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wear it's at
consider the humble jersey. perhaps unsurprisingly, we tend to take our cycle jerseys for granted, and that's almost how it should be. after all, even though there have been endless articles about frame fabrication, it would take a special kind of cyclist to consider the finer points of silver brazing, while sprinting for the road sign on a sunday morning. but with an apparent increase in the number of firms offering to custom design or print your team or club jersey, a basic understanding of the possibilities probably wouldn't go amiss.
what you are unlikely to have access to, unless money is seriously no object, is a jersey akin to those worn in the seventies and early eighties; wool, with flock lettering. the nearest offering to this available today is from british trendsetters, rapha, and at least one jersey range from new zealand's solo. rapha employ sportwool almost exclusively throughout their jersey range, which is dyed to their colour specifications, and with most logos embroidered. the exception to this would be the rapha condor recycling team jerseys which are, again, sportwool, but with the white logos applied by screenprinting on the surface.
solo, from down under, construct their equipe range of long sleeve jackets/jerseys from mapp, a similar merino/polyester fabric to sportwool, but in this case any logos are permanently 'flocked' onto the outer surface.
prendas ciclismo, who have possibly the largest catalogue of retro jerseys, generally stay away from getting involved in the design process. "none of us are graphic designers by trade. so mick and i feel this should be left to people who know what they are doing. however, with our extensive retro jersey programme, we do get involved in a great deal of design research." said prendas' andy storey. "some of the jerseys that we go about securing the rights to reproduce are simply our favourites, maybe because of the look of them (brooklyn) or because of the memories that they invoke (reynolds). our retro programme was first started by reproducing the iconic peugeot jersey (which is still going some seven years later), but we have gone as far back as the 1950s with mercier." tellingly, many of the prendas retro collection are modern day reproductions of the wool and flocked versions of yesteryear, re-created in the more ubiquitous modern fabric: lycra
but when we begin to consider the lycra jersey, which is certainly the mainstream offering from the majority of cycle clothing providers, we begin to have some (restricted) options as to how these might turn out. solo's paul mason explains: "nearly all cycle jerseys are printed using dye sublimation. this involves printing the design in reverse onto a special sublimation paper, which is then placed ink-side down onto blank fabric (it now reads correctly) and pressed in a heat-press. the ink is transferred onto the fabric - more importantly it is actually embedded in the fabric, rather than sitting on the surface like a typical t-shirt print. this is all done on the fabric panels before the jersey is sewn up."
this is how the majority of jersey design reaches the lycra or polyester these days, and there are undoubted advantages in doing it this way, particularly where commercial sponsorship enters the fray. with more and more emphasis on brand identity these days, it doesn't seem too unlikely that any given sponsor might like to have their logo in much the same colour as it appears on the side of their vans or headed notepaper. in commercial printing, by which i mean something like a colour magazine, all those different colours that exist in photographs and adverts are achieved by the use of only four colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (cmyk). by carefully printing different dot densities of each colour (look close enough at a printed page and you'll see) it is possible to fool the human eye into believing it is viewing in living colour. paul mason from solo again:"have a look at a typical trade jersey nowadays and you'll notice it's probably got half-a-dozen sponsors names on it. each of these may have several different colours in their logo and this is where digital printing comes into its own.
so the sublimation process is carried out by setting up artwork on a computer, then printing onto the paper using a large format digital ink printer. alan blue of scottish based endura/tal clothing said, "the printer is just like those found in a graphics studio, but we substitute the regular ink cartridges with inks appropriate to the sublimation process. this has reduced the setup costs drastically in the past few years, and subsequently the costs involved in smaller runs of each design" each component of the jersey - sleeves, front, back and side panels - is printed separately, with a separate piece of paper printed for each component of each jersey..
however, as comedian jiminy cricket would have said, 'there's more'; dye sublimation was preceded by a more complex process - screen printing. solo cyclewear of auckland new zealand use this method exclusively to produce their classique range of jerseys. paul mason explained,"with this method a separate piece of film is created for each colour used on the jersey. the film is placed onto a mesh screen which has been coated with a light sensitive emulsion and exposed to the light. the exposed areas are hardened whilst the unexposed areas are washed away allowing ink to pass through. each colour is printed separately, with the image being built up colour by colour."
"our aim is to produce a jersey with rich and vivid colours and a 'sharp' print. if you take a close look at a sublimation printed cycle jersey, compared to a screen-printed jersey, the image will be quite fuzzy around the edges.". this is where the 'old' technology of screen-printing is seen as superior to digital printing. in solo's case, the screen-printing inks are mixed to paul's specification - standard digital inks can only achieve a restricted range of colours. screen-printing inks, generally speaking, are more resistant to fading, and can produce a much richer, denser black ink. large areas of solid colour are perfect for screen-printing but more difficult to achieve with digital printing.
of course, screen printing comes at a price; solo's latest konig jersey sells for £63 ($117) as opposed to around £40 ($80) for a standard trade jersey. as described by alan from endura, dye sublimation has minimal setup costs, whereas for every colour used in the design, a separate screen has to be created. and that costs money. and the march of technology isn't making the quest for perfection any easier. solo's inks are made in italy, and it was a delay in acquiring one of the colours that subsequently delayed the release of the konig design.
in practice, the sublimation print is the one we'll most often be exposed to, particularly if you're the poor sod left with the job of designing the 2009 edition of the buckled wheelers' team strip. with the exception of the sportwool/mapp incarnations, it's worth bearing in mind that both screen printing and digital printing are applied to plain white fabric - in this sense, there is no such thing as white ink.
after all that, the humble jersey will never seem the same again.
i am indebted to alan blue at endura/tal for both info and photos, andy storey of prendas for info and the santini photos, simon huntsman and zepherine craster at rapha, and particularly paul mason of solo, without whose input, this article would not have appeared.
posted on monday 28th april, updated tuesday 29th
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