the construction is unlike anything else on this list. We are also including these because we highly doubt anyone will be wearing these on the bike. Real niche things. Aerospace grade titanium frame throughout, custom anodized titanium hardware, six base rimless blade silhouette. D+ Blue Mirror lens at 10.63% light transmission with anti-reflective and oleophobic coating on the interior. It repels oils. 28 grams. The Oxblood colourway is a deep reddish brown anodized titanium that is unlike anything else in this category. If the budget is there, cop these and wear them on the bike, while running, for coffee.

Find them here.

If these shades don't do it for you, feel free to hit me up via email or DM and I'll be more than happy to help you find something more specific.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Subscribe now

We will keep this nice and short so you can get to listening. We think the greatest of French races deserves to be paired with some of the greatest house tracks out of Paris. Some high quality French Touch. You know, the same way you would pair a Bordeaux with some Roquefort. They go hand in hand.

For those not in the know, French Touch was a style of music that emerged out of mid-nineties Paris. A group of producers took seventies funk records, ran them through some filters, and built something truly special. Daft Punk. Cassius. Bob Sinclar. It was a golden age.

Enjoy the deep dive into that sound. Pump it up when the riders are hurting up Alpe d’Huez. Pump it up when you’re chilling. Pump it up when you’re riding. Allez!

Here is the setlist.

This is VOL. 004 of THE DROP.

Listen/Download Here

SETLIST

Demon - Don’t make me cry

Demon - You are my High (Bootleg Version)

Modjo - Lady - Hear me tonight

Stardust - Music sounds better with you

Shakedown - At Night (Album Mix)

Moloko, Boris Dlugosch, Michael Lange - Bring it back (Bori Musical Mix)

Spiller, Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Groovejet (if this aint love)

SoulSearcher - Cant Get Enough! (Vocal Club Mix)

The Supermen Lover, Mani Hoffman - Starlight (Radio Edit)

Junior Jack - My Feeling (Daddys PrimeTime Edit)

Daft Punk - One More Time

Daft Punk - Aerodynamic

Daft Punk - Around the World

DeusExMaschine - Only You

Pepe Bradock - Atom Funk

Silicone Soul - Right On!

Antoine Clamaran, Lulu Hughes - Release Yourself (Angel Alanis Remix)

Bob Sinclar - Champs Elysees Theme

Sebastien Leger - Seems so far

Jamiroquai - Little L (Bob Sinclair Remix)

Celeda, Danny Tenaglia - Music is the answer (Original Extended 12-inch mix)

Feder and Lyse - Goodbye (Radio Edit)

Superfunk - Bangalter

Purple Disco Machine, Cerrone, Christine and the Queens - Supernature MMXXV (Purple Disco Machine Remix)

Daft Punk - Da Funk

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Subscribe now

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

I gotta be really honest here. I really don’t like Instagram. I use it because I’m kinda forced to. You know how it is, you’re trying to get something off the ground so you need a social media presence. Make a few posts, try to get it popping (never works). But also, it’s where cycling culture lives right now and if you are not on it, you are not in the conversation (I don’t think im part of the conversation btw). So, I am on it. Scrolling more than I would like to admit.

A few days after Unbound Gravel I opened the app and my feed was wall to wall Kansas mud. Riders I follow, brands I follow, accounts I had never seen before, all of it gravel. Even the podcasters were talking about it. The algo was spitting gravel in my face like I just raced the damn thing. Way more content than the Giro got. One of the biggest races in the world, one of the most beautiful races in the world, three weeks through Italy, and Unbound had way more presence on my feed. It seems like you can’t be a cycling influencer if you didn’t do Unbound…

I do not have a problem with gravel. I want to be clear about that.

I would ride it if I could. But right now, that means putting my bike in a car and driving 45 minutes out of Montreal. The terrain around here is road terrain. Gravel riding for me is a logistical decision before it is a riding decision and most days, I dont have the time or the patience for the logistics of it all. Traffic in this city has gotten so bad that I can’t imagine waking up to put my bike on the rack and take a drive to ride some gravel (although one can make a serious case for buying a gravel bike for road riding since we’ve got potholes the size of swimming pools). That said, something interesting has been happening in Quebec over the last couple of years. Gravel events are popping up everywhere. Good ones. Gravelooza. Big Red. Events that are drawing real numbers and building real community. Road rides? Almost nothing (I do understand that logistically its easier to close gravel roads than it is to close regular roads, but still). The organized ride infrastructure in this province is being built entirely around gravel right now and road is barely in the conversation

Gravel used to feel like something. Something that was new. Not too long ago. There was an energy around it that road cycling was missing. Looser. More open. Come as you are, bring whatever bike you have, nobody is going to look sideways at your kit. Wear a bib, throw on a tee, tie a scarf around your neck. That was kinda the whole point. Ride some dirt and drink some recovery ales. It positioned itself as the antidote to everything road cycling had become and people showed up in massive numbers because they believed it.

I even almost bought a gravel bike instead of a new road one two years ago cause the vibe around gravel seemed spot on.

This year though I wanted to pay attention to gravel racing. There seemed to be a lot of hype around these races so I figured I should watch some. Traka. Badlands. Unbound. There was a circus around it. Specialized dropped the Crux 5 two days before Unbound 2026. Tarmac SL8 tube shaping, Tarmac SL8 seatpost, full aero overhaul. Their own marketing called it ‘going full Tarmac mode.’ 48 hours later that bike swept the podium. Five of the six pro podium spots across the men’s and women’s races. The timing was not accidental. Nothing about it was accidental.

But the bike launch is really only part of it. The bigger thing is who was riding it and how. Specialized Off-Road is being called a super team, and that framing is accurate. Keegan Swenson, three-time Lifetime Grand Prix champion. Sofia Gomez Villafane, also three-time Lifetime Grand Prix champion. They are married to each other. Mads Würtz Schmidt, European Gravel Champion, won Unbound outright. Matt Beers, three-time Cape Epic champion. Annika Langvad, five-time mountain bike world champion. This is not a brand sponsoring a couple of athletes. This is an operation, resourced and coordinated the way a road team operates, racing with team tactics that the sport has never seen at this level.

Right now there are maybe 15 to 20 riders making six-figure salaries in gravel. The drop beneath them is steep. Some riders finishing inside the top ten of the Life Time Grand Prix are not making a cent. The Life Time Grand Prix prize pool is 590,000 dollars in 2026, up 55 percent from last year. The series winner takes home 50,000. The opportunity is real but so is the gap.

The money is real and growing. The gravel bike market is projected to hit 5.8 billion dollars by 2028. Unbound pulled over 500,000 views on the YouTube livestream this year. The sport is not niche anymore and the brands know it. Where the money goes, the products always follow.

So now, what happens to kit design when gravel is where the money is?

Gravel kit has always been more functional than road kit. More pockets. More storage. Room for a rain jacket, a tool, nutrition for ten hours in the dirt. The aesthetic built around that utility was part of gravel’s identity. Earth tones, looser fits, the visual language of someone who is going far and needs to carry things to get there. Kit brands have been running parallel lines for a few years now, a road collection and a gravel collection, different aesthetics, different briefs. But if the money keeps moving the way it is moving, that hierarchy could flip. Gravel becomes the primary design brief. Road becomes secondary.

You can already feel it in the new summer collections from the top brands. Look at Pas Normal Studios. Their Mechanism gravel line and their road line are converging fast. Same type of fabrics, same aero logic, same very very tight silhouette. Same-ish colors. Yes, the kits are looking great, but its getting harder to tell what separates the road collection from the gravel one other than the marketing language. Why release two collections when the only things that change are the number of pockets and the colors?

The UCI just made this more interesting. From July 1 2026, internal front jersey pockets are banned in road racing. The rule was triggered by riders stuffing hydration bladders and nutrition into front pockets for aerodynamic gain, a practice that became very visible at Unbound. The UCI cited aerodynamic advantage, sporting fairness, and rider safety, the argument being those aero gains lead to higher speeds and more severe crashes. The UCI rules on clothing apply to road, track, cyclocross and mountain bike. Gravel is not on that list. Gravel riders can still run whatever pocket configuration they want. Road kit is getting more restricted at the exact moment gravel kit has the most design freedom it has ever had. A kit brand paying attention to that gap has a very interesting few seasons ahead of them.

New brands should be emerging that skip road entirely. Gravel-first from day one. It hasn’t really happened yet, not at scale, but the conditions are definitely there. The audience is built. The money is moving. The design space is wide open. And if there is one thing happening in the clothingscape right now it is that specialists are winning. The brands that do one thing obsessively are pulling ahead of the ones trying to cover everything. A gravel-only brand with a clear point of view and the right community behind it has a real opening right now. Someone is going to walk through it.

We can even see it with the bikes. Road bikes have always been the main attraction in the sport. Magazines revolve around them. The cyclosphere loses its mind over a new road bike release. But in 2026, gravel bikes are getting as aero as road bikes. The geometry just as aggressive. So why not just buy a gravel bike and run two sets of wheels? It is starting to feel like the right move.

Joe Laverick (you should give him a follow on Substack) made an observation in his post-Unbound piece that stopped me mid-read. He noted that ultra racing in 2026 looks a lot like gravel did pre-2020. Niche, growing, sponsors starting to circle. Then he caught himself and wrote: ‘Wait, isn’t that what we said about gravel.’ Someone who’s inside the sport is noticing the same cycle start again. That line has been sitting with me since.

None of this makes gravel bad. Some of what is happening is genuinely good. More prize money means more riders can make a living doing something they love. More investment means better equipment and more events and more entry points into the sport. That matters.

What I keep sitting with is something smaller than an argument and harder to shake. Gravel felt like something specific for a while. The energy was different. It wasn’t about speed. It was about freedom. And I am watching that energy change in real time, post by post, product launch by product launch, super team signing by super team signing. The feed after Unbound felt less like a community sharing something they loved and more like an industry that had found its moment.

Maybe that is just what growth looks like. Maybe every scene that finds a real audience goes through this and comes out the other side with something worth keeping. I want to believe that.

I do not know where this goes. But I am watching the design space of it all closely. If gravel keeps pulling the money and the talent and the attention, something will shift in how kit gets made and who it gets made for. It will be interesting to see who moves first.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down

BEFORE WE START

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

LEFT TURNS // 004 — WHO MADE THAT KIT

Every WorldTour and ProTeam kit supplier for 2026. Men and women. In one place.

MOODY BOARDS // 005 — GIRO D’ITALIA

No explanation. No context. Just the feeling.

BREAKAWAY // 006 — La Corsa Rosa

The Giro started in Bulgaria and ends in Rome. In between, twenty-one stages, the Blockhaus, the Dolomites, and a hundred and fifteen years of history. Our love letter to the most beautiful race in the world.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

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We do not use affiliate links. We do not get paid to feature anything. No sponsored placements, no brand arrangements, no performance fees. Just things we actually rate. For the love of the game.

THE HELMET EDIT

Most helmets these days kind of look the same. Same elongated tail. Same six vents in the same six places. Same white colourway on the brand website shot from the same angle. The aero road helmet category has been converging on a shared aesthetic for some time now. Not that it’s always a bad thing, but wind tunnels point everyone toward the same similar solutions. Cycling marketing wording leads everyone towards the same path. But there is still a difference between a helmet that was designed to pass the safety test, one that was made to “save” you some watts, and one that was designed to hold your attention and look good on your noggin’.

We are not rating safety here. Every helmet on this list meets the minimum standards required to sell in its market and most have been independently tested by Virginia Tech. We are not going to pretend we have done the crash tests. What we can tell you though is how they look, what the details are doing, and whether they are worth the money.

We have not ridden in all of these, and we are not going to pretend we did. Every helmet on this list is on here because we think they visually look great.

Now, before we get into all this, there are a few “rules” we have about colour. Here at GH, we are very much a white everything type of aesthetic. Not because of Instagram, not cause of some cycling influencer. It has just always been that way. White shoes on and off the bike, white tees, white jerseys. White. When it comes to helmets, we have also always loved white, but we do believe that playing with colour here is cooler. The move going forward might not be the white helmet but a helmet colour that matches your bike, or your team jersey, or the kit colour you wear most often. There is some leeway to break the white rule when it comes to helmets.

Also, sizing matters. As much as we love a good deal online, try to walk into a store and try them on. If you do find a deal online, ask your local store to price match. Most of them do it. A helmet should not move on your head. It should be snug. We have bought too many helmets that needed to be clinched super tight just to stay put. Do not do that.

We did not include any helmets from Specialized, Trek, Giant, and similar other bike brands. We believe that to wear a helmet from those brands, you should ride their bikes. Do not ask us why. It is just how we feel.

Here are the helmets we are loving right now, in no particular order.

MET Trenta 3K Carbon MIPS

Honestly, this is one of those products where the sponsorship scheme worked. It is the helmet Tadej Pogacar wore to win the 2024 Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia. Seeing him ride in it gives the helmet some major aura points. That’s just the truth. The Trenta sits slim on the head, lower profile than most in this category, which is the detail that makes it photograph well and look right on the bike at the same time. The Pogacar colourway, a purple fade, is one of the better colourways that MET released for this product. This is probably the better helmet if you have a slimmer face. Four total colourways to choose from. Its probably also the most ventilated helmet out of the bunch.

Honourable mention to the Portal and KXNGS collab versions for anyone who wants the same helmet in something rarely anyone else is wearing. Two of the more interesting brand collabs in cycling kit right now. These are definitely the ones to purchase if you can get your hands on them.

Find the Portal x MET collab, here.

Find the KXNGS x MET collab, here.

Find the MET Trenta, here.

KASK Utopia Y

Italian brand… so of course they added some flair. The faux leather chin strap sounds like a detail that shouldn’t matter and somehow we kind of dig it. Nobody else in the category does it. The Utopia Y sits close to the head, closer than the profile suggests it should, which makes it look considered rather than bulky. Elongated at the rear, clean at the front, “minimal” logo placement. Eleven colourways, which is more range than most helmets in this category. Printed logos rather than stickers, which doesn’t sound like much but does really make a difference.

Honourable mention to the Paul Smith collaboration. These are genuinely the better colourways. Candy stripe. Marble. Its the kind of design that makes someone ask where you got your helmet, and we all know we love getting asked those types of questions... If you are going to spend this much on a helmet, spend it on a Paul Smith one.

Find the Kask x Paul Smith collab, here.

Find the Kask Utopia Y, here.

MET Manta MIPS

The Manta has been around since 2015. Mark Cavendish debuted it. It has been redesigned twice since, and the current version is the best-looking iteration by some distance. Lower profile than most, tube-shaped at the rear, sits small on the head so it wont give you that mushroom look. Fidlock magnetic buckle on the strap, which is the best buckle in the game and the most underrated detail in cycling kit. This is the kind of helmet that looks like it costs more than it does, which at this price point is a massive compliment.

Honourable mention to the Tan Line version of this helmet. Mainly off-white, but with a subtle pattern inspired by Marés, the distinctive sandstone found on Mallorca. The pattern gives the helmet a cool freshness.

Find the MET x Tan Line Manta, here.

Find the MET Manta MIPS, here.

Abus GameChanger 2.0

Mathieu van der Poel races the original GameChanger, so the updated version definitely makes the list. His is Canyon branded though, but it’s the same helmet. Most of the peloton moved to the 2.0. Yet he didn’t. That says something about how well the original was built and how hard it is to improve on something that already works. The 2.0 is wider at the rear than its predecessor, which gives it a slightly more aggressive silhouette. The shark fin bridges across the top is the most visually distinctive detail on this helmet. It comes in 18 different colourways so you got some choice with this one.

Find the Abus GameChanger 2.0, here.

Sweet Protection Falconer Aero 2Vi MIPS

Norwegian brand. Twenty-five years making head protection for snow and paddle sports before they came to road cycling. That history really does show up in how seriously the construction is taken rather than just how it is marketed. The Falconer Aero sits low, smooth shell, subtle vent placement that doesn’t break up the profile. Seen it in person multiple times and it looks great. The aero version has magnetic vent covers which add a panel detail that is worth the extra spend. The smoke grey colourway is one of the better helmet colours available right now.

Honourable mention to the PAS Normal collaboration. The Ion Grey, which is technically more purple then grey , is the cooler colour option for this helmet (if you can match it to something). Sweet Protection is truly underrated.

Find the PNS x Sweet Protection collab, here.

Find the Sweet Protection Falconer Aero 2Vi MIPS, here.

Oakley ARO7

The ARO7 comes in two versions. The Road version has an integrated Prizm lens that attaches magnetically to the front of the helmet and stows on top when not in use. The Lite version is the same shell without the integrated lens (we prefer this one). Same no-tail profile, same BOA 360 fit system, same silhouette. The shell sits lower on the head than most aero helmets, which gives it a different look from every other helmet on this list. Immediately recognisable on the road. If the integrated lens is not your thing, the Lite version gets you the design without the optics. If it is your thing, the Road version is one of the more distinctive helmets in the category. Also, this is the best option if you want a black helmet. Oakley is kind of crap at making other colours.

Find the Oakley ARO7 Lite, here.

Find the Oakley ARO7 Road, here.

P.S. We are directing you to the brand websites to purchase the helmets but dig a little deeper on the net and deals will find their way to you. Feel free to hit us up on the DM if you have any questions.

To submit a find, a brand, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

BEFORE WE START

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

LEFT TURNS // 004 — WHO MADE THAT KIT Every WorldTour and ProTeam kit supplier for 2026. Men and women. In one place.

MOODY BOARDS // 005 — GIRO D’ITALIA No explanation. No context. Just the feeling.

BREAKAWAY // 005 — Cycling Has a Visibility Problem Ben Healy has 105,000 followers. Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. That gap is not about talent. How fashion became the entry point for every sport that cracked the culture problem — and why cycling has not run that playbook yet.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

BEFORE WE START

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

LEFT TURNS // 004 — WHO MADE THAT KIT Every WorldTour and ProTeam kit supplier for 2026. Men and women. In one place.

MOODY BOARDS // 005 — GIRO D’ITALIA No explanation. No context. Just the feeling.

BREAKAWAY // 005 — Cycling Has a Visibility Problem Ben Healy has 105,000 followers. Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. That gap is not about talent. How fashion became the entry point for every sport that cracked the culture problem — and why cycling has not run that playbook yet.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

The Giro is by far my favourite race in the calendar. Not only for what it is, but for what it means. For what it represents. My family is from Fossacesia. A small town on the Adriatic coast of Abruzzo. My wife and I got married there a few years back. Over the holidays a few years ago, my mom’s uncle told me that growing up, him and his brother used to cycle all over those roads. His brother got good enough to race. He apparently turned pro in the fifties. Apparently even did the Giro. I was never able to find anything to confirm it online, so we are just going to have to believe it. Fossacesia is in the same region as the Blockhaus, the majestic climb that defines the first week of the Giro every time the race comes through the region.

The love for this sport did not come from nowhere. It came from somewhere specific.

I grew up in Montreal. Born here. Live here. But I grew up Italian. My parents, my sister, my nonno and my nonna, we spoke Italian at home, we ate Italian, our whole culture was Italian even though we lived in a French-Canadian city. I even went to Italian school on Saturday mornings. My whole circle of friends grew up the same way. We have always identified as being Italian over Canadian.

Growing up though, soccer had every ounce of my attention. Played it every day, watched AS Roma on the weekends, still do. I idolized the Azzurri. Totti, Maldini, Nesta. The golden age of Italian soccer. Cycling came way later in my life, after wrecking my knee a few times and realizing that soccer was not worth playing anymore. Surgery can do that to you. Once I got my first road bike and some friends did the same, everything changed. The first race I ever watched was the Giro. I did not really understand the sport at that point yet (especially the tactics of it) but I fell in love with how Italy was being portrayed through the race. How they spoke about the food, the wine, the weird little stories to fill up TV time. The country that mostly shaped who I am being shown to me through a camera on the back of a motorcycle at speed. The light. The roads. The crowds on hairpins. Italy is not just the backdrop. It’s the whole point.

The Giro d’Italia was born in 1909 as a marketing scheme. That’s the honest version. La Gazzetta dello Sport was a struggling sports newspaper in Milan, printed on pink paper because pink was the cheapest stock available. Their rival, the Corriere della Sera, had used an automobile race to drive circulation and it had worked. The Tour de France had launched in 1903 for the same reason, built by a French paper called L’Auto to sell copies. Tullo Morgagni, the editor of La Gazzetta, saw what a national race could do and sent a telegram to his cycling editor in Venice. Four words in Italian. Senza indugio, necessità obbliga. Without delay, necessity obliges.

Tullo Morgagni

They had no money. The paper could barely make payroll. They announced the race anyway, across seven columns on the front page, then sent an accountant named Primo Bongrani around Italy with a hat asking for donations. Even the Corriere della Sera, their direct rival, gave them 3,000 lire. Roughly two months of a working person’s salary at the time.

On May 13, 1909, at 2:53 in the morning, 127 riders left from outside La Gazzetta’s offices in Milan and attempted stage one out of eight. The first stage was 397 kilometers to Bologna. The roads were mostly dirt. The bikes weighed as much as small children. A mass crash happened before dawn, less than two kilometers from the start. The first ever stage winner was Dario Beni and he won it in roughly fourteen hours. That is the beginning of the Giro.

Dario Beni

The Italy we know now was very different than the Italy that was around when the Giro started. As a unified nation, the country was only 48 years old. Before 1861 there was no Italy, per se. There was the Kingdom of Sardinia in the north, the Papal States in the center, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south, and a collection of duchies and foreign-controlled territories that happened to share a peninsula and a language. The Risorgimento had stitched them together on paper. On the ground the divisions were still raw. A factory worker in Milan and a farmer in Calabria shared a flag and almost nothing else. To the first Giro fans, riders were not Italian. They were from Asti. From Novi Ligure. From Cittiglio. The region, or commune, came before the nation. It always had.

Morgagni understood this and routed the race deliberately. Not just through the north, where the fans and the passable roads were, but all the way through Italy. Down to Naples and back. Through towns that had never seen a bicycle race. Through regions that had no reason to feel connected to anything happening in Milan. But the People came out, and they came out in numbers. Farmers. Merchants. Fishermen. Standing on dirt roads watching riders from their region and riders from places they had never been to moving through the same landscape together. The Giro did not set out to unify Italy. It set out to sell newspapers. Somehow, it managed to do both.

By 1911, just the third edition, the organizers moved the start and finish to Rome to celebrate Italy’s 50th anniversary of unification. The race had become something much bigger than a sporting event in just two years.

The pink jersey came in 1931, twenty-two years after the first race. The maglia rosa. The reason it is pink has nothing to do with romance or intention. La Gazzetta printed on pink paper because it was the cheapest stock available at that time. That is it. A budget decision at a broke newspaper became the colour of the most recognizable jersey in the sport. It just happens, the way the best Italian things tend to.

Then came the war. Two of them. The Giro stopped during both. When it came back in 1946 the country was rubble and chaos. The roads were craters. Italy was trying to figure out what it was now, what it stood for, who was in charge. And into all of that walked two cyclists who could not stand each other and could not stop racing one another.

Fausto Coppi was from Piedmont. Secular, precise, obsessive about diet and training in a way nobody had been before. Cold in person, extraordinary on a bike. He approached the sport like a science while everyone else was still treating it like a suffering session. He was a hero of the industrial north.

Gino Bartali was from Tuscany. Conservative, deeply Catholic, blessed personally by three popes. He believed suffering on a bike was a form of devotion. Warm in public and suspicious in private. The rural south venerated him. They were teammates on the national team and barely spoke.

Coppi and Bartali in the Italian Alps.

Bartali booked hotel rooms next to Coppi’s and managed to go through his room for bottles, phials and tubes before some stages looking for evidence of doping. During a mountain stage of the 1946 Giro, Coppi drank from a glass phial mid-race and threw it into the bushes. Bartali retrieved it, put it in an envelope and sent it to a lab. It came back as a French tonic available to the public without a prescription. At the 1948 World Championship in Valkenburg they were both in the lead group on the final lap. Neither would ride for the other. Both climbed off the bike rather than help the other one win. The gold medal went to a Belgian.

The writer Dino Buzzati covered the 1949 Giro for the Corriere della Sera having never written about cycling before. He used military language. Achilles and Hector. Two men carrying the weight of a divided country across three weeks of mountain roads while Italy watched from the roadside and chose a side to root for.

Coppi left Bartali by eleven minutes on a single stage. Cuneo to Pinerolo. Eleven minutes. Coppi was the north. Progress, industry, the secular future. Bartali was the south. Tradition, faith, the old Italy. A country still trying to convince itself it was one thing watched these two men and picked a side. Most of them never switched and the rivalry was never resolved.

Fiorenzo Magni in 1956, crashed and broke his collarbone mid-race, his right arm completely useless, no way to grip the handlebar. He looped an inner tube around the bars and bit down on the rubber with his teeth, absorbing every cobble and every pothole through his jaw for the rest of the stage because abandoning was never a consideration. He finished. Not for the stage win. Not for the time. For the race. For the jersey. Because that is what the Giro asks of you and Magni was not the kind of man who said no to that.

The famous Magni Bite

Chris Froome in 2018. Down three minutes with three days left, which usually is unrecoverable, attacked alone on the first climb of Stage 19 and rode eighty kilometers through the Dolomites completely by himself. Simon Yates, who had worn the maglia rosa for thirteen consecutive stages that year, lost over thirty-eight minutes that afternoon. He also lost the jersey.

Seven years later, at the 2025 Giro, Simon Yates came back to the Colle delle Finestre. The same climb. He attacked on the gravel roads near the top, dropped everyone, set a new record up the mountain and won the race overall by nearly four minutes. The Finestre had defined his career once already. He went back and redefined it himself. Its hard not to be romantic when you hear stories like that.

The Dolomites do this. They are not like any other mountains in cycling. They come at you in walls. Short, brutal, relentless climbs that strip away tactics and team support and leave only the rider and whatever they have left. And the crowds. There is no crowd in cycling like a Giro crowd. They line hairpins in the middle of the night to be there at dawn when the race comes through. They paint the roads. They build shrines on the mountainside. They do not watch the Giro. They inhabit it.

The highest point of each Giro is called the Cima Coppi, named after the great Fausto Coppi. The first rider to crest it takes the award. Coppi won this race five times. He got sick after a hunting trip in Africa in 1959. His doctors could not figure out what was wrong. Nobody thought to test for malaria. He was a European cycling champion. He’s been through hell multiple times. It did not cross their minds. He died on January 2, 1960. He was forty years old. Every year at the top of the hardest climb his name gets painted on the road and the peloton rides over it.

In 2023, the Giro started from Fossacesia Marina. Stage one. A 19.6-kilometre time trial along the Costa dei Trabocchi to Ortona, past the trabocchi, the fishing platforms built on stilts above the Adriatic that have been there for centuries. Won by Remco Evenepoel, who took the first maglia rosa of that edition in the town where I got married. The town my family grew up in. A few kilometers from the mountain my great-uncles rode after the war for no other reason than because it was there and they had bikes and they were alive.

1 of 23 Trabocchi left on the Adriatic coast in Abruzzo.

The 109th edition starts today. It begins in Bulgaria before crossing into the south of Italy, moving north through the Apennines, into the Alps, into the Dolomites, finishing in Rome. The Blockhaus is on the route. Stage seven. Rest assured, we will be on the couch in Montreal, in a city that is not Italy, but in a home that always was.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

BEFORE WE START

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

MOODY BOARDS // 005 — GIRO D’ITALIA No explanation. No context. Just the feeling.

BREAKAWAY // 005 — Cycling Has a Visibility Problem Ben Healy has 105,000 followers. Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. That gap is not about talent. How fashion became the entry point for every sport that cracked the culture problem — and why cycling has not run that playbook yet.

LEFT TURNS // 003 — What If Cycling Had a Creative Director? Crystal Palace did it. Como 1907 did it. The Cleveland Cavaliers did it. Every sport with cultural ambitions figured this out already. What happens when cycling finally makes the call.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

WHO MADE THAT KIT?

Nobody talks about who made the kit. They talk about the riders. The results. The bikes. But the brands stitching together what the best cyclists in the world wear every single day? Mostly invisible.

Open Instagram. Scroll for sixty seconds. You will see Rapha. PAS Normal. MAAP. The same names in a loop. Cycling influencers have a chokehold on what gets pushed. Now look at what the WorldTour peloton is actually racing in. Gobik. Castelli. Bioracer. Pissei. Vermarc. Kalas. Brands nobody is building a mood board around. Brands that are on the bodies of the best riders in the world, six and seven hours a day, across every kind of road and weather a European spring can throw at them.

There is a gap between what gets pushed and what gets worn. Between the brands that figured out content and the brands that figured out kit. We picked up a pair of Q36.5 bibs recently and it reframed the whole conversation. Some brands are building for the gram. Some are building for the ride.

On a design level, most of the brands the pros are racing in are not particularly interesting to look at. They kinda suck. Their best work is the team kit they produce under contract, and you know how we feel about those. The consumer collections are mostly functional and not much else. Which probably explains why nobody is talking about them. The influencer brands figured out that the kit you race in and the kit you want to own are two different products. Most of these brands never made that distinction.

Not everyone can afford to ride in MAAP or Rapha. Some of the brands on this list are genuinely (somewhat) affordable. And if the best riders in the world are racing in them every weekend, they are worth knowing about. This list exists because we kept asking ourselves who makes the kits and figured we might as well type it out for you. A reference. Something to come back to. A full deep dive on design language, identity, and verdicts is probably coming but this is where it starts.

We are covering WorldTour teams and the ProTeams you see racing regularly at the sport’s biggest races. The Continental teams are a conversation for another day.

We have not ridden in everything on this list and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can tell you is who made it and which team is wearing it.

Here you go:

MEN’S WORLDTOUR 2026

UAE Team Emirates XRG — Pissei

Visma-Lease a Bike — Nimbl

Lidl-Trek — Santini

Ineos Grenadiers — Gobik

Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe — Specialized

Soudal-Quick Step — Castelli

Movistar — Gobik

EF Education-EasyPost — Assos

Groupama-FDJ United — Bioracer

Bahrain Victorious — Alé

Jayco-AlUla — MAAP

Decathlon-CMA CGM — Van Rysel

Alpecin-Premier Tech — Kalas

XDS Astana — Ekoï

Human Powered Health — Verge Sport

Lotto-Intermarché — Vermarc

NSN Cycling — Ekoï

Uno-X Mobility — Fusion

MEN’S PROTEAMS 2026

Pinarello-Q36.5 — Q36.5

Tudor Pro Cycling — Sportful

Unibet Rose Rockets — Santini

Polti VisitMalta — ToFit

WOMEN’S WORLDTOUR 2026

SD Worx-Protime — Specialized

Canyon-SRAM Zondacrypto — Canyon

Visma-Lease a Bike — Nimbl

Lidl-Trek — Santini

AG Insurance-Soudal — Castelli

FDJ United-Suez — Gobik

Liv AlUla Jayco — MAAP

EF Education-Oatly — Assos

Fenix-Premier Tech — Alé

Movistar — Gobik

Picnic PostNL — Nalini

UAE Team ADQ — Pissei

Human Powered Health — Verge Sport

Decathlon-CMA CGM — Van Rysel

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and will be for a long time. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

THE DROP // 003

My brother-in-law threw himself a concert for his 40th birthday. Every band he has ever played with showed up. The night was that good so he made us playlist, in his own words.

BREAKAWAY // 005 — Cycling Has a Visibility Problem

Ben Healy has 105,000 followers. Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. That gap is not about talent. How fashion became the entry point for every sport that cracked the culture problem — and why cycling has not run that playbook yet.

LEFT TURNS // 003 — What If Cycling Had a Creative Director?

Crystal Palace did it. Como 1907 did it. The Cleveland Cavaliers did it. Every sport with cultural ambitions figured this out already. What happens when cycling finally makes the call.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

// 005

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and will be for a long time. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 005 — Cycling Has a Visibility Problem

Ben Healy has 105,000 followers. Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. That gap is not about talent. How fashion became the entry point for every sport that cracked the culture problem — and why cycling has not run that playbook yet.

LEFT TURNS // 003 — What If Cycling Had a Creative Director?

Crystal Palace did it. Como 1907 did it. The Cleveland Cavaliers did it. Every sport with cultural ambitions figured this out already. What happens when cycling finally makes the call.

BREAKAWAY // 004 — The Kids from Piazza San Babila

Milan, 1983. A generation decided the most radical thing they could do was refuse politics entirely. No manifesto. Just dress better than everyone else. What the Paninari understood about clothes as ideology, and why cyclists have been running the same logic ever since.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

Some people love music but my brother-in-law… he lives it.

He has been playing in bands for a big chunk of his life. Toured the world because of it. Still plays every room like it’s the only one that matters. He is the kind of person who knows not just the song but everything underneath it. The label, the year, the B-side nobody pressed play on. To be fair, my wife’s whole family is like that.

A few weeks ago he threw himself a party for his 40th. It was a concert. A really fun one too. Every band he has ever played with showed up. Every person on stage changed except for him. A room full of people he loved, doing what he loved, with people he loved playing with. It was beautiful. The night was so good I had to ask him to make a playlist.

Instead of sending me a Spotify link, which is what I am going to do here, he sent me an email. One note per track. In his own words, exactly as he wrote them.

Here is the setlist, untouched from the email.

This is VOL. 003 of THE DROP.

Listen/Download Here

SETLIST

Santana – “Soul Sacrifice”
-As funny as memes about the crappy pop album Santana made are, this is what it’s about.

Grand Funk Railroad – “Got this Thing on the Move”
-GFR are Homer Simpson’s favorite band which is good enough for me.

Jimi Hendrix – “Manic Depression”
-drums sound like they’re played on pots and pans by a groovy child
and the guitar sounds like it’s played by Jimi Hendrix.

Queens of the Stone Age – “If Only”
-see my Black Sabbath comment

Deep Purple – “Sail Away”
-Sounds like Queens of the Stone Age had this tape in high school.

Black Mountain – “Old Fangs” (Canadian)
-I love bands that have more than 1 singer and different
instrumentation. There’s so much trading off between synth, guitar,
and each singer gets a verse.

Goat – “Goathead”
-probably my favourite contemporary band. Afro-beat, funk, psych rock, huge rhythms and riffs, chanting ritual female vocals!

Mdou Moctar – “Tarhatazed”
-he whistles halfway through the solo to make the band speed up, this recording is 3 dudes going as hard as they can. I love that it’s not in English.

All Them Witches – “Am I Going Up?”
-the less lyrics you use, the more you say.

Black Sabbath – “Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes”
-every stoner rock playlist needs a Black Sabbath song. Non-negotiable.

Bionic-“Turn You Out” (Canadian)

-An intro that deserves to freak everybody out at least once in their life.

Bison B.C – “Primal Emptiness of Outer Space” (Canadian)
-definitely on the metal end of the spectrum but I’ve seen these guys leave rooms speechless.

Priestess – “I am the Night, Colour Me Black” (Canadian)
-I’m getting goosebumps listening to this on speakerphone at a whisper.

Barn Burner – “Wizard Island” (Canadian)
-I was in this band, so they make the cut!

Roky Erickson – “Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)”
-the definition of psych-rock lyrics

Murder By Death – “Theme (for Ennio Moricone)”
-Heaviest sounding name for the folkiest band on the list!

Led Zeppelin – “Dazed and Confused”
-I found this song in my dad’s record collection and realized he
listened to heavier music than me.

Put Precious and Grace by ZZ Top too!

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and will be for a long time. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent. Even a share.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 005 — Cycling Has a Visibility Problem

Ben Healy has 105,000 followers. Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. That gap is not about talent. How fashion became the entry point for every sport that cracked the culture problem — and why cycling has not run that playbook yet.

LEFT TURNS // 003 — What If Cycling Had a Creative Director?

Crystal Palace did it. Como 1907 did it. The Cleveland Cavaliers did it. Every sport with cultural ambitions figured this out already. What happens when cycling finally makes the call.

BREAKAWAY // 004 — The Kids from Piazza San Babila

Milan, 1983. A generation decided the most radical thing they could do was refuse politics entirely. No manifesto. Just dress better than everyone else. What the Paninari understood about clothes as ideology, and why cyclists have been running the same logic ever since.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

We do not use affiliate links. We do not get paid to feature anything. No sponsored placements, no brand arrangements, no performance fees. Just things we actually rate. For the love of the game.

THE WHITE SOCK EDIT

We know the white sock rule sounds a little stuck-up. It is but we don’t care.

For the record, we wear white socks off the bike ninety-nine percent of the time. This is not a cycling thing. It is just a sock thing. We are a little obsessed with a good sock. This article was kinda inevitable…

So lets start here. Fausto Coppi, 1952 Tour de France, yellow jersey, white socks. Eddy Merckx, every race he ever entered, white socks. Anquetil. Hinault. Lemond. Bernard. The entire history of professional cycling, photographed in black and white and then in colour, and the one constant from the velodrome at Roubaix to the summit of Alpe d’Huez is white socks. Not because anyone decided it per se, but because nobody questioned it.

The sock was a utility object for most of the sport’s first century. Cotton, mid-calf, white. It absorbed sweat. It protected the ankle. It cost nothing and said nothing and sat between shoe and skin the way a sock is supposed to. The riders who built the mythology of this sport wore white socks not as a statement but as a default. Which is, paradoxically, what gives them weight now.

Because at some point cycling decided it needed to evolve. Teams got title sponsors. Kits became billboards. The jersey went from wool to lycra and the colours went from national to corporate. And somewhere in that transition the sock got pulled into the rebrand. Compression socks appeared. Coloured socks appeared. The ankle sock appeared, which is its own crime (Vingegaard still rocking these btw…). The sock that had been a blank slate for a hundred years became a canvas.

In professional cycling, almost nothing belongs to the rider. The jersey is the sponsor’s. The shorts are the team’s. The helmet, the shoes, the frame, all of it decided somewhere upstream. The rider is the least free person in the peloton when it comes to what they are wearing.

Except for small things. A necklace. A bracelet under the glove. The cap rolled under the back pocket. And the sock. The sock is the one place where the visual logic of the kit is not entirely dictated. Which means when a rider makes a considered choice about the sock, it reads. Immediately. Silently. The way the right detail always does.

The white sock is the choice that transcends everything else. It does not fight the jersey. It does not compete with the shoe. It does not announce a preference or a brand allegiance. It belongs to nobody and therefore works with everything. Merckx in Molteni orange. Hinault in Renault yellow. Pogacar in UAE white. The sock underneath all of it: the same.

Lance Armstrong wore compression socks so aggressively tall that he had to explain himself to the Tour de France director over lunch. The UCI legislated sock height not long after. Some people are still hating him for that fashion faux pas, and not for the other thing.

The UCI was not entirely wrong. A longer sock reads better than an ankle sock. Visually. And it turns out that modern sock fabric is technically more aerodynamic than bare skin. The longer the sock, the more it works. The UCI measured it in wind tunnels. So the look and the marginal gain are, for once, pointing in exactly the same direction.

Now the part that does not get talked about enough. A white sock has nowhere to hide.

A pattern gives you something to look at. A graphic gives you something to read. A colour story gives context. White gives you nothing except the object itself. The quality of the yarn. The density of the knit. The way the cuff holds its shape across 150km of riding or loses it after forty minutes. The way the white stays white after ten washes or goes grey, then yellow, then unwearable. These are the things white makes visible.

This is the same logic that makes a white Oxford shirt the hardest thing to wear well. No colour to blame. No pattern to hide behind. Just construction. And most socks, when you take the graphic away, have nothing underneath it.

The brands getting white right are the ones who did the extra reading on yarn, on construction, on cut. PROLEN instead of polyester. Seamless instead of seamed. A cuff engineered to sit at a specific height and stay there. A sock built to be white in six months the same way it was white on day one.

That is a different level of commitment to the object. And it is immediately visible on the bike.

White sock, white shoe. That is the rule. Go as wild as you want with everything else. Colour on the kit, colour on the frame. Even colour on the shades. But the sock stays white.

Here are our four favourites right now.

Fingerscrossed #002 Classic White

The one that started the brand. Bavarian-made, PROLEN yarn, a hand-pressed nickel-free rivet on the left sock. Not the right. The left. That detail alone tells you everything about how seriously these people take the object. PROLEN is a polypropylene-based yarn, lighter than polyester or nylon, moves moisture faster, dries almost instantly. The brands reaching for it are the ones who did the extra reading. No graphics. No colourway story. Mid-calf cut, sits exactly where it should, stays there across the whole ride. The benchmark everything else gets measured against.

Find here.

Attaquer ULTRA High Crew Sock White

One of the more technically ambitious socks on this list. The yarn is the story. Far Infrared technology absorbs body heat and promotes microcirculation, which sounds like marketing until you read how it works. Silver yarn in the footbed handles antimicrobial protection. 195mm ribbed tube, low pile construction for direct connectivity to the pedal, seamless toe closure. The kind of sock that has clearly been thought about from the inside out. Clean white, high crew cut, sits exactly where it should.

Find here.

nologo Classic White

Czech brand. Barely anyone outside of Europe is wearing them and they are not particularly bothered about changing that. Same PROLEN construction as Fingerscrossed, same logic, different postcode. Four cuff height options including a 27cm version that has no business looking as good as it does. The name is the ethos. No logo means the sock has to earn attention on its own terms. It does. Worth finding. Worth importing if you have to.

Find here.

Assos Endurance Socks S11 White Series

Not the race sock. The one you actually reach for. 18cm cuff, seamless construction, odour-resistant yarns mapped across the metatarsals, arch, and ankle. Lightweight, fast-drying, lightly compressive. The kind of sock that does not announce itself and does not need to. Assos has been obsessing over this object for decades. Worth every dollar.

Find here.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 004 — The Kids from Piazza San Babila

Milan, 1983. A generation decided the most radical thing they could do was refuse politics entirely. No manifesto. Just dress better than everyone else. What the Paninari understood about clothes as ideology, and why cyclists have been running the same logic ever since.

LEFT TURNS // 003 — What If Cycling Had a Creative Director?

Crystal Palace did it. Como 1907 did it. The Cleveland Cavaliers did it. Every sport with cultural ambitions figured this out already. What happens when cycling finally makes the call.

BREAKAWAY // 003 — Café Raids

Tour riders stopping mid-race to drink wine, eat at cafés, and disappear back into the peloton with glass bottles stuffed in their pockets. The history of la chasse à la canette and what cycling gave up when it decided to grow up.

No affiliate links. No paid placements. No sponsored content. Everything we write about and put in front of you is either something we genuinely believe in or something we believe the culture needs to be talking about. That has always been the deal.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

Ben Healy won a Tour de France stage in July 2025. Wore the yellow jersey for two days. Was written up by NSS Magazine as a fashion icon. Talks about his Issey Miyake trousers in interviews. Posts vacation dumps from Florence and Venice between races that feel like a Dua Lipa feed. Twenty-four years old. Genuinely one of the most interesting athletes in cycling.

He has roughly 105,000 Instagram followers.

Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. An estimated six figures per sponsored post. When he announced his move to Ferrari, Ferrari’s stock price went up more than 10 percent the same day. Dior. Tommy Hilfiger. Lululemon. Every major fashion house has found its way to him.

The gap between those two numbers is not a talent gap. Not a style gap. Not even a sport gap. It is a visibility gap. And cycling built that gap itself.

We have been thinking about this problem since reading an article over at Bicicletta de Montaigne writing about the UCI’s structural problems (go subscribe). But while Catherine was writing about the financial collapse, we kept coming back to something running parallel to that idea. A conversation about visibility. About why cycling, with all of this great raw material, cannot break through to the audiences that tennis and F1 and basketball have built. About how fashion, whether cycling likes it or not, is one of the most powerful tools any sport has for building cultural presence.

The playbook already exists. It just lives within other sport leagues.

The NBA tunnel walk started as nothing. Players walking from the arena entrance to the locker room before games. Nobody was photographing it. Then in 2005 David Stern introduced a dress code, which backfired in the best possible way. Players who had been wearing whatever they wanted suddenly had rules to push against. LeBron James showed up in Thom Browne. Russell Westbrook wore skirts. The short walk from the door to the locker room became the most watched fifteen seconds in the sport.

Image via Vogue.com

Ian Pierno started @LeagueFits in 2018, an Instagram account dedicated to documenting NBA tunnel fashion. He struggled to find content at first but today the account has over a million followers. The NBA took notice and started building tunnel content into their own channels. When Kyle Kuzma posted a photo in a $3,000 Rick Owens puffer it sold out within days. When Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wore Fear of God, searches for the brand spiked the following week. The tunnel walk became a product launch platform, a cultural moment, and a new fan acquisition tool all at once.

Pierno said it plainly: if you are a new fan of basketball, maybe the statistics go over your head. But you can relate to the cool outfits. Fashion became the entry point.

F1 ran a different play with the same result. Hamilton spent a decade turning the paddock into a version of the red carpet. Custom looks for every race weekend. At the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix his outfits transitioned from a full whitish-silver fit to a full red one over four days to mark his move from Mercedes to Ferrari. He co-chaired the Met Gala. Launched his own streetwear brand. Hamilton did not just become a fashion figure. He became proof of concept that a driver could be a global cultural personality and that personality could pull massive new audiences into the sport. Women now make up around 40 percent of F1’s global audience, up from around 8 percent in 2017. There is a huge surge in North American audiences. That shift did not happen because the cars got faster. It happened because of the imagery around the sport.

Tennis is doing it right now in real time and the ATP is not even pretending it is accidental. They quadrupled their fashion marketing budget. Built ATP Styling Studios, giving players one-on-one sessions with fashion industry professionals. Manufactured tunnel walk moments at Indian Wells this year, photographing Taylor Fritz, Alexander Zverev, and Andrey Rublev walking in like it was a runway. Carlos Alcaraz is with Louis Vuitton. Jannik Sinner carries a custom Gucci bag on court at every tournament. Jack Draper is with Burberry. The ATP looked at the NBA and said we want that.

Tennis players worked with former GQ fashion director Mabolaji Dawodu to create custom looks for the Tunnel.

Their SVP of marketing said it out loud: there is a clear intersection between tennis and fashion for our fans. We see this as an opportunity to bring fans who might be following the sport more casually deeper into the fold.

Cycling has not said this yet. Not officially. Not ever actually. Not with a budget behind it.

At the end of an F1 race the drivers emerge from the cockpit looking touched up. At the end of a cycling stage the riders look like they have been through a war. Sunburn, salt stains, road rash, the thousand-yard stare at the finish line. We love that imagery. It makes them look human in a way no other sport does. But that imagery only reaches people who are already watching. It does not travel. It does not pull anyone in from the outside.

New audiences do not enter a sport through its hardest moments. They enter through the ones around it. The tunnel walk. The paddock. The ATP arrivals corridor at Indian Wells. Every sport that has built a real cultural crossover found its door in the same place. Not the competition. The moment before it or after it. What the athlete wears when the helmet comes off. What they look like walking into a hotel lobby in Florence the morning before a stage. Those moments exist in cycling every single week. Nobody is there with a camera. Nobody has a stylist on the phone.

The peloton races through the most photographed cities in the world. Paris. Florence. Milan. San Remo. Liege. Brussels. The backdrops are free and they are extraordinary. The sport produces images that look like they were art directed. A rider in kit climbing a mountain in the Dolomites. The peloton through the Arenberg cobbles in morning mist. The finish line on the Champs-Elysees. No other sport drops its athletes into visual environments like this on a weekly basis. And then those athletes disappear into a team bus and nobody documents what happens next.

Image from the talented Jared Gruber.

The cycling jersey is already a fashion object. The Molteni orange. The Mapei squares. The Bianchi celeste. Pas Normal Studios, MAAP, Rapha. The crossover is happening from the product side. Brands are doing the work. But a jersey on a hanger in a Copenhagen studio is not the same as Ben Healy wearing Issey Miyake trousers at a café in Florence after a rest day. One is a product. The other is a cultural moment. The difference is a photographer and an intention.

And the raw material is already there.

Michael Matthews has been that guy his entire career. The jewellery. The clothes. The cars. The peloton gave him the nickname Bling before Instagram existed, which tells you everything. This was not a brand exercise. Not a stylist. Not a team social media strategy that decided fashion content performed well. It was just who he was, and the people who rode next to him every day noticed it first. Thirty-four years old now. Grand Tour stages in all three races. Green jersey at the Tour. And 121,000 followers on a platform built for exactly the kind of person he is. The handle is @bling90. The identity was there before anyone thought to document it. It is still waiting.

Mathieu van der Poel is arguably the greatest classics rider alive right now, with the kind of presence that fashion campaigns are built around. He jokes with Pogacar on Instagram after Milan-San Remo. Posts the GOAT emoji under his rival’s victory post. Genuinely a good, funny dude online. Just over a million followers. In any other sport at his level of dominance that number would be 10 million.

Tadej Pogacar is the best cyclist alive (potentially ever). Three Tour de France wins, two Giro d’Italia wins, world champion. 3 million followers. Patrick Mahomes, the best NFL quarterback of his generation, has nearly 7 million on Instagram alone and a multi-decade State Farm deal that runs during the Super Bowl. Pogacar has won more in his sport than Mahomes has in his and has less than half the platform.

A significant portion of the WorldTour peloton lives in Monaco. Pogacar. Michael Matthews. The same square kilometre of the Riviera that houses Formula 1 drivers, tennis players, hedge fund managers, and fashion people. The crossover is not theoretical. It is happening on a Tuesday morning over coffee. Pogacar and Carlos Sainz are neighbours. They ride together on recovery days. Sainz describes it plainly: even on Pogacar's easy days, he is going flat out just to keep up. In March 2026 Sainz drove from Monaco to San Remo to watch Pogacar win Milan-San Remo and was there on the podium to hand him the trophy. The best cyclist in the world and a Formula 1 driver, sharing espressos and a stage finish. Nobody is leaning into that story.

Sainz said it after the race: we are very good friends, and seeing him win the Sanremo here in person, after all he worked for, is a source of pride and honor. He is a top guy. Humble, down to earth. I’d never come to see a race live before. But for him I came.

That is the door. Right there. The elite athlete subculture of Monaco is already integrated. The friendships are real. The shared world is real. The infrastructure to broadcast any of it to the people who would care does not exist.

One rider at the 2025 Tour de France had 1,709 followers. A WorldTour professional competing in the biggest bike race in the world. He told a journalist he might need to crash to get more followers. That sentence should be on a billboard at UCI headquarters.

So why is this happening?

A few reasons.

Cycling has historically treated marketing as an afterthought. Team budgets go to riders, staff, equipment. That’s it. The cultural extension of what their riders represent has not been part of it. Riders spend most of their season in kit or in recovery. The arrival, the hotel lobby, the transfer between races, the post-race cafe stop. These moments happen and disappear. Nobody is photographing them with intent.

The sport has always worn its indifference to image like a badge. Suffering is the point. Looking good is not. Fashion has been treated as peripheral at best, embarrassing at worst. That attitude is the obstacle.

And most importantly: nobody has built the infrastructure. There is no @LeagueFits for cycling. No ATP Styling Studio equivalent. No official channel dedicated to what riders wear when they are not racing. These things do not exist yet. That is not a problem. That is an opportunity.

Here is what fixing this looks like.

Ben Healy does not need to change anything about who he is. He needs a photographer following him for a week during the Tour and a team social media strategy that understands his Issey Miyake trousers are content. The vacation dumps between race days are already the right instinct. They just need to be documented with the same seriousness as the on-bike footage.

Image via Ben Healy’s insta.

Michael Matthews has an identity built for this. A decade of peloton reputation. You do not invent that. You film it. You follow him through Milan before San Remo and you turn it into a proper editorial shoot alongside the ride content. The raw material is already there. It just needs production.

The proof that the appetite is there already exists. Bas Tietema started a YouTube channel in 2019 with two friends. Three people filming themselves at the Tour de France, handing pizza to riders, messing around on the road. No strategy. No sponsor deck. That channel became the Unibet Rose Rockets, a UCI ProTeam now employing 85 people including a 20-person media team. They have a fanbase called the purple army that shows up at races in purple jackets. At the Amstel Gold Race they filled an entire corner with thousands of supporters. Their most watched video of the season was one where the whole team DNF’d. Not a victory. A failure. Because the fans were so invested in the story that the failure mattered as much as the win. Tietema has said his goal is not just to reach the WorldTour but to build the biggest fanbase in cycling. Nobody else in cycling has made that their primary objective. And they are proving it works.

The women’s peloton has the same problem and an even bigger opportunity. Demi Vollering won Strade Bianche in 2025, finishing alone in the Piazza del Campo in Siena, covered in white dust, every centimetre of that finish photographed by the best cycling photographers alive. 80,000 Instagram followers. Elisa Longo Borghini has won the Giro d’Italia Women two years running, Paris-Roubaix, Tour of Flanders. She is Italian, races in Italy, finishes on roads that look like paintings. 80,000 followers. The visual conditions are perfect. The athletes are extraordinary. The infrastructure to connect those two things to the outside world does not exist. The WNBA built a fashion moment in a single season when the right players arrived and someone decided to document it properly. Women’s cycling has the riders. It is waiting for the same decision.

At the sport level, the UCI and race organisers need to create the conditions. Formal pre-race arrival content. A designated photographer at every Grand Tour start capturing what riders wear off the bike. An official channel dedicated to it. This is not expensive. @LeagueFits was started by one person with a phone. The barrier is not budget. It is intention.

The brands are already paying attention. Richard Mille, Breitling, and Tudor have all moved into cycling in the last three years. Breitling sponsors the Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team. Tudor is the official timekeeper of the Giro d'Italia. In April 2025 IUMAN, the Italian men's underwear brand formerly known as Intimissimi Uomo, signed a deal to put their name on the Maglia Rosa itself. An underwear brand on one of the most coveted jersey in cycling is not an obvious move. It tells you exactly who thinks cycling's audience is worth reaching right now. These are not brands that make uninformed bets. They go where the audience is going. Or more precisely, where they believe the audience is about to go.

The fashion brand side will follow the rest if the infrastructure exists. Sinner did not go looking for Gucci. Gucci went looking for Sinner because the ATP had built the platform that made him visible as a fashion figure. Cycling has riders who are equally compelling. Build the conditions and the brands will come. The brands always follow the audience.

The target is the person who does not yet know they care about cycling. The person who found F1 through Hamilton’s paddock looks. Who started watching the NBA because @LeagueFits showed up on their feed. Who is currently following tennis because Alcaraz looks good carrying a Louis Vuitton bag.

That person exists for cycling too. They just have not been given a door.

Ben Healy in Issey Miyake trousers at a cafe in Florence is the door. Pogacar and Sainz sharing espressos in Monaco and a podium in San Remo is the door. The peloton winding through the streets of Milan on race morning is the door.

The raw material is extraordinary. The sport has just never treated it that way.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 004 — The Kids from Piazza San Babila

Milan, 1983. A generation decided the most radical thing they could do was refuse politics entirely. No manifesto. Just dress better than everyone else. What the Paninari understood about clothes as ideology, and why cyclists have been running the same logic ever since.

LEFT TURNS // 003 — What If Cycling Had a Creative Director?

Crystal Palace did it. Como 1907 did it. The Cleveland Cavaliers did it. Every sport with cultural ambitions figured this out already. What happens when cycling finally makes the call.

BREAKAWAY // 003 — Café Raids

Tour riders stopping mid-race to drink wine, eat at cafés, and disappear back into the peloton with glass bottles stuffed in their pockets. The history of la chasse à la canette and what cycling gave up when it decided to grow up.

No affiliate links. No paid placements. No sponsored content. Everything we write about and put in front of you is either something we genuinely believe in or something we believe the culture needs to be talking about. That has always been the deal.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

// 004

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and will be for a long time. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 004 — The Kids from Piazza San Babila

Milan, 1983. A generation decided the most radical thing they could do was refuse politics entirely. No manifesto. Just dress better than everyone else. What the Paninari understood about clothes as ideology, and why cyclists have been running the same logic ever since.

BREAKAWAY // 003 — Café Raids

Tour de France riders stopping mid-race to drink wine, eat at cafés, and disappear into the peloton with a glass of something cold. The history of la chasse à la canette and what cycling gave up when it decided to grow up

BREAKAWAY // 002 — A Sharpie, a Hack, and 150 Years of Castelli

A Norwegian rider blacked out a logo with a marker in 2009. Castelli turned it into a product. Then half the peloton showed up at Milan-San Remo in one. How the most important cycling garment of the last twenty years started as a fix and became infrastructure.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

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We do not use affiliate links. We do not get paid to feature anything. No sponsored placements, no brand arrangements, no performance fees. Just things we actually rate. For the love of the game.

The Paninari are gone but their logic isn’t. This is a FEED ZONE for off the bike. No kit. No bibs. Just pieces that carry the Paninari vision right now, worn with the awareness that the brand on your back has always been a statement.

We are also kinda tired of seeing cyclists and cycling content creators dressed in the same rotation of Salomons and sportswear. We have nothing against Salomon. We love the brand. But there is a whole world of considered, deliberate, interesting clothing out there and this sport has the cultural foundation to wear all of it with authority. The Paninari figured that out in 1983.

Nothing in this edit is cheap. That was also true in 1983. The Paninari understood that the object was the statement. That hasn’t changed.

It is time to dress. Actually dress.

01 // STONE ISLAND — 100002 SPLIT LEATHER S.I. GHOST JACKET

The Ghost line is Stone Island doing what Stone Island has always done best: taking a concept and following it all the way to its logical conclusion. Ghost means fully monochromatic. Everything the same tone. Even the compass badge is rendered in a special matching version to disappear into the garment. The jacket itself is cut from split bovine crust leather, the material obtained by reducing the thickness of the hide, giving it a textured, durable surface that allows raw-cut finishes. Industrial detailing throughout. Snap-fastened stand collar. Contrasting and matching hardware. An internal compass-embroidered pocket.

The Paninari wore the orange Moncler because once everyone had a Dolomite puffer, you had to move on. The Ghost jacket is the 2026 version of that logic.

Find here

02 // STONE ISLAND — J100006 LIGHT BULL DENIM-TC IN MILITARY GREEN

Lightweight 13oz denim, garment dyed, with an anti-drop finish. Five pocket construction. The Denim Research badge with metal buttons on the left leg. Stone Island applying the same level of material obsession to denim that they apply to everything else. The result is a jean that does not look like it is trying to be a Stone Island piece and yet is unmistakably one.

The military green is a color that should be prominent in your wardrobe. The Paninari understood the language of military references translated into civilian clothing before anyone else. Massimo Osti built C.P. Company and Stone Island on exactly that logic. Forty years later these jeans are the same conversation in a different weight. Wear them with everything in this edit. They do not try too hard. That is the whole point.

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03 // C.P. COMPANY — LIGHT BLUE COTTON CHENILLE POLO LENS SWEATER

The Goggle detail is the most recognisable thing C.P. Company ever did. Osti designed it in 1975 as a functional element, a built-in protective lens for working in adverse conditions. The Paninari turned it into an icon. This version takes the lens detail into a chenille polo knit in light blue. Soft construction, considered colourway, the kind of piece that rewards wearing.

C.P. Company’s fabric research is still some of the most serious in outerwear and knitwear. Garment dyeing. Material obsession. Zero interest in trends. The Paninari wore this brand because it was the best thing available. That calculus has not changed. CP Company should be in your closet rotation.

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04 // VINNY’S — AZTEC BOAT SHOE

The Sebago moccasin was a Paninari essential. The sailing shoe as status object. A piece of American preppy culture adopted and elevated by Milanese kids who understood that footwear was the first thing anyone clocked. Vinny’s is a Danish brand doing something very similar with the Aztec. Handcrafted in Portugal. Hand-stitched suede upper. Vibram lug sole. Three-eyelet moccasin construction. Classic silhouette with enough weight in the sole to feel considered rather than casual.

The boat shoe has always had a life outside the boat. The Sebago in Milan in 1983. The Paraboot on French terraces. The Vinny’s now. Different decades, same instinct for the right shoe at the right moment.

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05 // GHIAIA CASHMERE — RIBBED WOOL HALF-ZIP SWEATER IN ARMY GREEN

Ghiaia Cashmere is a family-run Italian knitwear factory. Not a brand built around campaigns and collab drops. A manufacturer that has been making exceptional wool pieces the same way for a long time and sees no reason to change. This ribbed half-zip is 100% wool in army green. Mid-weight. Regular fit. Clean construction with no excess. The kind of piece that disappears into your wardrobe and never leaves it. The army green connects directly to the military reference thread that runs through Stone Island and C.P. Company, the whole Paninari language of technical and workwear codes translated into something you actually want to wear. Ghiaia is obscure enough that the right people will clock it immediately. That is not a coincidence. That is the whole point.

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06 // MAAP — TECH TOTE

MAAP built the Tech Tote from ALUULA Graflyte, a composite fabric with a strength-to-weight ratio eight times that of steel. 130 grams. Waterproof. Structured. The kind of material that gets used in yacht racing and aerospace before it ends up in a tote bag.

The Paninari carried the Invicta Minisac because it was the right object for the right moment. Considered, specific, built to last. The MAAP Tech Tote is running the same logic forty years later. A cycling brand making something you would carry anywhere. Throw everything in there and get on with your day.

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To submit a find, a brand, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 002 — A Sharpie, a Hack, and 150 Years of Castelli

A Norwegian rider blacked out a logo with a marker in 2009. Castelli turned it into a product. Then half the peloton showed up at Milan-San Remo in one. How the most important cycling garment of the last twenty years started as a fix and became infrastructure.

THE DROP // VOL. 002

A playlist that is a little all over the place and completely selfish. Songs we have been living with for years. For the last few indoor training sessions before the roads open up.

FEEDZONE // 003 — The Vest Situation

The piece of kit nobody photographs and everybody reaches for. Six brands that actually figured out how to make the best version of it.

No affiliate links. No paid placements. No sponsored content. Everything we write about and put in front of you is either something we genuinely believe in or something we believe the culture needs to be talking about. That has always been the deal.

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They were not revolutionaries. And that was kind of the whole point.

Before the Paninari, there were the barricades. The 1970s in Milan meant the Years of Lead. Students throwing Molotov cocktails, arguing about Marx, wearing ideology like a badge. Then the eighties arrived and something shifted. A new generation decided the most radical thing they could do was refuse all of it. No politics. No manifesto. Just dress better than everyone else.

They called themselves the Paninari. Named after a sandwich bar in Piazza Liberty. Sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, gathering on Saturday afternoons in Moncler puffers, Levi’s 501s, Timberland boots. No manifesto. No politics. Just the precise articulation of taste as a worldview. A generation celebrating economic optimism after a decade of violence and austerity. Dressing well was not shallow. It was a declaration that things were better now. That joy was available. That you could just live.

A reporter sticks a microphone in a kid’s face and asks what he stands for. The kid lists his outfit, brand by brand, and at the end says: do you want to know the price as well?

That kid single handedly invented hype culture. He just didn’t know it yet.

Every other youth subculture of that era expressed itself through music or politics, or both. Punks had the Clash. Autonomists had the barricades. The Paninari had Stone Island. The first subculture not anchored to music or politics. Pure aesthetic identity. The brand on your back was the belief system. If the British Mods of the early 1960s were the first subculture to introduce obsessive attention to fashion detail into youth culture, the Paninari extended that obsession to brand and luxury and predicted hype culture by twenty years. The High Numbers released a single in 1964 as a detailed handbook of modernist fashion. Twenty years later the Pet Shop Boys exported the Paninari concept worldwide with a song named after them. The pattern is the same. A subculture so specific and so coherent it forced the outside world to pay attention. The proof of how deep it ran: look at the Pony Express riders delivering packages around Milan in the 1980s. They were delivery workers, and yet the aesthetic was identical to the Paninari. Sportswear and workwear elevated to cult status by proximity to the scene. That is not fashion. That is a movement.

Massimo Osti in his office.

Massimo Osti, a Bolognese designer who thought of clothes like an engineer would, built C.P. Company in 1971 and Stone Island in 1982. Technical outerwear. Military references recut for the street. Fabrics that did things other fabrics could not. The Paninari adopted both these brands immediately. Not because a magazine said so. Because the clothes were genuinely extraordinary. Functional. Obsessive in construction. Not trying to be fashion and therefore more fashionable than anything that was. The hierarchy was strict. One member of the scene put it plainly: “at first we wore Dolomite puffers, then since everyone had one, even the tackiest of people, we switched to the mandatory orange Moncler”. That sentence contains the entire logic of how taste works. The moment something becomes available to everyone it stops meaning anything. You move on. You find the next thing. You protect the vibe. Another style move was to wear the watch above the cuff. Not under it. Above it, over the sleeve, visible at all times. A gesture of deliberate ostentation traced directly back to Gianni Agnelli, who had been doing it for decades. The Paninari were not inventing a new attitude. They were inheriting one from the most stylish man in Italian industry and wearing it on a Saturday afternoon outside a sandwich bar.

Gianni Agnelli.

Osti said he wanted to design for science, not fashion. The Paninari took his research and turned it into a uniform. A subculture built around technical obsession that its own creator never intended for them. Neither of them planned it that way. That is usually how the best things happen.

The movement burned bright, but brief. By the end of the decade it was over, dissolved by changing politics and shifting taste. But the brands survived. Stone Island went to English football terraces first, then to hip-hop, then to Supreme, then got sold to Moncler for 1.15 billion euros. C.P. Company went to casuals, then to Palace, then to Manchester City. What’s amazing is that the shops that now carries these brands, also carries Pas Normal Studios, Rapha and MAAP. The same shops where cyclists shop. That journey from Milan to the terraces was not accidental. The UK football casuals of the 1980s and the Paninari were running the same logic from different cities. Tribalism expressed through brands. Identity declared through what you wore. British youths adopted Stone Island and C.P. Company directly from the Paninari, integrating them into a culture that was equally serious about what the badge on your chest meant. The connection between those two worlds explains exactly how a subculture born in a Milanese sandwich bar ended up on the backs of Manchester City fans four decades later.

We have not seen the blending of these brands in a physical store yet but scroll through any serious online retailer right now and you will find Pas Normal Studios sitting next to Stone Island sitting next to Moncler Grenoble. Different worlds, same page, no curatorial note explaining why. The person who built that product assortment understood something. The customer who scrolls past all three in the same session understands it too. The crossover is not accidental and it is not new. It is the same logic the Paninari were running in 80’s, playing out forty years later on a different kind of wheel. The Paninari were not just brand loyal. They were ideologically committed. Taste was the worldview. The brand on your back was the belief system. Declaring something about who you were, what you valued, who you wanted to be understood by. The clothes were the manifesto. Us cyclists do the same thing. The rider who chooses MAAP over a generic kit is not just making a performance decision. They are making a cultural statement. Even the bike you choose says something about who you are. The brands that earn that loyalty in cycling do it the same way Osti did it in 1982. By being genuinely serious about what they make. By treating the garment as an object worth obsessing over. By having a point of view that goes beyond the product. PNS, MAAP, Castelli, Q36.5, Rapha. These brands speak a language that cyclists who care about the aesthetics of the sport understand immediately. The ones that do not speak that language get ignored regardless of price. That is not consumerism. That is ideology.

Those kids understood something that cycling culture is only now fully articulating. Technical outerwear worn with intention is a complete aesthetic statement. The Moncler puffer was not just warm. It was a position. The Stone Island badge was not just branding. It was a declaration. They were not dressing for function. They were dressing to be understood by the right people and invisible to everyone else.

Sound familiar?

The rider in the full aero Castelli kit at the cafe stop is doing the same thing. The gravel rider in the faded Cafe du Cycliste jersey. The commuter with the Brooks saddle and the deliberate restraint of a black Rapha everything. We are all Paninari. We just ride bikes instead of Vespas.

The real difference though is that cycling actually requires the performance. The Paninari wore technical outerwear as a pose. We wear it and then ride six hours. All of it has to work. Function earns the form here. That is what makes cycling culture’s version of this more interesting than the original.

There’s a story where a kid named Massimo got tired of the fact that the only iron-on patches available with cartoon characters were designed for girls. So he started drawing an angry Donald Duck on the thighs of his Levi’s 501s with a marker. By hand. The most expensive subculture of its generation had a DIY streak running underneath it the whole time. When the market does not give you what you want you make it yourself. The signal matters more than the budget. Cyclists have always known this. The stickers on the helmet. The custom bar tape. The decal set that makes a stock frame look like something personal. The rider who sands the logo off their saddle because the colorway was wrong. Small acts of individual expression inside a sport that otherwise dresses everyone the same. The Paninari drew on their jeans. We put stickers on our lids. Same instinct. Different road.

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To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 003 — Café Raids

Tour riders stopping mid-race to drink wine, eat at cafés, and disappear into the peloton with a glass of something cold. The history of la chasse à la canette and what cycling gave up when it decided to grow up.

THE DROP // VOL. 002

A playlist that is a little all over the place and completely selfish. Songs we have been living with for years. For the last few indoor training sessions before the roads open up.

BREAKAWAY // 002 — A Sharpie, a Hack, and 150 Years of Castelli

A Norwegian rider blacked out a logo with a marker in 2009. Castelli turned it into a product. Then half the peloton showed up at Milan-San Remo in one. How the most important cycling garment of the last twenty years started as a fix and became infrastructure.

No affiliate links. No paid placements. No sponsored content. Everything we write about and put in front of you is either something we genuinely believe in or something we believe the culture needs to be talking about. That has always been the deal.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

Think about the New York Yankees cap. Most people wearing it have never watched a game. They have no attachment to the Bronx. Couldn’t even name the starting lineup. They wear it because it represents something. A city. An attitude. A cultural shorthand that travels everywhere a baseball cap can go. The object escaped the sport a long time ago and became something else entirely.

That does not happen by accident. It happens because somewhere along the line someone understood that a sports team can be a cultural object, not just a sports team. And they built everything accordingly.

Cycling has never had that person.

Kenny Annan-Jonathan, Creative Director of Crystal Palace

Every other sport with cultural ambitions has figured this out. Kenny Annan-Jonathan became the first creative director in the Premier League when Crystal Palace hired him in 2023. He said something that has stuck with us: we want to be able to design stuff that can exist outside of football. That sentence. That is the whole job description. Not making merch. Not designing a limited edition jersey for a cup run. Building things that people want to own regardless of whether they follow the team. Objects that carry the culture of the team into rooms the team itself cannot reach.

Rhuigi Villaseñor of Rhude and Chief Creative Director of Como 1907

Rhuigi Villaseñor did the same thing for Como 1907. After his name sake brand (RHUDE) blew up, he moved to Lake Como. Became Chief Brand Officer and minority owner of the team. Staged his Rhude runway show at Villa d’Este. Designed a fourth kit for their final match against Inter Milan that had LAKE COMO - LOS ANGELES across the back. Opened a members club on the lake. The club and the brand and the city became the same thing. That is not simply a jersey. That is a world.

Daniel Arsham of Arsham Studios and Creative Director of the Cleveland Cavaliers

Daniel Arsham has been creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers since 2020. Guillermo Andrade of 424 was creative advisor for the MLS Leagues Cup in 2023. These are not stunts. These are structural decisions made by organizations that understood culture is not a side project.

Guillermo Andrade of 424 and Creative Advisor for the MLS Leagues Cup

Now think about what this could look like in cycling. A creative director for a WorldTour team with real authority over the whole thing. The race kit, obviously. But also the off-bike wardrobe. A jacket that references the team’s color history without screaming the sponsor’s name. A cap with the right weight and the right brim. Objects that someone who has never watched a race might still want to own because they are just genuinely well made and considered. Merch that is not “advertising”. Things that carry the team’s identity into a room that the team itself would never enter.

The sport races through Florence, Liege, the Dolomites, the cobbles of Flanders. So many incredible cities. Such beautiful visuals. A creative director who understood what those races mean culturally could build something around a team that no manufacturer’s brief ever would. Not geography. Identity. The team with a point of view on what the sport means. The team whose kit tells you something about who they are and what they believe. Not just who paid for it.

To be quite frank, this would be our dream job. We started GRAVITYHILL because we believe cycling culture deserves to be taken seriously. A creative director role at a WorldTour team (or any team, really) is that same belief at a completely different scale. The jersey, the riders, the world built around them. We would do it without hesitation.

Somebody in this sport needs to make the call. Hire the person. Give them real authority. Let them build something that exists outside of cycling. The proof that this works is already inside the sport. The Rockets built an entire fanbase before they had the results to justify it. Storytelling first. Community first. And what makes them genuinely different from every other team in the peloton is that people actually love the Rockets as a team, not just the riders on it. When a rider leaves, the fans stay. That is what a real identity does. A creative director builds that identity deliberately instead of leaving it to chance. Cycling is a beautiful, complex, visually extraordinary sport that most of the world hasn’t truly discovered yet (especially in North America). Other sports are not waiting. They are building worlds that exist outside the sport itself and pulling new fans in through culture, through objects, through things people want to wear and own and be associated with. Cycling is still sending out press releases. The sport needs to modernize how it thinks about its own culture and a creative director is one real way to start doing that.

To submit a find, a brand, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 002 — A Sharpie, a Hack, and 150 Years of Castelli

A Norwegian rider blacked out a logo with a marker in 2009. Castelli turned it into a product. Then half the peloton showed up at Milan-San Remo in one. How the most important cycling garment of the last twenty years started as a fix and became infrastructure.

THE DROP // VOL. 002

A playlist that is a little all over the place and completely selfish. Songs we have been living with for years. For the last few indoor training sessions before the roads open up.

FEEDZONE // 003 — The Vest Situation

The piece of kit nobody photographs and everybody reaches for. Six brands that actually figured out what a vest is supposed to do

No affiliate links. No paid placements. No sponsored content. Everything we write about and put in front of you is either something we genuinely believe in or something we believe the culture needs to be talking about. That has always been the deal.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

Today a WorldTour rider knows exactly what is in every bottle coming through the car window. Grams of carbohydrate. Milligrams of sodium. Timing mapped to the km. Nothing left to chance. Nothing improvised.

A hundred years ago, a rider in the same race would stop at a roadside bar, lean his bike against the wall, walk inside, and order wine.

Not as a protest. Not as a bit. Because he was thirsty and the café was there.

The very first Tour de France in 1903 set the tone immediately. Maurice Garin, the man who won it, rode with a cigarette in his mouth and stopped at bars along the route to refuel. Not once. Regularly. He credited wine, hot chocolate, and oysters as essential to his preparation. Cycling’s inaugural champion was essentially running on a moving picnic.

The following year, 1904 winner Henri Cornet fuelled himself on champagne, hot chocolate, tea, and rice pudding. Every single day. Cornet was nineteen years old and is still the youngest Tour winner in history. He won on a diet that would get a modern rider pulled from the race by their nutritionist before the first mountain stage.

In those early years the Tour took no responsibility for feeding the riders at all. They were expected to make their own arrangements. Breakfasts at cafes. Bread from farms. Whatever they could carry or find. The race went straight through towns and the towns were part of the race.

Wine was fuel. Beer was hydration. Champagne sat somewhere between the two. And alcohol was often a safer bet than water. This is not a joke. Rural France in the early 1900s had no guarantee of a clean supply. Village water came from whatever was available. Streams. Old pipes. Wells that had not been tested by anyone. No treatment. No regulation. Nothing standing between what went in the ground and what came out the tap. Fermentation killed what was in it. A bottle of wine that had been through that process was genuinely safer to drink mid-stage than a cup of water from a roadside pump that nobody could vouch for. Riders were not being reckless. They were being practical. The science backed them up even if they did not know it yet.

By the 1960s the practice had its own name. La chasse à la canette. The can hunt. Louis Malle documented it in his 1962 film Vive le Tour, calling the drinking raid one of the most important moments of the race. The footage is something. Riders flying off bikes, shouldering through cafe doors, ransacking the bar for wine and beer and champagne, anything with calories, then disappearing back onto the road with glass bottles stuffed in jersey pockets and silver foil champagne tops catching the light.

They did not pay. The Tour organisers settled the bill at the end of the race. The bar owner got reimbursed and got a story he would retell for the rest of his life. The riders got back in the peloton ten minutes down and made it up. That was the deal.

Team leaders did not even do the raiding themselves. That was the domestique’s job. The captain would bark the order and the raiding party formed around him. Fetching the bottles was part of the service. One of the unwritten perks of being a leader on Tour. It was never your round.

The story that captures all of this perfectly happened in 1935. Stage 17. Pau to Bordeaux. Baking July heat through southwestern France. Somewhere along the route, spectators had set up a table by the roadside loaded with beer for the peloton. An offering. A gesture. Completely irresistible in the circumstances.

Almost the entire peloton stopped.

One rider did not. Julien Moineau drifted quietly away from the group as everyone else reached for a glass, slipped into a gap, and put his head down. He had organized his own water stops in advance. Some people have suggested he may have also organized the beer table, though he never admitted it. He won the stage by fifteen minutes and thirty-three seconds. One of the largest winning margins in Tour history. The whole peloton, outmaneuvered by a cold beer and a plan.

Café raids faded slowly. Not because they were banned outright, but because everything around them changed. Team cars became common. Feeding zones standardized. Nutrition science arrived. Gatorade was developed at the University of Florida in 1965. Cycling took a while to catch up, characteristically, but it got there. Sponsors wanted control. Television wanted predictability. The race tightened.

By the time gels and energy drinks took over, stopping at a café mid-stage felt unthinkable. Dangerous. Out of sync with what cycling had become. The café was no longer part of the course. It became something you visit after the ride.

Something was gained though. Speeds went up. Today’s riders consume upward of 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour, more than double what the science recommended a decade ago. Their guts literally retrained to absorb that much fuel. What the human body can do across three weeks of racing in 2025 is not the same sport as what Garin and Cornet were doing on unpaved roads with wine in their pockets. The results are not up for debate.

But something was lost too. Not alcohol. Informality.

The café raid belonged to a moment when cycling had not fully separated itself from the world it moved through. The race accepted interruption. Riders adapted to what was there instead of eliminating every variable. Towns were not just backdrop. They were infrastructure. Spectators were not watching from behind barriers. They were handing over bottles and laying out beer tables and settling up with the bar owner at the end.

That image feels foreign now. Modern cycling is a controlled environment. Every variable monitored. Nothing improvised. The race exists inside a bubble the sport spent a century building and the bubble works. There is no romance in bonking because you thought vibes were enough.

The café raid stories are not a counterargument to any of that. They are context. Texture. A reminder that the first Tour winner stopped at bars with a cigarette in his mouth and won anyway. That a nineteen-year-old fuelled himself on champagne and rice pudding and became the youngest champion in history. That an entire peloton once stopped for a cold beer and got beaten by fifteen minutes by the one rider who did not.

Most of us are not stopping mid-ride to grab a beer (maybe, sometimes). We are stopping after. Bikes leaned up outside. Shoes still on. One drink turning into two. Talking about the ride while the body comes back down.

That is where the café raid lives now. Not as a tactic. As a tone.

Cycling grew up. It got faster and more precise and more demanding and all of that is correct. Cycling optimized everything it could find. Somehow it never got around to the café. We are certainly not complaining.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here, but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

We do not claim ownership of any images unless otherwise stated.

// 003

To submit a find, a brand, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.