The Pedal Mafia x Jean-Michel Basquiat Core Sock brings one of contemporary art's most enduring visual identities onto the bike. CoolMax construction and estate-approved graphics.
When Cycling Culture Meets One of Art’s Most Enduring Legacies
The Pedal Mafia x Jean-Michel Basquiat Core Sock is a collaboration that sits at the intersection Monoro was built around: performance cycling and culture, sharing the same object. Jean-Michel Basquiat remains one of the most referenced figures in contemporary visual culture, four decades after his most prolific work, and Pedal Mafia brings that graphic vocabulary directly onto the bike through a sock that functions as well as it looks.
Pedal Mafia has built a reputation for connecting cycling with culture beyond the sport itself, through collaborations with Sir Bradley Wiggins, Caleb Ewan, and MotoGP. The Basquiat collab takes that logic further, licensing one of the most recognisable visual identities in 20th century art and placing it on everyday cycling kit. The result is a sock that carries genuine cultural weight, not a graphic applied to shift units, but a considered use of an estate-approved image tied to a brand that understands what it is doing.
The sock
The Core Sock is Pedal Mafia’s most comfortable and durable sock in the range, built from a 50% CoolMax, 40% Nylon, 10% Lycra construction. CoolMax handles moisture management and breathability across long efforts, the Nylon adds structural durability through repeated wash cycles, and the Lycra maintains a consistent fit that does not loosen over a season of riding. It is a sockengineered for performance, dressed in something that belongs on a gallery wall as much as a start line.
Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the New York graffiti scene of the late 1970s and defined a visual language that absorbed street culture, art history, race, identity and commerce simultaneously. His career lasted less than a decade before his death in 1988 at 27, but the body of work he left behind has only grown in cultural relevance. His imagery, bold text, rough crowns, crossed-out words and anatomical references, translates immediately across any medium it touches.
Specifications
Construction
50% CoolMax, 40% Nylon, 10% Lycra
Sizing
S/M, L/XL
Range
Pedal Mafia Core
Price
$22
Who it’s for
The Pedal Mafia x Basquiat Core Sock is for riders who treat their kit as an extension of how they engage with culture more broadly, and who recognise that a $22 sock carrying a Basquiat graphic is an accessible entry point into one of cycling’s most interesting brand collaborations of the year. Available in S/M and L/XL.
