A plaid shirt that doubles as a cool jacket isn’t a natural fit for a winter issue of a motorcycle magazine, you’ll be thinking, and in many ways you’d be right, but that’s before you think about it as a layer, which is how I’m wearing it right now.
Not that I haven’t had the opportunity to try it as a jacket too – thanks to a bit of winter sun on the Mediterranean coast a monthor so ago … well, you’ve got to make the most of your opportunities.
It’s far from being the only Kevlar-lined shirt – with pockets for armour – out there, and it is part of what I’m banging on about in this issue’s editor’s letter (AmV89): recognising the impact that Kevlar is starting to have in riding gear.
We have long celebrated not having to dress up like power rangers when we ride and this, and other things like Roland Sands Design’s Stoddard shirt, are the natural progression of that.
Outwardly it is a shirt in a cotton flannel brown check, and it would take a keen eyed observer to spot the lack of buttons – or more likely RSD-branded snap fasteners to match those that keep the top pocket closed – but to the wearer it is freedom.
Freedom to jump on a motorbike at any point without thinking about a leather jacket, wearing the shirt that you were wearing round the house or workshop … okay, so maybe not the workshop unless it has been converted to a ‘Man Cave’, and the only oil there being for your hair.
It wears like a regular western shirt with a couple of notable exceptions: it closes with a zipper, there is a hand-warmer pocket on each side and it’s lined. Twice. Once with Kevlar and a second time with a quilted satin lining.
Add armour and you can add a fourth item to that list, but you’d then tick the ‘maybe’ box in a questionnaire about comfort and functionality … and RSD recommend you need to go up a size.
Yes, of course armour will offer an additional level of protection in the event that you or someone else does something silly on the road – and we have been told for years that we need to dress for the crash, not the ride – but that it offers abrasion resistance up there with leather is a vast improvement over cotton alone, and certainly over cotton flannel.
And I do mean it wears like a shirt: winter has properly struck this week and I’ve been doing just that, over a t-shirt.
You’re not going to tuck it in should the fashion change again – the bulk of the lined hand-warmer pockets don’t lend themselves to that – hence the t-shirt, but usefully a technical t-shirt with some sort of odour absorption trickery worn underneath will keep this fresh. As will riding in it, in open country.
It is machine washable on a cold wash and needs to be line dried in the shade – as do most aramids – but I’m treating it more as an intermediate/outer layer and won’t be over-washing it.
As an intermediate layer, it’s not too bulky to be worn under a regular bike jacket, and if you wear it under a normal jacket, you will still have all the protection of the Stoddard below.
It won’t save your fashionable outerwear, but it could save your skin.
Having saved on fasteners on the front, they have been generously sprinkled everywhere else. The hand-warmer pockets get one each – not a flap because then it would start to look too much like a jacket – and the adjustable cuffs get three: two to give a wind-cheating tight grip round your wrists or a more casual shirt fit, and a third half way up the vent to keep it tight. Oh, and there are two more on the collar, to keep that snapped down, but they are smaller and purely functional with hidden studs.
Liberated from the tyranny of fixed buttons up the front and that fiddly one at the top if you’ve got the wrong collar size, the zipper runs higher than most top buttons, finishing with a high and tight seal round the neck. And being cotton flannel, a comfortable one.
The tightness of the cuffs and neck might have you thinking that this is windproof, but you’d be wrong.
They’re there to stop everything flapping round at speed, and the body of the shirt lets some breeze though making it an excellent summer riding shirt: unzipped to keep the temperature down when off the bike, zipper at half-mast riding in the city, with the front flapping to aid cooling, but zipped up when on the open road without overheating.
It’s enough to make you want summer to come back again … what am I saying? Book me a flight I’m heading south!