The ladies' jeans hunt

That was February. In October I did the homework properly. I’m 5ft with a 26 inch inside leg: short, but not rare, since about one British woman in fourteen is shorter than me. If you’ve ever watched the hem of a pair of riding jeans pool round your toes in a changing room, this one’s for you.

The shortest leg in the country

I went through every women’s riding jean and legging I could find on sale in the UK and wrote down the shortest leg each one comes in.

• 26 inch: Oxford, the only one I could find, going by Sportsbikeshop’s charts. The Sofia (AA, £149.99), the Original Approved jeggings (AA) and the Super Leggings (A). Oxford’s own general size guide says its women’s short is 30 and that the real length varies by style.
• 27 inch: Bull-it’s Extra Short, on three styles including the Guardian (their chart says it’s for women of 5ft 1 to 5ft 5), and Roadskin’s Taranis Elite.
• 27 to 28 inch: MotoGirl’s petite, shorter than most. Its size chart says 27/28 across the range. The Sherrie Leggings (AAA) look shorter still: three buyers found them short, two saying so against MotoGirl’s other shorts, and one shop calls them “the shortest petite model we carry”. Two 5ft 1 riders found the length right, so it isn’t everyone. And JTS’s Scarlett in Extra Short, from a firm in Leicestershire.
• 28 inch: Knox’s Colton, Richa’s Original 2 (in a size 8 only; the short grows with the waist), and Hood in Norfolk, who’ll alter a pair to any leg from 28 to 34 inches for free.
• 29 inch: Merlin’s Mere.
• 30 inch or longer: RST, Rev’it, John Doe, Furygan, Spada, Resurgence, Pando Moto and Trilobite’s women’s cut.

These are the makers’ and shops’ figures, not my tape measure, and they don’t always match what ends up on my leg.

Marks and Spencer’s extra short petite is 27 inches, on selected styles. A lot of the motorcycle trade stops four inches above me.

It isn’t only me. Read the reviews and short women say it over and over. A 5ft 4 rider on a pair of Bull-it’s: “the regular is very long in the leg but there was no short option available in my size.” A buyer of their Guardian: “Have been looking for well fitting protective jeans in a short leg length for ages.”

Nobody will say whether taking the hem up yourself keeps the jeans certified. I couldn’t find a single brand or test body that answers it. The bottom of the leg decides whether a short rider can wear the thing at all, and nobody has rules for it.

I thought we paid more. We get less.

I went in sure women pay more for the same protection. The numbers say I was wrong, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend.

Where a brand makes the same jean for both of us, it charges the same. Bull-it’s Guardian AAA is £199.99 either way. Roadskin’s Taranis Elite AAA is £179.99 either way. Knox’s Shield Spectra is £249.99 either way at J&S.

What we pay for is choice. Oxford sells four single-layer AAA jeans for men and none for women; our best is AA. On RST’s own site its women’s denim is all A-rated, the men’s goes to AAA, and RST’s women’s “short” is 30 inches. Resurgence’s only single-layer AAA jean is a men’s one; the women’s AAA is lined, so thicker, and comes in a 32 inch leg only.

The good news is there are brands doing it right. Bull-it, Roadskin, Knox and MotoGirl all sell women a single-layer AAA. Two of them come close to my leg: Bull-it’s Ladies Guardian in Extra Short and Roadskin’s Ladies Taranis Elite, both 27 inches, both in stock when we checked on 29 October. A good rating doesn’t mean a good fit, though: the Roadskin went back, as you’ll see on the card above.

Short leg, wrong knee

I thought the length was about looking daft. It’s about where the knee armour sits.

The CE standard says knee protectors have to sit over your knee. Put a 30 inch leg on a 26 inch rider and the pocket ends up somewhere down your shin, with four inches of denim concertinaed above it. The Australian injury researcher Liz de Rome put it bluntly: if armour moves out of place, it “could be entirely useless”.

Adjustable knee pockets help, and the brands that fit them deserve credit. But the most travel anyone publishes is about 5 to 6 cm, and nobody says whether that reaches a 26 inch knee in a 30 inch jean. The women reviewing them say it plainly. A 5ft 3 rider in a regular-length Bull-it jegging: “the knee pads do sit slightly too low on me”. An under-5ft rider who finally found a short: “the armour is finally in the right place”. Even in Oxford’s short jeggings, the ones I tried, one buyer found the “knee protectors are a little low as my legs are quite short”, while a 5ft 1 rider in their leggings found the pockets “in right place for me”. Same brand, different knees.

Two more things I didn’t know. “Women’s armour” usually means the same part, made smaller. D3O’s own guide says it “may be more compact”. I couldn’t find a knee protector shaped for a woman, and I found nothing at all on where a hip pocket should sit on a female pelvis. And hip armour is only compulsory in AA and AAA. In an A-rated legging it’s often a pocket and a promise, which is exactly what my Oxford jegging had.

Sold out in petite

MotoGirl’s Sherrie Leggings are AAA, single layer, from a women’s brand in Kent, and £179, about what a man pays for AAA. On 29 October the petite length was sold out in every size but a 4 and a 12. My own RST leathers were the same story, as you’ll see on the card above: three months on order, and in the end a small shop with one lucky pair. One woman reviewing MotoGirl summed up the rest of us: “Bike clothing is notoriously difficult to get when you’re a plus size and short!”

Stock comes and goes. But when the short leg is the first size to sell out, that tells you how many of us are looking.

The test rider is 5ft 9

The abrasion test behind every AA and AAA label is built around “an average rider” of 75 kg and 1.75 m. That’s 5ft 9. The machine presses the fabric onto the road at one fixed pressure, whoever ends up wearing it.

I’m 5ft and about 50 kg on a good day, so there’s less of me to stop in a slide. That might mean less wear. It might not: nobody has measured it, and the label doesn’t say. What the researchers do agree on is that the bigger risk for a rider my size is fit, with the armour and the tough panels sitting in the wrong place.

Glyn is the other end of it: at 6ft 2 he’s five inches taller than the test rider. For bigger riders, the Deakin University team behind Australia’s MotoCAP ratings say a rider’s weight pushes the fabric harder into the road, and they list it among the reasons seams burst. They also say even the larger size of armour can give “marginal or inadequate” cover to taller, heavily built riders.

So the standard’s average rider is nobody in our house. One of us is too light for it, the other too big, and nobody has done the sums for either.

One more thing

Women need to review things more. Men post their opinions all the time. I’m as guilty as anyone: I only ever review things I don’t like. This page is me trying to be better.

Prices are the makers’ RRPs as we found them on 29 and 30 October 2026, and what we remember being told on the day for the shop visit. They’ll change. Check before you buy.

Where this came from

Our research notes hold the full working, with every figure labelled checked, maker-only or search-only. The main sources: Oxford’s jeans range and the Sofia listing; RST; Oxford’s general size guide; MotoGirl’s Sherrie and reviews of it at Peak Moto and J&S; Moto Lounge’s fit guide; Roadskin’s Taranis Elite; Hood’s K7/AAA; Resurgence; Bull-it and its sizing guide; Roadskin; Knox at J&S; MotoGirl’s leggings; JTS Scarlett; Hood; M&S petite; SATRA on EN 17092; Liz de Rome in American Motorcyclist; D3O on women’s armour; customer reviews of the Bull-it Fury V and Covec SR6; MCN’s women’s guide; customer reviews of Bull-it’s Icona and Guardian, Oxford’s jeggings and leggings, and MotoGirl on Trustpilot; RST’s S-1 ladies leathers; Pheasant’s tables; Deakin University’s guide for manufacturers and MotoCAP’s questions page.