Our original look, “Aubergine,” was created by club members Keith Plunkett and Chris Neyen, with consultation and creative services by James Selman and Jeremy Dunn. Our primary font was chosen by James.

Keith is a professional package designer and freelance T-shirt and cycling-apparel designer who won Embrocation Cycling Journal’s T-shirt contest in 2009.

Chris is a mixed-media artist who holds an MFA and has exhibited in New York City, San Francisco and throughout the towns and cities near his home in the Lehigh Valley, who teaches design and typography at Moravian College, formerly designed books and magazines, received a Communication Arts Magazine Award of Excellence, and currently creates advertisements and marketing materials as a partner and the creative director of Perfect Pitch Creative.

James, co-founder of the weights&pulleys creative agency, previously worked at Wieden+Kennedy for ten years, with clients such as Microsoft, Coke, Oregon Tourism and Nike (where his emphasis was on running and cycling). He was responsible for the cycling documentary Road to Paris, the lauded retro RadioShack jersey worn by that team at 2010 Tour of the Gila, and has contributed designs to Mellow Johnny’s, the Hup United team kits and select other recipients. In 2009, he was one of the founders of Beloved Cycles.

Jeremy is a rider, writer, editor and designer who founded Embrocation Cycling Journal and has since disassociated from the current version, and who currently works in communications and marketing services for Rapha. We mostly follow him these days at The Athletic.

Our 2012 aesthetic, “La Vie Muur,” was created by Keith and Chris. Our homage to the legendary La Vie Claire professional cycling team was inspired not only by the squad’s exploits and palmares, but by the manner of the design’s birth. As retold best in Richard Moore’s book, “Slaying the Badger,” when Bernard Tapie launched the team in 1984, he hired at great expense a celebrated Parisian stylist to fashion a kit that would introduce to cycling an entirely new look, in keeping with the revolutionary team he hoped to unleash upon the world. At a private unveiling, dramatically, a curtain was drawn back to reveal a kit that directeur sportif Paul Kochli says was “…like a superman outfit, but in black! I can’t really describe it, but it was wrong, wrong!” A student who’d been allowed to attend the ceremony, a sort of design intern studying with the master, observed the dismay and stepped forward and said, “What about Mondrian?” She quickly sketched a brightly paneled jersey based on the color blocking of Piet Mondrian’s 1928 “Composition en rouge, jaune et bleu.” And, in the spite of excess and the opinion of the well-schooled and firmly established, simplicity, beauty, and audacity triumphed, birthing one of the most iconic designs in all of cycling. To this, we momentarily hold low for a genuflection our panache.

All of our kit design is sublimated onto Castelli clothing. Castelli is one of cycling’s most revered yet technologically aggressive apparel companies. They’re Italian through and through, though our kit was done up here in the U.S. by the custom workshop, Servizio Corse. The headquarters is hard against the Dolomites, near the Croce d’Aune — the mountain that inspired another Italian, Tullio Campagnolo, to invent the quick release when his cold-numbed fingers had difficulty undoing the hub nut to flop the rear wheel for a gear change in the 1927 Gran Premio della Vittoria. We don’t mention the year just to show off our fake erudition (in truth, we had to look it up). It’s there for perspective, because the roots of Castelli go back more than 50 years earlier than that. The Milanese tailor Vittore Gianni — that’s right, Victory Johnny — made uniforms for the futbol clubs AC Milan and Juventus, clothing for the Milan Ballet and, starting in the 1900s, cycling apparel for five-time Giro d’Italia winner Alfredo Binda. Armando Castelli worked there as a tailor and eventually took over the business. He was close with Fausto Coppi, who wore only Victory Johnny, the most distinctive example being a custom silk skinsuit. In 1974, Armando’s son Maurizio relaunched the brand as Castelli. Innovations include the first Lycra racing shorts, the first colored shorts, first sublimated jerseys, first synthetic cold-weather gear, first use of windproof fabrics and, at various times, the lightest jerseys and most aerodynamic jerseys ever made. Maurizio died in 1995, riding up the Cipressa, the legendary ascent of Milan-San Remo. We like the clothes — they look like racing kit should, they feel great and perform better than they look — but we wanted to wear Castelli because we also like the people who make the clothes. They’re good guys to ride with, even when you’re barely hanging onto one of their Croce d’Aune lunch rides.

Our occasional pretensions come from some source mysteriously inerasable to us, since we ourselves realize as well as you that all of this is nothing but a caper. But perhaps only through the most serious commitment to fucking about can one find out what it’s all fucking about.