Rapha Is Rebuilding Its Voice. Both of Its New Answers Are Old.

On 30 July a film about the most decorated rider in cycling history premiered at the Regent Street Cinema in London. Two weeks later it screened once more, in Brussels, with Eddy Merckx in the room for the Q&A. Rapha's event listings showed both nights sold out. Since then, nothing: Rapha has announced no stream, no second run and no wider release, and as of this morning no review of the film has appeared in the cycling press. Almost nobody who pays Rapha for membership has seen it.

This morning Rapha put its name on something else, a second collection with David Carson, the designer who took a scalpel to the typographic rulebook at Ray Gun between 1992 and 1995.

Rapha is in the middle of the deepest rebuild in its twenty-two years. These are the two things it chose to show us in four weeks, and both of them reach backwards.

A film Rapha got behind, and a collection it built to order

525: The Unstoppable Eddy Merckx is built around the 525 victories Merckx is credited with between 1965 and 1978, with Mark Cavendish, Bernard Hinault and Ernesto Colnago on camera and Rapha co-founder Simon Mottram moderating the London Q&A. The film is the work of 6 Day Films, a London company set up in March 2022 by the filmmaker Lee Donaldson, who came to Merckx as a cycling fan rather than a cycling-industry insider. He has said he spent the pandemic wondering why nobody had made a film about the man, assembled a team and approached the Merckx family himself. Rapha Films presents it, and the backing is real and specific: the brand put its name on the title card, its rooms and its members behind the screenings, and its founder on stage to host the Q&A. That is a different decision from commissioning a heritage film, and a more revealing one. Rapha did not set out to make something about the sport's past. It found a finished film about the sport's past and decided that was worth standing behind.

The Carson collection is the opposite kind of object, entirely Rapha's and built to order: the Pro Team range in men's and women's cuts, a $180 hoodie and a $90 tee off the bike, ten clubhouses carrying a location-exclusive tee nobody outside those rooms can buy, and a short film shot in the Caribbean where Carson winters. Rapha's copy describes clouds and sky as "emblematic of unrestricted thought" and typography that "feels like it's breaking out of the design." Carson supplies the thesis: "People will say you have to know the rules to break them, and I simply don't believe that." One work treats the past as canon. The other treats rules as things to break. Both reference points are secondhand.

The rebuild is not in question. The material is.

Rapha has spent two years taking itself apart in public. It left the WorldTour at the end of 2025, ending seven years with EF Pro Cycling. It signed USA Cycling through the 2028 Los Angeles Games. It closed five clubhouses before April, discontinued its lifestyle range and paused shoe production. In April it put Scott Mellin, Salomon's former chief brand officer, on the board. Fran Millar's stated reason for hiring him reads almost like a brief for this article: "Scott has a track record of pushing brands to find new cultural relevance whilst deepening authenticity and a sense of heritage." Mellin's own line was that Rapha is "in a period of transformation," and that he hoped the next few years would "completely reinvent what it feels like to wear Rapha."

The reinvention is stated policy, not inference. What is open is what the new voice is made of, and Millar has been direct about where she thinks the material is. "We are the originals, we started this," she told BikeRadar last October. "We have a deep credibility and deep authenticity in this sport. I think that is our differentiator." She also conceded that Rapha has not done a brilliant job of doubling down on it, and that share has gone elsewhere. Most of it has gone to MAAP, which in the last eighteen months has collaborated with a Munich record label, an Amsterdam skate brand and a Melbourne art house, and talked HOKA into stripping its own logo off a shoe, and to Pas Normal Studios, which put a Monet on a jersey with JJJJound, built a 30-unit Colnago and made its first documentary. That is a competitive set playing modernity and playing it well. Rapha cannot out-new it. What it has instead is twenty-two years of standing in the sport, enough to put its name on a Merckx film and have Merckx turn up. In a market where any silhouette is copyable inside a season, provenance is the one asset nobody can forge.

Both moves point inward. The screenings were private, members got the collection a day early, ten clubhouses hold a tee the rest of the world cannot order. None of it is built to find a new customer; all of it is built to make an existing one feel correctly placed. The clubhouses used to do that job. With five of them gone, a members-only screening and a tee you can buy in ten rooms are what Rapha has left to make membership feel like membership, and they cost a fraction of a lease. The financial floor under all of it: revenue down to £96m from £110m in the year to January 2025, an eighth consecutive loss, and a target of EBITDA-positive by 2027.

The Carson move is a hedge on tone rather than on time. Rapha's liability is not that it is old. It is that it is earnest, and the Merckx film pushes straight into that: reverent, canonical, told by the men who raced him. Carson pushes the other way, with humour, looseness and an open refusal of design convention, and he imports credibility from surf and skate rather than from the Ardennes. Rapha is buying a different generation's memory carrying a different attitude, which widens the cohort without requiring the brand to be contemporary.

This is a motion rather than a one-off. Three named-artist collections have shipped in thirteen months: Carson last August, Yinka Ilori at the end of June, Carson again today. No program name, no announced designer-in-residence.

What an archive can and can't do

The case for building this way is strong. Provenance is the scarce premium, and setting a reverent work against an irreverent one is how brands age gracefully. The Carson work itself is excellent, a rule-breaker's language imported into the most codified aesthetic in endurance sport; what keeps it short of category-defining is reach, because it lives inside a membership.

The case against is equally real, and it is about material rather than age. Merckx's era ended in 1978, Carson's in 1995, and Rapha has no contemporary reference point to set against either. An archive is excellent at telling people who you have been. It is much worse at telling them what you think now, because everything in it was made in answer to a question somebody asked a long time ago.

The distribution question should stay open. Two rooms and no stream is either a deliberate cultural object or heritage as exclusion: a film about the sport's greatest rider that almost none of the sport could attend. Both readings come off the same facts.

Any premium brand rebuilding on top of real archive equity faces the same fork: the archive is the most defensible thing it owns, and it is also the easiest thing to hide behind.

Rapha has decided its job is custodian of the sport's soul. It is a real job, and no other brand can do it: nobody else could put its name on a Merckx film and have Merckx turn up to the screening. But a custodian and a voice are not the same thing, and a brand rebuilding itself needs the second. The question these four weeks leave standing is whether the past is the material Rapha builds a contemporary voice out of, or the thing it reaches for instead of finding one.

Our March feature covered the strategic turn: the WorldTour exit, the clubhouse closures, the Olympic bet. This is that turn producing work you can look at. See Rapha Is Tearing Itself Apart to Survive.