Somewhere in the Fox Racing offices in the early 90s, someone in the graphics department proposed an all-over checkered pattern in neon yellow and cyan on a grey base. And nobody said no. This is important. In a modern gear company, this design would go through brand reviews, focus groups, retail feedback, and probably emerge as a tasteful blue-on-black. In Fox Racing in the early 90s, it just went to production.
Photo by Martin Pettitt / Flickr / CC BY 2.0
The visual culture of motocross in this period was defined by a simple principle: the graphics are not decoration, they're identity. A rider going 40 miles per hour through roost is a blur of color and shape. The bleacher spectator, the magazine photographer, the TV camera — they all need to read the jersey instantly. So the jersey has to be loud enough to cut through dust, distance, and motion blur. This is why MX graphics look the way they do: not because the designers lacked taste, but because the use case demanded volume.
Fox's Terrafirma videos — which projected 5,000 sales and hit 65,000 — helped establish the brand's visual identity beyond the track. Kids who never rode motocross watched Terrafirma because it was exciting and the soundtrack was good and teenage Ricky Carmichael and Travis Pastrana were in it talking about ice cream between crashes. Those kids absorbed Fox's visual language the way they absorbed MTV's visual language: through repetition and enthusiasm. The neon checkered jersey is from this era — the peak of Fox as both a gear company and a cultural brand.
At $125, this is the most expensive jersey in our vintage moto collection, and it should be. This colorway is rare because most of these got ridden into the ground. The ones that survived in vintage condition are the ones that were too loud to wear and too cool to throw away.
There's one.
Related Reading
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Browse the full vintage moto collection at Pemulis Water & Power.
Header image: Photo: Julian Henke via Unsplash