Rolling billboards

The WorldTour stretches from late January to October, but in the brief hiatus that is the off-season there’s time to fill those column inches with the more playful. Cue the annual debate over team kits.

This year’s rolling catwalk is a mix of the colourful (Bahrain Victorious), the relatively monochrome (Trek-Segafredo) and fearlessly brown (AG2R-Citroën’s gusset). But what’s the inspiration? What are the restrictions on designers and stakeholders? And just how many more logos can Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert Matériaux squeeze onto their bodies? It’s time to unpick the seams, beginning where all good team kit discussions should: EF Education-EasyPost and EF Education-Tibco-SVB’s obsession with diamonds.

Pink revolution

‘The 2022 kit is executed through creative coding and pattern manipulation,’ reads the January press release for EF’s latest outfit. Sorry?

‘We wrote computer code that multiplies diamonds. Basically, it’s a new take on EF’s argyle patterning,’ says Nick Clarke-Hodge, product designer at Rapha, the British apparel brand that sponsors the American team. ‘The brief was to be disruptive. The argyle pattern is old and traditional, and we wanted to take it into a new space. It’s progressive in the stagnant field that the professional peloton can be.’