NVFRC / Does The 'Stitch Make My Butt Look.........??????

Stitch now......

Paris next.....

Can't wait to wear my leathers EVERYWHERE..........





January 3, 2008



Stealing From a Biker Gang

By GUY TREBAY


ROCK ’N’ ROLL, the art world, Hollywood and fashion have swiped inspiration from biker style so often that it’s a wonder there is anything left to purloin. This has been the case in every two-wheeled decade, and rarely more so than now, when the hip artist du jour Richard Prince seems to have motorcycle culture firmly in the pincers of his ironic quotations, and style avatars like Kate Moss have taken to kitting themselves up like Hells Angels mamas.

An inexhaustible trove of style since Brando used a leather biker jacket to butch his way to movie-stardom, biker chic seems all but ubiquitous lately, from the “Wild Bunch” streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Topshop and the Hannah Montana tour, where Miley Cyrus signals the tough-chick lurking inside every tween when she puts on a leather biker vest.

Consider the winter 2007 collection, shown in Paris last March, that the Japanese designer Junya Watanabe built around the classic zippered biker jacket.. Consider the Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo’s take on this utilitarian garment, in which the parts were exploded and then Franken-stitched together again.

Consider the winter collection for Hermès that Jean Paul Gaultier staged at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Parking a Harley-Davidson at the head of the runway, Mr. Gaultier sent out a series of tough biker jackets, boots and caps. Memo from Mr. Gaultier to the prim Hermès customer: Ditch the Birkin bag, zip on some leathers and get yourself a hog.

Even Karl Lagerfeld, in his inimitable way, seems to have absorbed biker style into his stylized self-presentation. What is Mr. Lagerfeld with his ponytail, ZZ Top frock coats, half-gloves and knuckles barnacled with Chrome Hearts hardware but the image of a biker daddy?

Despite the wholesale plundering of biker culture by the design world, there is plenty of gold left to mine from this $9.7-billion industry. The average age of motorcyclists continues to increase, to 41 today, from 32 in 1990, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. Yet, paradoxically, biker style looks fresher than ever. This, at least, was the impression one took away from the 27th Annual Cycle World International Motorcycle Show, which blew into Manhattan at the Javits Center last week.

You didn’t need to know a knobby from a slick tire to be excited, for instance, by the way anonymous creators of motocross clothes have been experimenting with high tech textiles like abrasion-resistant nylon, Dynax and Cordura. Isn’t that more or less the stuff that draws hosannas for the Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere when he uses these materials in his designs?

KTM, the Austrian motorcycle maker renowned for leading-edge technology in its machines, has taken the same approach to making clothes. Padded, welted, fortified and also superbly tailored, the Street Evo jacket from KTM struck at least one viewer as a dead ringer for something from Mr. Ghesquiere’s celebrated Star Wars collection for spring 2007. Maybe this was just coincidence. And maybe, in a sense, it is not and even owes to the growing influx of women into motorcycle sports.

Women now make up 10 percent of the motorcyclists in the United States, and that is not including those who ride on the back. Biking is still overwhelmingly a male pursuit, of course, and yet even the gnarliest (meant in a good way) motorcycle gear shows a certain feminized influence. In another era, the accessories being promoted at the booths of Harley-Davidson, Ducati or Buell would have been stuff that ran on oil or could be scrubbed down with Armor All. Now most manufacturers have their own clothing lines. There were old-school leathers on view and lug soled boots from traditional labels like Red Wing. There were utilitarian gaiters, fleece balaclavas, zippered and laced and Velcro-fastened custom chaps. There were scores of people wearing grommeted, studded and patched memorial leather vests that, if Seventh Avenue hasn’t ripped them off yet, it should.

“I have over 200 pins, and each pin is a memory of an event or a value or belief,” said Kirk LaPierre, 48, of Rutherford, N.J., referring to a laced leather vest that resembled a multimedia soft sculpture commemorating 30 years on the road. Trimmed at the collar with hunks of turquoise, it had rows of silver skulls at the hem. The skulls, he said, signified the bravado “of laughing death in the face.”

A decade into the infestation of the city’s hipper locales by people with M.B.A.s wearing trucker caps and wallet chains, the elements of the troglodyte biker look better than ever. They look unironic, for one thing, and sincere in their sentimental reference to a pursuit that, before it was taken over by lawyers and periodontists, attracted mainly outlaws and vagabonds.. They seem authentic, in the case of biker leathers, because they have changed so little. That they are functionally appropriate is no small part of their appeal.

Like members of the International Best Dressed list, bikers seem to have found what works for them, and are thus immune to the whims of style. Skeleton motifs are as popular as ever and so are spider web elbow tattoos. Even the sexism that traditionally blighted biker culture now seems so stylized as to be quaint. After all, if the Mudflap Girl can turn up in a Super Bowl commercial, there are probably not many people left to be offended by the motif of a buxom woman whose arms form the fork of a bike.

“This is bitchin’,” said a woman decked out in a do-rag with an unprintable slogan and head-to-toe leathers emblazoned with the logo of her South Jersey chapter of the Harley Owners Group, or H.O.G. The woman, who declined to give her name for publication, was pointing with approval at a vest patch stitched by KMIS Patches, with a cycle club logo depicting a creature that was part woman and part four-stroke machine.

KMIS was doing a thriving business at the show on Saturday, and the most popular of the $100 patches they offered seemed to involve demons, Maltese crosses, topless women or all of the above. “What do you think, baby?” the woman from H.O.G. said to her husband, as she pointed out an image of a woman athwart a bike. Her face a skull and hair blowing in the wind, she faced the road with a look of demonic rictus.

“Baby,” the woman told her husband. “I’m going to get this as a tattoo.”









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