In Conversation with Mental Athletic

GC: Mental Athletic came about by looking at sport differently: what if creativity was as important as performance? Fashion and subculture are connected: the way we live in cities, music, art, design – everything around us. Sport and wellbeing have become increasingly important, and social media has accelerated that. I’ve also always been obsessed with magazines and books. One of my biggest ambitions was to create something tangible, especially when so much content disappears with a swipe. I wouldn’t say we sat down to combine all these worlds – they were already part of our lives. Mental Athletic became a place where they could coexist.

It’s hard to say exactly. We created a media project that wasn’t purely product-centric or focused solely on performance. We’re more interested in people and their stories, and in speaking to an audience that sees sport through a more creative, curious lens. Sport is much bigger than competition or challenges. It connects people, builds communities, and ultimately encourages a healthier way of living. Performance is part of it, of course, but it’s not the only story worth telling.

I’m not sure there’s one simple way to define that relationship. Living through sport makes you more aware of your body and physical well-being, and that inevitably connects to your mental state and how you handle everyday life. The project resonates strongly with creative minds. Our audience is curious, culturally engaged, and interested in more than sport itself. Sport links all these different parts of life. It creates a structure that helps you live more consciously and be healthier – physically and mentally.

Performance is ultimately about challenging yourself. It doesn’t necessarily mean winning or achieving something extraordinary. Sometimes it’s simply reaching a small personal objective, in sport or in everyday life. Sport teaches you how to compete, but competition itself is built around ritual, preparation and, above all, respect. First, towards yourself: learning your limits, pushing them and understanding what it takes to reach an objective. Then there’s respect for your opponent, who can also become one of your greatest sources of inspiration. To me, that's one of the most beautiful things about sport.

Of course, the deeper you go, the more obsessive it can become. The first name we considered for the project was KIDS ON DRUGS, because we liked the idea that the more sport you do, the harder it becomes to live without. In the end, we realised the word “drugs” wasn’t exactly the easiest concept to sell.

In Italy, cycling is part of our tradition. I grew up with the Giro d’Italia. Cycling is deeply rooted in the territory and in everyday life, and I was exposed to it from a very young age. But another moment completely changed how I saw cycling. In the early 2000s, I discovered the fixed-gear movement and MASH. It radically changed how cycling could be represented, bringing together riding, photography, film, street culture, design, and a very specific attitude. That showed me that cycling could exist far beyond the traditional idea of the sport.

I’m not sure cycling has always been as connected to lifestyle as we say it is now. Brands like MAAP have been at the forefront of changing how cycling interacts with fashion, design, and a broader lifestyle language worldwide. In Italy, we are still very attached to a much more traditional idea of cycling. There are still a lot of established codes around how you should ride, how you should dress and even how you should behave. Some of those codes need to be challenged. That is probably where the most interesting evolution is happening now: making cycling less rigid and more accessible to different communities and different ways of interpreting the sport.

We’re a very close team; everyone brings different influences. That exchange has been essential to our evolution. In just over two years, we’ve found a recognisable way of expressing ourselves that goes beyond publishing. One of the things we enjoy most is seeing people identify with that, and feel part of it. But a point of view can never be static. Cultural contamination makes a project grow. Experiences have to be absorbed and eventually translated into the way you communicate. And they can come from anywhere: travelling, meeting someone unexpected, having a conversation with a friend, talking to one of your followers. Every encounter matters if you want the project to keep evolving.

Our magazine is more than just a printed object. We see it as a collectable and as one of the strongest representations of the Mental Athletic identity. From the beginning, I wanted the logo and the visual language of Mental Athletic to exist beyond the masthead of a magazine. I wanted it to become a symbol of belonging — something that could work on a photograph, on an object, on a T-shirt or in a physical space. One of my references when I started was the idea of creating something like Thrasher Magazine for sport: a publication, but also an identity and a community that could live far beyond its pages. Print gives you that permanence. You keep it, you collect it, you come back to it. It becomes part of your physical environment in a way that digital content rarely does.

Fashion is very personal for me. I worked in the industry for more than twenty years, and even today Mental Athletic inevitably has a relationship with fashion. But I tend to think of fashion more as costume: the way society adopts and reinterprets styles that originally come from cultural movements. And those movements are usually shaped by a combination of music, art, design and sport. I don’t really see a clear boundary – I see contamination.

The era we live in has been profoundly shaped by sport. Buffalo and Ray Petri in the 1980s, for example, and the way athletic garments entered a completely different visual and fashion language. Later, Michael Jordan transformed sneakers globally from sporting equipment into cultural objects. There are countless examples. Sport has always generated aesthetics, codes and identities that move far beyond the field of play.

People. Ultimately, people are still the most interesting thing to me. The people we meet through sport, the communities that form around it, the stories behind why somebody runs, rides or dedicates themselves obsessively to something. Products change, trends change, sports change, but people and their stories are what keep giving us new perspectives.