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Video: Women in cycling - Beyond Shrink & Pink

Three women from cycling design talk about gender and bikes

A short documentary has been produced to highlight successful women in the field of cycle design.

Called Beyond Shrink & Pink, the five minute piece shows three women in cycling design and their contribution to cycling culture. These are designers who, like most of us, believe women's cycling gear should be more than just a smaller, pinker version of the men's kit, and highlight that women have a unique contribution to make in the field.

For Alessandra Cusatelli, art director at Cinelli, the bicycle "is the first present we are given, our first moment of independence."

"It is a thing full of emotion," she says.

With 15 years designing Cinelli bikes, the woman responsible for overseeing their colourful decoration since 2001, Cusatelli calls the Vigorelli bike her first love, a design that has been copied many times.

Beyond shrink & pink - Women in cycling documentary from Giulio De Blasio on Vimeo.

Alex Feechan, fashion designer at women's active wear company, Findra, saw what women were wearing cycling and realised "it wasn't flattering, it wasn't well designed, it wasn't considered, and it certainly wasn't designed with females in mind." Feechan said what was designed for women too often seemed an afterthought of the men's collection.

"From a design point of view the products looked like they suffered from the 'shrink it and pink it' approach," she says.

Taking men's products, reducing them in size with a pink stripe or flower, is not the way to appeal to women, she says.

Sarah Drummond is director at Cyclehack, the annual event that sees cyclists brainstorming solutions to everyday bike-related problems.

She says: "If you think of women's marketing, it is a lot of pink Lycra, and that's not really going to encourage people to get on their bike."

Drummond says women's and men's designs don't have to be pigeonholed by gender and points out Cyclehack's most famous output, the Penny in yo' Pants, that weighs down women's skirts for cycling, was designed by a man.

A follow-up to the video will feature details of a special charity auction, with a bespoke bike the prize.

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15 comments

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bumble | 8 years ago
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consider that the average woman is 5'4"...

Most women are riding bikes that don't fit, and are increasingly difficult/impossible to be made to fit. Yes, i'm talking about cranks.

Buy a new bike, and there's a good chance you can't fit square-taper cranks (it'll be BB90, or something similar). Which means you'll be limited to 165mm as a minimum crank length.

When it comes to cranks (surely a key factor of 'bike-fit') we haven't even got around to shrinking-and-pinking them.

165 is only 6% less than 175. No other bike component comes in such a small range of sizes. This is daft. You can adjust your saddle height all you like, but if your cranks are too long you'll never have comfortable leg extension AND knee flexion.

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userfriendly | 8 years ago
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Oh FFS ... get over yourself. I was merely pointing out (for the third frigging time now) that that particular kind of discussion is just a wee tiny little bit off topic here.

No, I'm not looking for "a positive feedback response" - not to my throw-away line in my first comment, which wasn't really meant to start a discussion about socialism/capitalism with the mollycoddled, under-informed Dailysun Mailgraph crowd, nor to anything else really. If I am looking for a response of whatever kind then it would be one that addresses what I actually said - if your reading comprehension doesn't reach far enough to recognise anything other than what the lot of you have been jumping on so far, well ... not my fault, is it?

So yeah ... if you haven't got anything to say about the actual topic, can I suggest you admit that to yourselves and kindly fuck off? Or doesn't your inflated ego fit through the door anymore?

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Colin Peyresourde | 8 years ago
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Oh, so comments by anyone are not allowed? Just those that mirror your own? Typical response by a person who doesn't have an open mind and is looking for a positive feedback response - "my comment only counts if you agree with it!" - it's the sort of thing that has got psychotherapy into a bit of a problem.

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userfriendly | 8 years ago
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And yeah ... it's pretty telling that in a comment section about womens clothing, a throw-away line, made in jest, prompts the Dailysun Mailgraph crowd to come crawling out of the woodwork and and enlighten the cycling world about the dangers of socialism ...

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userfriendly | 8 years ago
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You know, it doesn't really help the dialogue if anything slightly left of the centre-right is constantly compared to Stalin. You only have to remember that fascism grew straight out of capitalism, you'd do well to keep that wee little plank in your own eye thing in mind ... if everything and everyone is reduced to a commodity, that's the road at the end of which the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz are towering over the hypocrisy of the petty bourgeoisie.

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crikey | 8 years ago
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I think I prefer helmet threads....

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userfriendly | 8 years ago
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If you're honestly, genuinely interested then I'm sure you'll happily do some reading on the topic, without the need for someone to educate you about it in the comment section of an article on women's clothing  29 ... And given your previous comments I strongly suggest you look for sources decidedly outside of your narrow right-wing comfort zone.

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Kim | 8 years ago
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Feels a bit strange seeing Sarah Drummond talking about how Cyclehack first came out of a meeting over coffee. I was there drinking coffee with Sarah and Jo, in Spoon on South Bridge. I wound what other ideas have been thought up in that same cafe?

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birzzles | 8 years ago
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Yes, what we need is a socialist revolution, no need to decide what to wear, as it will be decided for us, although it might not be available  24 , after all nice clothing is a bourgeois conceit, which a good comrade should reject.

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userfriendly replied to birzzles | 8 years ago
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birzzles wrote:

a stalinist revolution

Fixed that for you.

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birzzles replied to userfriendly | 8 years ago
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userfriendly wrote:
birzzles wrote:

a stalinist revolution

Fixed that for you.

i am genuinely interested to know what a world socialist revolution would involve, and how the world would look during and after it. I would have thought that choice and free will lead to inequality, so not sure how you'd get more and better products in the people's utopia.

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frogg replied to userfriendly | 8 years ago
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userfriendly wrote:
birzzles wrote:

a stalinist revolution

Fixed that for you.

you know, when socialism doesn't work as expected, it's because there's not enough socialism ... Socialism is just Stalinism waiting to happen; and history proves it's true.

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userfriendly replied to frogg | 8 years ago
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CheapMonk wrote:

you know, when socialism doesn't work as expected, it's because there's not enough socialism ... Socialism is just Stalinism waiting to happen; and history proves it's true.

Yeah ... and you'll find you can say the exact same thing about capitalism. It's just fascism waiting to happen.

It's not the ideology that's the problem, it's people. There are always the arseholes ruining it for everyone else.

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Colin Peyresourde replied to frogg | 8 years ago
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O

CheapMonk wrote:
userfriendly wrote:
birzzles wrote:

a stalinist revolution

Fixed that for you.

you know, when socialism doesn't work as expected, it's because there's not enough socialism ... Socialism is just Stalinism waiting to happen; and history proves it's true.

The irony being that it mirrored fascism in the end. How the world laughed at that one....they also ended up killing more people than Hitler. The far left don't like being reminded of that because it destroys their Utopian dreams, and rather makes their idealism look as bad as everything they hate and accuse others of....hypocrites.

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userfriendly | 8 years ago
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"Shrink & Pink", now that's an apt phrase if I've ever seen one.

The whole thing is a bit of a chicken and egg kind of problem, isn't it? Given that there won't be any world socialist revolution doing away with capitalism any time soon (sadly), the fact that it's a largely male dominated sport (and, at least in the Greatest of all Britains, also a largely male dominated mode of transport) means that a lot of companies simply cannot be bothered to put in the effort - a simple rule of the market which won't be overturned by even the most ardent of efforts. Which in turn isn't exactly making more women folk pick up the bike cycling bicycle like Sarah correctly points out.

How to solve that? Not got a clue.  7

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