A Brief, Genuinely Strange History of How Motocross Gear Ended Up on Runways

Pemulis Water & Power • Outer Sunset, San Francisco

In 1991, AXO Sport released a line of motocross jerseys using a process called Gelprint — all-over graphics baked into the fabric at $50 per piece. They were hot to wear. They looked insane. The idea was that riders going forty miles an hour through roost should be identifiable from the bleachers. This was a practical consideration, not a fashion one.

Twenty-seven years later, Supreme released a collab with Fox Racing. It included motocross jerseys, pants, goggles, gloves, and a full helmet. GQ covered it. Shortly after, 2 Chainz was photographed at an NBA game wearing a Supreme x Fox jersey courtside. This also got covered. Not by motocross media. By fashion media.

Here is a partial list of things that happened in between:

In 2017, Rihanna opened her Fenty x Puma runway show by riding in on a motocross bike. Not as a prop — she rode it in herself, in full gear. The fashion press treated this as a statement about the future of sportswear. The motocross press, to the extent it noticed, was mostly confused.

Also in 2017, GQ published a piece on why NASCAR jackets — logo-heavy, color-blocked, aggressively branded — were resonating with menswear. The argument was that what looked garish in 1993 looked, by 2017, like exactly what streetwear had been trying to do for a decade. Racing apparel had been doing the thing before the thing had a name.

Around the same time, Vogue reported that Drake had bought Alpinestars gear off the rack. Not for racing. For wearing. Alpinestars makes protective motorcycle equipment. Drake bought some because he liked how it looked.

Then Balenciaga worked with Alpinestars. Then Palace worked with Mercedes-AMG. Then Kith worked with BMW and made a whole lifestyle collection including redesigned BMW logos on tracksuits. The line between motorsport and fashion had not blurred — it had simply been crossed in both directions enough times that it stopped being a line.

Why did this happen? The honest answer is that motorsport apparel was always doing what streetwear values: bold branding, functional patterning, technical materials, logos that signal something to people who know what they mean and mean nothing to people who don't. A Fox Racing jersey from 1992 has sponsor logos, contrast paneling, mesh venting, and a silhouette designed for maximum range of motion under body armor. It looks, to someone coming at it cold in 2025, like something a designer made. It was made by engineers solving a real problem — how to keep a rider cool and identifiable at speed — and the aesthetic fell out of the engineering.

The Terrafirma video helps explain the cultural pipeline. Fox Racing released it in 1991, projected to sell about 5,000 copies. It sold 65,000. The sequel sold 85,000. The films featured early footage of Ricky Carmichael and Travis Pastrana as teenagers, and they circulated through skate and surf culture the same way mixtapes did — copied, passed around, watched until the tape wore out. The kids who grew up watching Terrafirma and then became the people who ran streetwear brands in the 2010s were not making a calculated crossover decision when they started working with Fox. They were going back to something they actually remembered.

The vintage jerseys that exist now are what they always were: functional garments made to get destroyed. A lot of them did get destroyed — cut off in ERs, shredded in crashes, worn into the ground over two months of regular riding and thrown away. The ones that survived are the ones that weren't used up, which means they carry a particular kind of luck. Clean, intact, original — not because someone preserved them, usually, but because someone put them in a box and forgot about them, and the box survived long enough for the culture to catch up.

That catching-up is now complete. The AXO gelprint that was hot and weird in 1991 and used up by 1993 is, in 2025, the thing people are looking for. The brands doing full-scale runway collaborations are reverse-engineering what that original gear was doing. The original gear is still out there, in boxes, one of one.

Shop the vintage moto collection — jerseys, pants, and gear from the era — at Pemulis Water & Power

Header image: Photo: CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons