Cycling Streetwear Done Right: Cinelli x Chas — Drop 6
Cycling streetwear is having a moment. But for us, the line between the bike and everyday life was never really there to begin with.
We've been making apparel since long before "cycling lifestyle" became a marketing category. Since 1948, we've been part of the worlds of racing, urban cycling, and design in equal measure — not as a sponsor, but as an active participant. The people who ride Cinelli, wear Cinelli. The people who wear Cinelli, ride.
DROP 6 is the latest expression of that idea, and it comes with a collaborator who embodies it better than most.
Chas Christiansen and Cinelli: a decade on the road
Chas Christiansen won his first Cinelli frame at a San Francisco alleycat. He rode it to work the next morning — up and down the hills of the city, paying the bills as a messenger. That bike became a race bike, then a design project, then a through-line across some of the most interesting chapters in urban cycling over the last fifteen years.
Red Hook Crit. The Parallax frame. The SSCX. A Hobo MTB across Africa with Lucas Brunelle. An alleycat in Bogotá, because there's always an alleycat at the end.
Chas is exactly the kind of person our cycling streetwear is made for — someone for whom the bike isn't a hobby or an aesthetic, but a way of moving through the world.
The Shred Life collection
DROP 6 includes seven pieces: three designed by Chas under his Shred Life label, four from us. The Ciao Tee, the Shred Tee, and a 5-panel cap designed to work on the bike, on the trail, and everywhere in between. Not technical cycling apparel. Not fashion borrowed from cycling. Pieces that sit comfortably in both worlds because they were made by someone who lives in both.
All three Chas pieces are drawn from daily life — the things he sees, uses, and says. Designed on an iPad, produced in Italy, worn wherever.
Cycling lifestyle apparel that earns the name
The best cycling streetwear doesn't try to look like cycling. It looks like the people who cycle — which is a different thing entirely.
We've been working with artists, riders, and designers since the early 1980s. Keith Haring, Barry McGee, MASH SF. The thread running through all of it is always the same: find people doing something real, make something together. DROP 6 follows that logic exactly.
