What’s in a cycling jersey? Is it just an aero tool to help you shave off milliseconds of speed, or simply the uniform of the sport? Lily Rice reckons it has the potential to be much more.
Last month, she launched an anti-slavery jersey in collaboration with creative agency BUCK and cycle CIC Ride for Freedom. It is bright-white, and plastered with large, graphic, multi-coloured stickers: in one, a cyclist morphs into a giant helmet-wearing shadow-figure in the back pockets – “Freedom” balloons in crescent writing above it.
“I think a lot of people think slavery is something in our history books, and they don’t necessarily think about how much it can touch our lives now,” said Rice, the co-founder of custom cycling apparel company, The Long Run Club.
“We think it’s really great that so many clothing brands are using recycled fabrics and trying to improve what they’re doing,” Rice said. “But what a lot of brands are not doing is looking holistically at their entire supply chain and impact. Making sure that your garment workers are treated fairly and ethically is a really big part of saying that you’re ethical and sustainable.”
Pushing through the streets on your bike, traffic whistling past, your jersey is a small billboard of whatever company, club, race-name happens to be slapped on it. It’s a conversation starter. But sometimes the way that jersey is manufactured may be at odds with the good-cause you could be challenging via your kit.
“A lot of companies are wanting to become more sustainable, and then saying to their employees, go out and do this bike ride raising funds for a really good cause, but they don’t think about the piece in the middle – the jerseys that they’re purchasing, or the way that they’re getting their employees to that event, or, the water bottles that they’re using.”
“With this limited-edition jersey, people can wear the impact,” Ride for Freedom’s COO, Vicy Hvartchilkova, said. ” [It] turns awareness into action and helps us protect the most vulnerable through education.”
