Stripes Are Earned

The Rapha Cycling Club kit has served as a marker of determination and dedication to the sport for over a decade. Learn what went into the latest designs for the world’s most connected network of cyclists.

The first Rapha collections took inspiration from the racing aesthetics of the 1950s and ‘60s. For many, this was the golden age of cycling kit design. In a sport without a stadium, with TV coverage a distant dream, where the action flashed by in a matter of moments, spectators needed a way to spot their chosen riders. Jerseys had to be simple, but striking. Bold, primary colour-blocked designs were recognisable in the bunch, while also being attuned to the production processes of the day; try asking a seamstress in 1952 to sew you a gradient fade.

And for amateur clubs the requirements were no different. These kits have always been a signifier of allegiance: when you’re training together in the same kit, it drives you further and faster. There may not be a scientifically measurable impact of matching with your mates, but if you’ve joined a club run fully-kitted you know the difference it makes. 

Club kits also create a sense of solidarity, one not consistently provided by the professional side of the sport. Real Madrid wear pristine white and it’s not a Barca kit without a garnet stripe – but what colour does your favourite pro team ride in? This year might be mauve, and next year fluorescent yellow. The year after that, the team could cease to exist. So what colours do you show?

To wear your club colours is to belong to something bigger and – importantly – to something that will still exist in ten or twenty years.

In 1924, the great cycling writer, Albert Londres, characterised the peloton as “forçats de la route” (convicts of the road). Londres was a journalist covering the dawn of professional road racing, and was no doubt prone to the odd exaggeration – as with all his colleagues who shared the blessed privilege of reporting a sporting event that nobody reading their copy had seen a second of. But about this, at least, his words ring uncannily true, even at a century’s remove. 

Cyclists today remain bound to the road by passion, dedication and a desire to suffer in pursuit of something. If they are convicts, it is a willing imprisonment, a shared sentence served with, if not a smile, then at least a grimace.

The Rapha Cycling Club was founded on a reverence for road racing, bringing together those cyclists who wanted to ride, to push and to suffer. Today, it is still a place for like-minded riders to compete, commit to big challenges and find real camaraderie on the road – and it is our kit that pulls all this together across more than 25 chapters around the globe. 

The vertical stripes on the RCC Pro Team Jersey are a reinterpretation of the horizontal bars from the debut RCC kit, and which are also seen on many items from our Pro Team Collection. For Club members, the bars have always been a sign of intent: choose this jersey when you know it’s time to put the hammer down.