Dainese · A history of firsts
Fifty years of firsts
One workshop in the Veneto hills spent half a century inventing the safety gear the whole sport now takes for granted.
FROM MOTOCROSS TROUSERS TO THE AIRBAG
1968
A Vespa, and an idea.
It began with a road trip. In 1968 a twenty-year-old Lino Dainese rode a Vespa to London and saw the ton-up boys — café racers wrapped in black leather, the first real protective gear he had ever seen. He rode home with a mission that would outlast him: make the rider harder to hurt.
1972
The first stitch.
Dainese opened in 1972 in Molvena, set with intent between Italy's tanneries and its leather workshops. The first product was not a race suit but a pair of motocross trousers. Within two years the young firm was already clothing a world-championship rider — the start of a bond with racing that has never broken.
1979 · The first world-first
The lobster.
In 1979 Dainese introduced the first back protector made for motorcycling. Its interlocking plates were modelled on a lobster's shell, spreading a crash across the whole spine instead of a single point. It quietly rewrote what a rider was expected to survive — and every spine protector on the market today descends from it.
A timeline of firsts
2007 · The air age
The airbag arrives.
The boldest first took the longest. After more than a decade of work, the D-air airbag deployed in a Grand Prix for the first time at Valencia in 2007 — the first system of its kind to protect a rider at racing speed. By 2018 the sport had made it compulsory for the entire grid. The pioneer had become the standard.
Head to boot
More than leathers.
Dainese is now a group as much as a brand. In 2007 it acquired AGV — a helmet maker founded back in 1917 — extending its protection from head to boot. Near Vicenza it keeps its own archive, twenty rooms tracing every idea from that first pair of trousers to the airbag. Fifty years on, it is still trying to invent the next first.
Fifty years, on Inter-Pace.
Suits, gloves, boots and sliders — the living catalogue of a company that never stopped inventing.
Every rule in racing safety began as one workshop's refusal to accept the odds.Fifty years of firsts
The verdict
Fifty years, one collection.
The back protector, the second skin, the airbag — every Dainese first lives on in the gear it builds today. Explore the full range on Inter-Pace.
Explore DaineseThe Dainese collection grows continually as new pieces land.