Test Your Mettle

At Pearson, we design the bikes in our Road collection to ensure you get the most from your riding experience. We design them to provide an optimal position, then build them to guarantee years of comfortable use. It’s a philosophy we’ve carried over into our new collection of Road clothing.

The new Road Insulated Jacket. A lightweight but robust outer layer, it’s designed for colder days. (The name is a bit of a spoiler.) Those days when you want to prove you can cut it, that you can ride long and hard, no matter how far the temperature drops. It’s why we’ve called it Test Your Mettle. So, you can show other riders what you’re made of. (You could, on the other hand, just use it to keep warm.)

Creating clothing that meets the same high standards as our bikes has proved an exciting challenge. For the past 159 years, we Pearsons have been more accustomed to testing conventional ‘metal’, the kind that once went into our ironwork (we’re descended from blacksmiths), and then into our steel bike frames. The variation we used in naming the jacket, a uniquely British measure of perseverance and character, dates back to the 16th century. Shakespeare couldn’t get enough of it, dolloping the phrase liberally into a number of his plays, notably Macbeth. “Bring forth men-children only,” Macbeth pleads with his wife, “for thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males.” But then, if you were married to a chronic social-climber and living in a windy old castle, you’d take comfort where you could get it.

Who knows, if old Macbeth had wrapped himself in our cosy new Insulated Jacket, it might have warmed his heart enough for things to have turned out better? (They could hardly have turned out worse.) Out on the road, the jacket will warm a lot more than your heart. It features cutting-edge fabrics, including a technical outer for windproofing and breathability, particularly on the chest and arms. A water-repellent finish keeps the rain out and the back of the jacket also has a longer tail, for extra protection from road spray.

The jacket is well suited to long days on the bike. There’s plenty of storage, for example, including a zipped valuables pocket for a phone and two open storage pockets for everything else. The fabric is superbly lightweight, simply requiring a short or long-sleeve base layer beneath to maintain optimum warmth, from below 10C to below freezing. Extremely versatile, it’s equally at home on shorter rides and perfect for wearing around town.

Shakespeare could never have imagined the extent to which his work would endure. That’s where we have the advantage. (And how often can you say that?) We deliberately build our bikes to last because we believe in sustainability. The same applies to our clothing. The Insulated Jacket is, crucially, made almost entirely from recycled materials. For instance, 70% of the fabric used in the chest and arms is produced from recycled polyester. And the back of the jacket fares even better, being made from a fully recycled Italian ‘Roubaix’ material. That’s 78% recycled nylon and 22% recycled Lycra, to be precise. What you might call boring but important.

The jacket’s Polartec® Alpha lining is developed for special forces by a company with over 100 years of fabric innovations, also made from 100% recycled fabrics and provides ‘active’ insulation. That means it releases excess heat rather than absorbing moisture, so you’ll stay perfectly warm without getting sweaty. And because cold days are often darker ones, the jacket features a reflective Pearson Rose to help you stay seen and safe.