LET’S SEE…
HIP HIP
Flying Solo Gear Killswitch pack - Price - $60
ON YOUR HIP, hipsters. There is no doubt that some motorcycle clothing is a bit on the… utilitarian side. Well, a lot of motorcycle clothing. All right, most of it. We keep reading that hipsters are reluctant to take up the motorcycling lifestyle (and despite the horrible word, that’s what it is) and I wonder whether the… utilitarian clothing is part of the reason.
There is smart-looking gear that you can wear on the bike, of course, but at times it trades off motorcycle-usefulness for looks, because it isn’t designed purely for use on a bike. It’s good, then, to see a seriously hip product that’s also great for riding – that has, in fact, been designed directly for the purpose.
When Canadian-born, Melbourne-based product designer Amanda Chan totaled her GSX-R600, she spent some of her recovery time thinking about the lessons of the crash. One of them was, ‘keep hard objects away from your body, or at least outside the padding’. As someone who wore the imprint of his mobile phone (one of the old ‘bricks’) on his chest for a while after stepping off and landing on it, I fervently agree). While she was designing a way of doing that, she thought that there should be other advantages to the resulting product – like keeping things easily accessible. What she came up with was the Killswitch Pack. While it looks like a small bum bag, it is actually considerably more. Each pack is handmade from a sandwich of canvas, waterproof ripstop nylon and Kevlar-Carbon fibre hybrid textile. Not only does the four-layer design make it waterproof, it also makes it abrasion, heat and puncture resistant. The 20x10x1cm package has a waterproof zipper, an external key holder and – wait for it – a belt made from
