British designer Paul Smith was gifted a racing bike for his 11th birthday; as a teenager he sought to go pro, competing in races and time trials as part of Nottingham Beeston Road Club until a crash put an end to his ambitions. Despite this – and a shift to fashion after the success of his initial Nottingham boutique, which opened in the 1970s – cycling has remained a prescient inspiration throughout his career at the London-based eponymous label (he even released a Thames & Hudson-published book on the subject, Paul Smith’s Cycling Scrapbook, in 2016).
Smith’s relationship with Rapha – a cycling brand founded by Simon Mottram in 2004 that aims to ‘to inspire the world to live life by bike’ – is also longstanding. Smith has been friends with Mottram for over two decades and collaborated on several collections. One of the earliest collaborations was a co-branded cycling jersey in 2007, when the first leg of the Tour de France was held in London. ‘Paul and I are really just two long-time fans of cycling – something that brought us together from the earliest days of our friendship. We share decades of excitement about racing and veneration of cycling heroes,’ explains Mottram.
