Deus Ex Machina started in 2006 in a warehouse in Camperdown, a suburb of Sydney. The founder, Dare Jennings, had previously co-founded Mambo, an Australian surfwear brand known for irreverent graphics and a refusal to take the surf industry seriously. Deus applied a similar sensibility to a different intersection: custom motorcycles, surfing, and the specific culture that forms when people who ride bikes also surf and also care about good coffee. In Sydney, this intersection is bigger than it sounds.
Photo by Ryan Elwell / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0
The Camperdown location was both workshop and retail space — custom bikes being built in the back while t-shirts and coffee were sold in the front. The bikes were the draw; the merch was the business model. This is a structure that other brands have since copied extensively, but Deus was early to the formula: the authenticity of craft (custom motorcycles) funding the scalability of apparel (t-shirts and jerseys).
This mesh MX-style jersey is from Deus's moto-adjacent apparel line — gear that borrows the silhouette and construction of motocross jerseys but applies Deus's black-and-white aesthetic. It's not race gear. It's gear for people who appreciate race gear's form factor without needing its protective specifications. The mesh construction, the mock neck, the Deus script logo — it's a jersey designed for looking right on a custom bike in a parking lot, not for absorbing roost at speed.
Deus eventually expanded to Bali, Milan, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. The brand scaled. The original Camperdown energy — the warehouse with the custom bikes and the good coffee — is harder to find in the global version. This jersey is from before the global version.
Vintage. There's one.
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