by Bert Meinders

Created on: June 10, 2009   Last Updated: July 06, 2009

What you wear when riding a motorcycle is influenced by many factors. I still remember the discomfort of riding my XS650 in torrential rain one Christmas eve, wearing leather jeans, boots, gloves, full-face helmet, gloves and a T-shirt. Two friends, from the same party, riding an RD350 and (I think) an XS400, were similarly attired and similarly uncomfortable. Even in Summer, being that wet on a bike is no fun at all, so why were we doing this?

We were on our way to the police station to report the theft of our expensive leather jackets. The irritating rhubarb thrasher who had denounced our bikes at length as "Jap crap" had finally given us a break from his boring harangue. Or so we thought. Then someone came in and told us that our bikes had been pushed off their stands. While everybody was watching us picking them up and inspecting them for damage, he was inside stealing our jackets.

Bike wear has its fashions, its fads, its sartorial malfeasance's, and its never-go-out-of-style classics. It has its share of the effortlessly stylish dressers, and there is sure to be someone, somewhere, who wears a tartan scarf, denim jacket, and Ugg boots (a sort of antipodean mukluk made of sheepskin). I bet he rides a born-to-be-mild 250 cruiser. In my early years on bikes - Oh, all right, I'll admit it; the 1970s - surprisingly few of my friends actually bought proper riding clothes, preferring to improvise with ordinary light rain jackets, gumboots or even just shoes, and open-face helmets without visors or goggles. Naturally, real men didn't wear gloves. None of this applied to the women in our group; they dressed properly without prompting.

I had the classic, always-in-style essentials. A black leather jacket, cream silk scarf, traffic cop gloves (black and reflective silver, with good long cuffs, and cheap), proper motorcycle boots which I had made by a local craftsman, and blue jeans in good weather. In wet weather I had a pair of baggy yellow PVC overtrousers, because comfort matters more than appearance. I had a full-face helmet and an open-face with goggles. Overdoing it a bit on a Honda CB175, I admit, but I graduated to a CB450 after a mercifully brief spell with a Ural 650 on which it hardly mattered what I wore because the damn thing usually wouldn't start anyway. When I bought a Yamaha XS650 I also bought a set of two-piece touring leathers, and a second full-face helmet for my girlfriend (who dumped me a month later).

Back on two wheels in the Spring

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