Yes, we understand that your favourite jeans are comfortable. And we appreciate that you reckon you look really cool in them. But we’ve got to tell you that riding a motorbike in a pair of street jeans is, to put it bluntly, a bit daft.

The truth is that, at anything over 30mph, a regular shop jean will almost certainly split open on impact with the tarmac. From that point on, it’s your skin that supplies all the abrasion resistance. And it doesn’t take long before you’re down to muscles, ligaments, nerve endings and bone. Yes, there’s going to be some pain involved, but the damage you can do to yourself, even at low speeds, goes way beyond pain. There’s A&E time, reconstructive surgery time, time off work, time in bed, time to rehabilitate. And, of course, time off the bike.

But what makes this so unnecessary is that many of the single-layer jeans out there offer huge amounts of abrasion resistance, yet are just as comfortable to wear as a pair of regular Levi jeans. Our Rokker Rokkertech jeans, for example, have a slide time 50% better than leather. Resurgence’s New Wave jeans are more than twice as abrasion resistant as leather. Even our £150, single-layer, cotton/Cordura jeans from Spidi are probably four times stronger than a pair of shop jeans. And then, of course, there’s the armour. You don’t have to land that hard to break a hip, kneecap, or shin. And all our riding jeans come with armour.

As far as we know, not many high street jeans do. We are not without bias. We exist, we admit, to sell motorcycle gear. It’s what we do. But we take our job seriously. We don’t and won’t sell gear that doesn’t provide protection. And when a motorcyclist comes into the shop wearing nothing but a pair of denim jeans, it does tend to send a shiver up and down our spines.

The fact is that, if you have an accident, a pair of cotton jeans provides little more protection than riding around in nothing more than a pair of underpants. And it doesn’t matter how good a rider you are, how experienced a rider you are, or how long it’s been since you last had an accident. All it takes is one idiot in a car. Or one little patch of diesel. It’s time to grow up, and get yourself a pair of “big-boy” trousers.