Bike Fashion: Formula for Cool

I really want to call this my Bike Fashion Outfit for Winter Riding. But like my favorite bike-blogging San Francisco mom, I also have absolutely zero winter biking credibility. San Francisco is pretty much 60 degrees all year round. Any ten degree swing in either direction and people around these parts tend to lose their sh**.

On the other hand, the consistency of our weather conditions does give me a chance to really perfect an outfit formula. It's something like this:

The American Apparel Disco Pant is like a fashionable version of the full Lycra kit favored by MAMILs. Hey, even I like to cut down on wind-resistance if I'm going to put more than ten miles on my bike in a given day.

Ironically, the magically-smoothing material is free of any Lycra/spandex but still has plenty of stretch. The presence of not only pockets, but also a front-fly zipper pushes these babies out of leggings territory.

Dome-style helmets (like my Giro Surface Multi-Sport) are way better at preventing helmet head than the vented, sporty style helmets that most bike shops are infested with seem to carry.

But my favorite style innovation is my scarf, which isn't a scarf at all. It's actually a color chart for textile design. Hundreds of colors, organized by hue and intensity, are printed onto a test yard of fabric.

Each little square is also printed with its unique digital color code. This way a designer can get an idea of how the colors of a digitally-rendered design will look on digitally-printed fabric.

I ordered the color chart when I was planning on doing some textile design through Spoonflower. But nothing came of my designs because I couldn't come up with anything cooler than the chart itself.