La Vie Claire spent less than a decade in the professional peloton and shut up shop nearly 30 years ago, but the French team left a mark on the sport that still stands out today.
Of course, the two Tour de France victories played a big part in that. In 1985, Bernard Hinault collected a record-equaling fifth title, which remains the last time a Frenchman won La Grande Boucle. The following year saw ‘the Badger’ go head-to-head with his own teammate, Greg LeMond, in one of the most famous – or infamous – Tours in history.
But for all the sporting success, the iconography of La Vie Claire is wrapped up in the jersey. At the mere mention of those three words, what springs most readily to mind are the rectangles. Those beautiful rectangles.
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Even among the outlandish designs we’ve seen over the years, La Vie Claire’s jersey was unlike anything that went before in professional cycling. There’s certainly been nothing like it since. It’s the only jersey to have been based on the work of an artist, namely Piet Mondrian and his compositions with red, yellow and blue.
As with every great jersey, there’s a great story behind it. As detailed in ‘Slaying the Badger’, a book on the 1986 Tour, it only came about by chance, after the Parisian stylist who’d been commissioned came up with an almost exclusively black design. “No, no – cyclists don’t wear black jerseys,” team manager Paul Kochli reportedly said, at which point a young student piped up and suggested: “What about a Mondrian?” The student was apparently receiving “daggers” from the stylist as she sketched out the rectangles, but Kochli and everyone else were in agreement: “It was genius.”
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