Retro cycling jerseys

What would the Tour de France be without the Malliot Jaune?  And the Giro without the Maglia Rosa? These are among the most recognisable jerseys in sport.  In the case of the tour's yellow, it's right up there with Brazil's famous football strip and the intimidating All Blacks kit: instantly recognisable around the world.
The design of the current crop of pro-team kit is quite interesting to read.  The obvious purpose of the design is to afford the sponsor as clear a platform as possible to build their profile.
It's odd that from my seat in the UK that exotic sounding teams are in fact just sponsorship platforms for the most mundane corporate activities.  I don't know what I was expecting but to find out that FDJ is the French equivalent of the National Lottery and that PMU, sponsors of the Tour's Malliot Vert is a bookies where French blokes go to have a flutter on the nags, kind of destroys the magic.
The nicest kit in the Peleton of le Tour this year was, in my view, Saxo / Tinkoff Bank, closely followed by Europecar's green.
However, it was defiantly Team Sky shirt which fulfilled its sponsorship objective most successfully.
It's retro styling is clean and neat and judging by the amount of people you see out wearing it, the sales of replicas have been strong for them.
I started watching the tour in the late 1980s - in the days of Channel 4 coverage and I really love some of the jerseys from that era.
Sean Kelly in the yellow of Kas, Roche in Carrera Jeans, the superb Systeme U shirt worn by, among others Lauren Fignon and Luis Hererra's Cafe de Columbia.  My favourite however, was the La Vie Claire top worn by Hinault and LeMond.
The Molteni shirt made famous by Merckx is a classic too which still looks fantastic.
Designs of almost everything go through a period of being naff before acquiring a retro cool and I think this is where some of the 1990s cycling shirts are now.

So whereas you can buy a new reproduction of the Merckx Moltenti and La Vie Claire from the superb Prendas Ciclismo, you can't get US Postal, T Mobile or Mercatone Uno.  But their time will probably come.