Cafe du Cycliste Women's Heidi Winter Jacket

The Café du Cycliste Heidi Winter Jacket looks unlike any other piece of cycling kit I've ever seen. There's a hint of Star Trek about it, but nonetheless it looks smart and a bit different.

Cote d'Azur-based Café du Cycliste have gone right back to basics rather than tweaking a standard jersey design, and the result is the Heidi. It's designed to be a performance jacket for winter riding, and despite its casual looks, it's certainly fully featured.

Made from a super technical Italian fabric, it has windproof panels on the torso, shoulders and fronts of the sleeves, while the inside face of the fabric is brushed for comfort and insulation as well as assisting in moisture transfer away from the skin.

Zipped vents in the shoulders aim to give extra ventilation options if things warm up. The front zip is offset for comfort and ease of single-handed use, there's a hem gripper, two pouch pockets at the rear and a generous zipped pocket.

The fit of the Heidi is on the small side, and even taking into account the fact that it's a performance garment and therefore intended to be snug, it's worth considering going up a size if you're borderline on stated sizing. There's excellent length in the arms, but taller women may find it a little short in the body.

The fabric is extremely comfortable, either next to skin or with a thin base layer. This jacket is sufficiently warm that I really only needed a thin baselayer beneath it, if that.

It's worth bearing in mind that the windproof panels in the sleeves make synthetic baselayers a better performing option than merino, from a moisture wicking point of view. Things got a touch clammy with a merino baselayer, but were much improved with synthetic.

It's super warm to wear, and the shoulder vents are a nice touch to give extra flexibility, but it's strictly a cold, dry day garment as it's fundamentally not designed to be worn in the wet. A lightweight shell jacket would pop into the rear pocket nicely though for just those emergencies.

It has fast become a real 'go to' jacket for deep winter wear, but if there was one thing I'd change it would be the colour. Despite the fact that the grey and black combo keeps things smart, stylish and attractive to everyone, it's just not a good colour for dreary, grey, winter roads. Perhaps a higher-vis alternative might be something to consider in the future, or even just brighter coloured accents here and there.

Verdict

Really well-designed, superbly comfortable winter jacket/jersey but unfortunately road-coloured