The Message Inside the Collar: What 90s Motocross Brands Whispered to Their Riders

Pemulis Water & Power • Outer Sunset, San Francisco

Turn a vintage motocross jersey inside out and look at the collar. On Fox jerseys from the mid-nineties you might find: Dream On. Or: Attitude is everything. On a 1995 AXO: Face the future! On a 1994 Sinisalo: This might be the best thing that could happen to you. Some brands put messages inside both cuffs as well — little slogans stitched into the lining where only the person wearing the jersey would ever see them.

This detail is not in the catalogs. It doesn't show up in the magazine ads. It has no value to a spectator standing at the side of a track watching a rider go by at speed. The inside-collar message was for one person: the rider. Which makes it one of the most interesting things about nineties motocross gear, a category not typically known for subtlety.

The outside of an MX jersey from this period was doing a lot of screaming. AXO pioneered all-over "Gelprint" in 1991 — a process developed in Asia that wrapped the entire jersey in vibrant graphic color at $50 a piece, expensive for the time. Within a year every other brand had copied it. Fox was running zebra stripes, spider-webs, barbed wire. Jeff "Chicken" Matiasevich wore a pink and blue spider-web combination that riders still reference by colorway thirty years later. The jerseys were designed to be readable at speed from the bleachers, which meant high contrast, loud patterns, and color combinations that violated any reasonable theory of taste — what one period observer described as "yellow, purple and orange? yes, please." The point was to be seen. The brands competed on visibility the way race cars compete on livery.

The inside of the collar was the opposite logic. It was private. It was the brand talking directly to the person paying attention enough to turn the thing inside out, or the rider pulling the jersey over their head before a race and catching the text for the thousandth time. Dream On. Face the future. It's a strange move for a mass-market gear company — putting a message somewhere almost nobody will ever read it. But it fits the mentality of the era: motocross in the late eighties and nineties was a sport with an enormous gap between what the spectacle looked like from outside and what the actual experience of doing it felt like from inside. The outside was loud graphics and neon and Damon Bradshaw signing to AXO for seven times his Fox salary. The inside was a seventeen-year-old pulling on their jersey before a race at a local track somewhere in the Central Valley, reading Attitude is everything stitched into the collar for the hundredth time, and meaning it.

The gear was also genuinely designed to be destroyed. Motocross pants from the era were replaced every couple of months from regular use. Some jerseys ended their careers in emergency rooms — there are enough accounts of gear being cut off at hospitals after crashes that it reads less like individual bad luck and more like an accepted occupational variable. The ones that survived intact, that made it to a closet instead of a trauma bay or a landfill, are the ones that were either spares or pulled off the track before they could be used up. That's why clean examples are hard to find now. The jersey wasn't made to be saved. It was made to be worn until it wasn't wearable.

What's left is a small percentage of the original production — pieces that survived by accident, that lived in boxes or drawers or the back of a parent's garage for thirty years because someone decided not to ride them one day. Each one has that original inside-collar message still stitched in, still readable. The outside graphics are what people talk about. The inside is the part worth looking for.

We source from thrift stores, estate sales, and directly from collectors. Every piece is one of one.

Browse the vintage moto collection at Pemulis Water & Power

Header image: Photo: Debbie Matthews, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons