Do you know what it is to feel the great ennui? In my role as a junior graphic designer at the Amaury Sports Organisation, that is all I know. Every July, our crown jewel – the Tour de France – rolls around like a canary yellow harbinger of doom, reminding me that a year has passed and I have accomplished nothing in life.
A year of riding to work on my battered fixie from the tiny apartment I can barely afford in the 13th Arrondissement; a year of crossing the Pont D’Issy-Les-Moulineaux to the ASO office, watching the Seine glinting below and reflecting off the windows of our building with the Eiffel Tower just over my shoulder. Always the same races, always the same desk, always the same shade of yellow (Hex #FFC726 / Pantone 123C).
They say there’s comfort in the familiar. They are wrong. It is a creative prison.
Last week, my manager Jean-Luc called us into the conference room and said that we needed to realign the Tour de France design language for a more modern era, whatever that even means. Valentin – dumb sweet Valentin – asked whether that meant we would be changing the jerseys, like that went so well last time. But no: an external consultant had been brought in to freshen up our approach to merchandising. Jean-Luc said he’d come recommended by Alpecin-Deceuninck’s design agency – he’d been involved in their denim kit rejig for the 2024 season – and now he was here to impart his wisdom to us.
Mon dieu, I’ve never heard such a load of nonsense as what this guy was telling us. He spoke the worst French with this thick Australian accent, and he just went on and on about ‘sunsetting old thinking’ and ‘synergies’ and ‘running low-hanging fruit up the flagpole’. After the meeting finished, Valentin and I went downstairs for a break – grabbed a diabolical coffee; vaped like we hated it – and despaired about what would come of it all.
By the time we got back to the office, Chad the Australian was gone and Jean-Luc was peppering our inboxes with action items. My task: a new Tour de France merch line with broader international appeal. “Think outside the square,” I was told. “Make something in vogue, ironic, post-modern, topical.”
The first design took me five minutes: I superimposed a Pride flag over the Tour de France logo and put it on a hoodie. Honestly, I thought that was almost too on the nose – after all, on the men’s side, this an aggressively heteronormative sport, one in which no male riders feel safe enough to exit the closet. But Jean-Luc’s one-word assessment slammed into my Outlook minutes later. “Magnifique,” he wrote. A red rag to my creative bull.
The next hoodie took a little longer. I started with an illustration of a little mini-peloton of riders wearing the iconic jerseys of the Tour de France, because that’s where these things always start, but then it was time to throw caution to the wind. I put a big circle around the riders, then put ‘Tour de France’ in an ugly italic typeface at the top, with a lower-case ‘r’ that looked like a lower-case ‘c’.
It looked out of balance, but I was feeling unimaginative about any other words so I just duplicated the text box and bent it to follow the curve at the bottom. Touc de Fcance up top. Touc de Fcance down below. And then, as a middle finger to Chad and the idiots in the sales and merchandising department, I brought in a new little motif and plonked it in second wheel in the peloton.
Valentin wheeled his desk-chair over to look at my screen, slack-jawed and aghast. “Why is there a huge winking chilli on a bike, Nicolas?”, he asked, timidly. I snorted, took a deep drag of my watermelon guava vape, smoke rolling out my nostrils like a sleeping dragon as I looked darkly across at him. “Why not, Valentin?”
Jean-Luc took longer to get back to me on that one, CCing me on an email chain with Chad for a second-opinion. Jean-Luc’s doubts about my stupid chilli jumper were quickly overcome with Chad’s response: “so brat, lol. Put this on my christmas list!!1”, he wrote, signing off with a shaka emoji.
I looked out the big glass windows of our building at the late-autumn shadows lengthening over the river and the bridge. The commuters on their bikes poured out of Boulogne-Billancourt over the Seine back toward the centre of Paris, like rats abandoning a sinking ship. The last leaves dropped off the trees over the boulevards of the City of Light. Soon, I knew, the cold weather would be here – brisk air stinging the lungs like a coolmint vape – and the Eiffel Tower would be lit up in green and red like an enormous metal Christmas tree. I turned back to my screen, head full of hatred for cultural imperialism and Chad and Jean-Luc. “You want merch? I’ll give you merch,” I muttered under my breath as I busied myself with a template.
An hour later my evil masterpiece was complete. A yellow jersey-clad cyclist, pulled by three reindeer. A Tour de France™ logo. A winding road through a landscape that was simultaneously day and night.
I leaned back in my deskchair, surveying the most despicable maillot Noël of all time. My worst and greatest creation – a wearable monument to festive bicycle consumerism to be knitted by machines operated by children in Bangladeshi factories, weaving spools of flammable yarn by the kilometre, all for it to be flown across the world and bundled up under a Christmas tree for recipients that will be too embarrassed to ever wear it.
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