When sitting around wasting time on the internet (as I often do), I inevitably end up passing through a trendy fixed gear blog. It seems like they’re waiting for you around every corner. Much of the time they’re good, honest sites maintained by people who have a genuine love of bikes. A fair few come across as a little pretentious and wanky, but I’ve always got that from edgy, trendy websites anyway. What tends to amaze me these days is that number of sites who seem to be in on this whole merchandising, limited edition, colab, colourways, sponsored event type things. Every second site seems to be tag-teaming it up with underground fashion labels or graphic designers and creating over-priced one-time-only garments or anodised components. And the thing is, it must be selling because it’s not stopping. It’s like the post-threadless design-your-own t-shirt website explosion a couple of years back. Same aesthetic everywhere, the same semi-elitist, somewhat removed and minimalist bend to posts, heavily over exposed photos with lowered saturation and odd angles, bold logos splashed across t-shirts and specially formulated jackets or new era hats. The list goes on.<\/p>\n
How the hell do they do it? Where do these companies come from, and where the hell do they get the money to do it? The fixed gear trend has been going strong for what, six to eight years now? Have they all been around from the start, working hard with no recognition until now? Are they trust-fund projects? Are they the kids cool enough to market ideas to the advertisers and get the backing to make it happen? Maybe it’s just that fixed gear and the culture that seems to have sprung up around it is actually big enough to maintain the momentum of these companies.<\/p>\n
It also seems as if the focus is evolving a little (or maybe it’s just me being sllow to catch on). With the spring classics filling blogs the vintage aspect that track bikes championed is expanding and covering wider ground. For a while now the vintage road bikes have been growing in popularity, and a fixed conversion isn’t always the first idea to spring to mind when a tasty lugged steel frame is spotted. It goes hand in hand with the jerseys, ‘real cycling’ and the increasing popularity of ‘hard man’ cycling and epics. Rapha’s continental series is a perfect example (though less influenced by trends and more by Rapha’s general direction I think), but it’s bee preceeded by the established Cannonball run documented by Andy and others. Now the Mash kids are out on the road, riding across California looking schmick in their nicely designed jerseys and riding sexy bikes.<\/p>\n
What am I getting at? Fuck knows. Maybe I want in? Maybe I’m jealous that these people have the market or the savvy to be printing up t-shirts and jerseys every week while we have to scrape a little harder to make it happen. Maybe I’m confused about how exactly you tap into ‘the cool’ (not that I have any desire too, but it does appeal to my curiosity). Maybe that BnC X Obey X Nike colab that Quon keeps harping on about keeps it on my mind. Maybe I spend too much time on the internet and not enough on my bike (probably).<\/p>\n
Either way, it’s nice being able to roll back to Bottles And Chains and find some homely, down-to-earth smack written by people with average literary skill who as a general rule are far from being cool enough to ever get in a video or be sponsored just for riding around on a track bike. Is that a little harsh? I love it!<\/p>\n
Roll on BnC, keep it real. Hellbound and pedalling.<\/p>\n
That said, if anyone wants to throw us lots of money I’ll get started on some t-shirt designs right away. I’m always for sale.<\/p>\n
This post inspired by and tributed to: MASHSF<\/a><\/strong> X ArkitipIntel Mash<\/a><\/strong> X HipsterNascar<\/a><\/strong> X Fyxomatosis<\/a><\/strong> X Trackosaurus<\/a><\/strong> – Much love. When sitting around wasting time on the internet (as I often do), I inevitably end up passing through a trendy fixed gear blog. It seems like they’re waiting for you around every corner. Much of the time they’re good, honest sites maintained by people who have a genuine love of bikes. A fair few come … Continue reading “Cool As Houses”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1176,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions\/1176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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