About That Time We Said All Bibs Should Be Cargo Bibs…
You may remember a certain blog post from last year. It had a confident title: “Opinion: All bibshorts should be cargo bibshorts (with one exception).” It called pocketless bibs “the dark ages.” It used the phrase “objectively superior.” It may have mentioned a zombie apocalypse.
We stand by every word.
Anyway, we made pocketless bibs.
Hear us out
In our defence, we left ourselves a loophole. Right there at the bottom, in the fine print, we wrote: “The exception to the rule is bibs designed for time trials or ultimate aero gains.” A small, dignified escape hatch. A trapdoor for future us.
The new Montu Shen Pro Bibshort is not a pure time trial short. It is not about just about the aero gains you get from not having pocktfulls of snack and phone bulk. It’s primarily designed as an endurance bibshort, built for the kind of rides where you have a frame bag, a top tube bag, a saddle bag, etc. Rides where your snacks have their own luggage. Rides where thigh pockets, frankly, are the least of your storage concerns.
So yeah, we simply changed our minds, in public, on the internet, where nothing is ever forgotten.
Why we did it
Here’s the thing we learned after a few years of preaching the cargo gospel: pockets are for carrying things, and the further you ride, the more the carrying moves off your body and onto the bike. Somewhere past hour five or six on the bike, what you want against your skin is less. Less bulk, fewer layers of fabric, fewer edges, fewer things.
So we built less. A lot less.
The Shen is cut from a single piece of fabric. Fewer fabric panels. Fewer seams. The legs end in a clean finish with no wide hem band, so the short just fades out instead of drawing a line on your thigh. The straps cross in an X at the back to spread pressure instead of loading two points on your shoulders. It’s named after the shen ring, the Egyptian symbol of eternity: a loop with no beginning and no end. Which felt right for a garment that is, structurally speaking, almost a one continuous piece, and for the kind of rides it’s built for, which also occasionally feel like they have no end.
It is, we admit through gritted teeth, a pocketless bib. And it’s one of the bibs thing we’ve made so far.
The official Montu position on pockets, revised
To be clear, the cargo bibshort manifesto still stands for 95% of riding. Big Tetris energy in tiny jersey pockets remains a scourge. The Canopic line isn’t going anywhere, and if you’re riding anything under six hours, we’ll still cheerfully argue that thigh pockets will improve your life.
But now the fine print reads a little differently:
The exceptions to the rule are bibs designed for time trials, ultimate aero gains, or rides long enough that comfort stops being a feature and becomes the entire product.
There. Fixed. Please do not screenshot the old version.
The Montu Shen bibshorts are available to order now. If you’d like to tell us we were right the first time, the comments are open!