Hi,
Friday, September 26, 2008, 10:40:56 AM, Tom Dalton wrote:
> You have to hand it to Rapha. All in one stroke they lay claim to
> what i s pure and old school, promise to deliver an experience
> reminiscent of cycling's "drug-free" glory days and then offer
> products that are so shoc kingly expensive that they one up all
> competitors in contemporary cycling's sad race to make the
> sport ever-more exclusive. Rapha will do wha t's profitable, but I
> find the whole thing pretty nauseating. Cotton cyc ling caps are
> old school to the point of being useless, since we all wear h elmets
> now, but $45 cotton cycling caps just insult our collective intellig
> ence.
I have one of those (it is $40 BTW, not $45). I guess I'm lacking in collective intelligence, but the cap is very nice actually (to the point that I'm likely to buy a second one). It is not made of "cotton", it is "Schoeller 3XDry cotton" - and whatever that means, it indeed is "highly water resistant, windproof and breathable" as their ad copy insists - great as rainwear IMHO. And it comes in large size.
> These hats are, however, just the right thing to sport down
> at the coffee shop if you want to out cool all the fat guys in $319
> Assos bibs by kicking it old school in order to reject all the evil
> they represent. Rapha stuff is especially helpful for building
> classic cred when you weren \u2019t actually riding three years ago, let
> alone in those glory days that Ra pha is now exploiting, but who
> knows, maybe you can buy authenticity.
--
Cheers,
Dmitry Yaitskov,
Toronto, Canada.