AXO Made the Prettiest Jerseys in Motocross. Then They Made Pants to Match.
The jerseys got the gelprint. The pants got the Italian engineering. Both got destroyed at roughly the same rate.
Photo by Martin Pettitt / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
Pemulis Water & Power • February 2026
AXO Sport's jerseys from the early nineties are the ones people remember — the gelprint graphics, the colors that shouldn't work together but did, the Italian approach to a sport that America owned. But AXO also made pants, and the pants tell a different story about what it meant to be an Italian gear company competing in American motocross.
Italian motorcycle gear has always been better-looking than it strictly needs to be. This isn't an accident — it's a design philosophy that treats aesthetics as a form of engineering, not a coat of paint applied after the engineering is done. AXO pants from the era reflect this: the panel construction is cleaner than it needed to be, the colorway coordination with the jersey line was deliberate rather than approximate, and the overall impression is of a company that couldn't bring itself to make something purely utilitarian even when pure utility was the job description.
The result is a motocross pant that looks, thirty years later, like it was designed rather than assembled. Which it was. The panels follow lines that make visual sense as well as structural sense. The color blocking is intentional. For a garment that was meant to be ground into California hardpack until the knees gave out, it has an unusual amount of care in it.
We have a pair of AXO Sport racing pants in the shop. Vintage, intact, from the gelprint era. One of one.