Santini

Cycle clothing technology has progressed at a pace since we first started cycling. Thankfully long gone are the days of scratchy woollen jerseys dangling ever lower as your ride progressed. And chamois cream is no longer an essential part of your kit bag, as we don’t actually ride on real leather anymore. We are all well used to the headline grabbing, technological innovation in the bikes we ride and components we use; the hardware of our sport. But now it seems, is the time of real software upgrading.

We saw Italian manufacturer Santini at a bike show recently and were impressed with the thinking and design that has gone into their new ranges. New and innovative uses of carbon and metallic yarns have produced textiles that go way beyond merely covering us. Now they warm us, shield us from UV rays, help us slip through the air, even providing us with vital supplements!

 

The Santini story began when Pietro Santini took over his sisters knitwear factory in Lallio, near Bergamo. Pietro’s love of cycling – he had raced as a boy – led him to decide to specialise in cycle clothing; a brave choice at the time, but one that’s paid off.

 

Santini still design and manufacture all their goods at their factory on the outskirts of Bergamo, Northern Italy. The company’s founder hasn’t been tempted to move to their manufacturing base as he believes that he has a duty to repay the community that helped raise him as a child and that by moving ‘we’d lose our control and our sense of pride that we put into our work’.

 

Santini have been at the forefront of many material advances from the early days of Lycra, to sublimation printing and anti-bacterial synthetic chamois, items that we take for granted in our cycling clothing now, but were massive leaps forward in their time. Over the following pages we’ll take a look at some of Santini’s latest offerings, with reviews to follow… (continued on page 2)>