Blog
The Fox Racing Graphics Department Had No Governor and It Showed (In the Best Way)
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...
Fox Racing Made Twenty Shades of Blue and Every One of Them Sold
Fox Racing's relationship with the color blue is longer and more complicated than it needs to be, which is why it's interesting. Over the course of the 90s, Fox released...
Fox Racing After the Neon: When MX Gear Learned to Use Its Inside Voice
Geoff Fox started making leather motocross pants in 1974 in Cholame, California — a town so small it barely qualifies as a town. The name on the label was his...
Why Blue and Red Became the Default Motocross Colorway
If you've ever flipped through a motocross magazine from any decade, you've noticed something: blue and red are everywhere. Not as a planned thing, not as a league mandate, just...
FLY Racing and the Riders Who Paid Their Own Entry Fees
Every sport has a tier of participant that the media mostly ignores and the industry mostly takes for granted. In motocross, it's the local racer. The guy (or increasingly, girl)...
Albert Einstein's Face Is on More T-Shirts Than Any Scientist Who Ever Lived. Here's Why.
Albert Einstein died in 1955. His image rights are managed by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to which he bequeathed his personal papers and intellectual property. In theory, putting Einstein's...
Deus Ex Machina Started in a Sydney Warehouse and Ended Up Everywhere
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...
The Gulf War Lasted 42 Days and the T-Shirt Industry Was Ready on Day One
The Mother of All Merch The Mother of All Bootlegs I Flew 3,000 Miles to Make a Pun This Will Not Stand Smart Bombs, Dumb Shirts New World Order Support...
The 90s Military Graphic Tee: When Gun Show Merch Crossed Over
Photo by U.S. Department of Defense / Public Domain There's a specific genre of American t-shirt that exists at the intersection of military culture, graphic design, and the kind of...
How AXO Sport Brought Italian Design to American Dirt
The story of AXO Sport in American motocross is really a story about what happens when one country's design philosophy meets another country's sport. Italy had been making motorcycle gear...
The Black Jersey in Motocross: When a Rider Was Too Fast for Color
In a sport defined by neon, a black jersey was a statement. Motocross in the late 80s and 90s was a color war — AXO's Gelprints, Fox's zebra stripes, Answer's...
AXO Was an Italian Brand That Conquered American Dirt
AXO Sport was Italian. This matters more than most people realize. The American motocross gear market in the late 80s and early 90s was dominated by domestic brands — Fox...