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news
Alessandra Cusatelli.pngVideo: Women in cycling - Beyond Shrink & Pink
A short documentary has been produced to highlight successful women in the field of cycle design.
Called Beyond Shrink & Pink, the five minute piece shows three women in cycling design and their contribution to cycling culture. These are designers who, like most of us, believe women's cycling gear should be more than just a smaller, pinker version of the men's kit, and highlight that women have a unique contribution to make in the field.
For Alessandra Cusatelli, art director at Cinelli, the bicycle "is the first present we are given, our first moment of independence."
"It is a thing full of emotion," she says.
With 15 years designing Cinelli bikes, the woman responsible for overseeing their colourful decoration since 2001, Cusatelli calls the Vigorelli bike her first love, a design that has been copied many times.
Beyond shrink & pink - Women in cycling documentary from Giulio De Blasio on Vimeo.
Alex Feechan, fashion designer at women's active wear company, Findra, saw what women were wearing cycling and realised "it wasn't flattering, it wasn't well designed, it wasn't considered, and it certainly wasn't designed with females in mind." Feechan said what was designed for women too often seemed an afterthought of the men's collection.
"From a design point of view the products looked like they suffered from the 'shrink it and pink it' approach," she says.
Taking men's products, reducing them in size with a pink stripe or flower, is not the way to appeal to women, she says.
Sarah Drummond is director at Cyclehack, the annual event that sees cyclists brainstorming solutions to everyday bike-related problems.
She says: "If you think of women's marketing, it is a lot of pink Lycra, and that's not really going to encourage people to get on their bike."
Drummond says women's and men's designs don't have to be pigeonholed by gender and points out Cyclehack's most famous output, the Penny in yo' Pants, that weighs down women's skirts for cycling, was designed by a man.
A follow-up to the video will feature details of a special charity auction, with a bespoke bike the prize.
Laura Laker is a freelance journalist with more than a decade’s experience covering cycling, walking and wheeling (and other means of transport). Beginning her career with road.cc, Laura has also written for national and specialist titles of all stripes. One part of the popular Streets Ahead podcast, she sometimes appears as a talking head on TV and radio, and in real life at conferences and festivals. She is also the author of Potholes and Pavements: a Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network.
Latest Comments
- brooksby 5 min 47 sec ago
I didn't know that! https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_Neil_Milne_Johnstone
- mdavidford 6 min 15 sec ago
Close passes and PSPO restrictions, for extra reality.
- hawkinspeter 9 min 56 sec ago
It's a cartastrophe! https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/trojan-tax-parking-charges-cause-9709032
- brooksby 18 min 3 sec ago
IIRC when I was in primary school, the only time the school had to go outside and stand by the side of the road and wave was this one time that the...
- mark1a 10 hours 16 min ago
No problem at all old chap, its successor the CAAD13 is available in mechanical 105 11sp guise (not too shabby a groupset IMO with Shimano trickle...
- David9694 11 hours 10 min ago
Car crashing into Colchester Co-op sees two hospitalised https://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/24719022.car-crashing-colchester-co-...
- Prosper0 12 hours 11 min ago
No offence to Endura, but same advice as to Rapha, I actually have all the kit I need, for probably several years. You need to go and win the next...
- chrisonabike 16 hours 6 min ago
Ah - yes, they've got an American Star the wrong way round (means the child carrier needs rearranged though). Or it could be a Facile but inverted?
- lesterama 17 hours 58 min ago
What a bunch of ases
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15 comments
consider that the average woman is 5'4"...
Most women are riding bikes that don't fit, and are increasingly difficult/impossible to be made to fit. Yes, i'm talking about cranks.
Buy a new bike, and there's a good chance you can't fit square-taper cranks (it'll be BB90, or something similar). Which means you'll be limited to 165mm as a minimum crank length.
When it comes to cranks (surely a key factor of 'bike-fit') we haven't even got around to shrinking-and-pinking them.
165 is only 6% less than 175. No other bike component comes in such a small range of sizes. This is daft. You can adjust your saddle height all you like, but if your cranks are too long you'll never have comfortable leg extension AND knee flexion.
Oh FFS ... get over yourself. I was merely pointing out (for the third frigging time now) that that particular kind of discussion is just a wee tiny little bit off topic here.
No, I'm not looking for "a positive feedback response" - not to my throw-away line in my first comment, which wasn't really meant to start a discussion about socialism/capitalism with the mollycoddled, under-informed Dailysun Mailgraph crowd, nor to anything else really. If I am looking for a response of whatever kind then it would be one that addresses what I actually said - if your reading comprehension doesn't reach far enough to recognise anything other than what the lot of you have been jumping on so far, well ... not my fault, is it?
So yeah ... if you haven't got anything to say about the actual topic, can I suggest you admit that to yourselves and kindly fuck off? Or doesn't your inflated ego fit through the door anymore?
Oh, so comments by anyone are not allowed? Just those that mirror your own? Typical response by a person who doesn't have an open mind and is looking for a positive feedback response - "my comment only counts if you agree with it!" - it's the sort of thing that has got psychotherapy into a bit of a problem.
And yeah ... it's pretty telling that in a comment section about womens clothing, a throw-away line, made in jest, prompts the Dailysun Mailgraph crowd to come crawling out of the woodwork and and enlighten the cycling world about the dangers of socialism ...
You know, it doesn't really help the dialogue if anything slightly left of the centre-right is constantly compared to Stalin. You only have to remember that fascism grew straight out of capitalism, you'd do well to keep that wee little plank in your own eye thing in mind ... if everything and everyone is reduced to a commodity, that's the road at the end of which the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz are towering over the hypocrisy of the petty bourgeoisie.
I think I prefer helmet threads....
If you're honestly, genuinely interested then I'm sure you'll happily do some reading on the topic, without the need for someone to educate you about it in the comment section of an article on women's clothing
... And given your previous comments I strongly suggest you look for sources decidedly outside of your narrow right-wing comfort zone.
Feels a bit strange seeing Sarah Drummond talking about how Cyclehack first came out of a meeting over coffee. I was there drinking coffee with Sarah and Jo, in Spoon on South Bridge. I wound what other ideas have been thought up in that same cafe?
Yes, what we need is a socialist revolution, no need to decide what to wear, as it will be decided for us, although it might not be available
, after all nice clothing is a bourgeois conceit, which a good comrade should reject.
Fixed that for you.
i am genuinely interested to know what a world socialist revolution would involve, and how the world would look during and after it. I would have thought that choice and free will lead to inequality, so not sure how you'd get more and better products in the people's utopia.
you know, when socialism doesn't work as expected, it's because there's not enough socialism ... Socialism is just Stalinism waiting to happen; and history proves it's true.
Yeah ... and you'll find you can say the exact same thing about capitalism. It's just fascism waiting to happen.
It's not the ideology that's the problem, it's people. There are always the arseholes ruining it for everyone else.
O
The irony being that it mirrored fascism in the end. How the world laughed at that one....they also ended up killing more people than Hitler. The far left don't like being reminded of that because it destroys their Utopian dreams, and rather makes their idealism look as bad as everything they hate and accuse others of....hypocrites.
"Shrink & Pink", now that's an apt phrase if I've ever seen one.
The whole thing is a bit of a chicken and egg kind of problem, isn't it? Given that there won't be any world socialist revolution doing away with capitalism any time soon (sadly), the fact that it's a largely male dominated sport (and, at least in the Greatest of all Britains, also a largely male dominated mode of transport) means that a lot of companies simply cannot be bothered to put in the effort - a simple rule of the market which won't be overturned by even the most ardent of efforts. Which in turn isn't exactly making more women folk pick up the bike cycling bicycle like Sarah correctly points out.
How to solve that? Not got a clue.