THE ALT CUSTOM SCENE COOPTED

The new Ducati Scrambler: perhaps the most obvious example of how alt.customs are influencing corporate motorcycles

Sideburn magazines Gary Inman, a friend of mine, wrote a thought-provoking piece on Influx.co.uk (a multi-motor blogazine) called Custom Bikes and Trophy Wives.  Ill quote a few bits here, but if youre at all involved with the alt.custom scene, its worth a read, and Id love to hear your opinion.  I confess to be deeply embedded in this world professionally, while never having been an owner/rider/builder of alt.customs themselves. Sti ll, I count many of the most important players in this business as personal friends, so am well-placed to write about their world.  Hence my Custom and Style editorship at Cycle World...

Gary credits the Wrenchmonkees of Denmark for an explosion of a particular style, which is becoming cliché with various imitators.  Of course, plenty of alt.custom builders do things very differently...

Some thoughts from Gary: "The annexation of the most vibrant motorcycle sub-culture in decades didn’t take long...For marketing departments, desperat e to find any growth in Northern hemisphere biking, it’s an easy sell. It’s all smart haircuts and expensive denim, an appreciation of art, architecture and photography, a willingness and the means to travel. The holy-bleeding-grail of target audience if you’re trying to shift ‘lifestyle’ products. And the bike manufacturers didn’t have to lift a finger for the scene to become so large they could no longer ignore its potential. What was an exciting niche is now a cliché. Inevitably. But â€" another question that only time has the answer to â€" is it a bad thing for ‘the scene’?..."

On that note, it might be worth re-reading my Instafamous/Instabroke essay from Classic Bike Guide (republished on BikeExif)  or my very similar thoughts on the Industry poking fingers into the Custom scene, called Awake, Leviathan, also in CBG (read it here).

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