Culture moto
The women who rode first: motorcycling's pioneers
CultureVan BurenBessie Stringfield From Clara Wagner, disqualified in 1910 despite a perfect score card, to Beryl Swain, stripped of her licence after the 1962 Tourist Trophy, one and the same story links the women who rode when the rules shut them out. The Van Buren sisters crossed 1916 America on their Indian Power Plus machines, Beatrice Shilling moved from the Brooklands banking to the carburettors of the Rolls-Royce Merlin, Theresa Wallach rode London to Cape Town, Bessie Stringfield criss-crossed the segregated South and Anke-Eve Goldmann imposed her one-piece leather suit. Contents Before 1920: riding when the road does not exist...
The Perfecto: how a leather jacket became the biker's uniform
CultureSchott NYC1928 Created in 1928 by Irving Schott in the New York workshop his family had founded in 1913, the Perfecto was first a work garment sold over the counter of a Harley-Davidson dealer on Long Island. Its off-centre zip, its belt and its horsehide answered the wind rather than fashion. The name comes from a cigar shape. In 1953, The Wild One and Marlon Brando's silhouette turned it into a badge of rebellion, before New York's punks took it up. Nearly a century later, in everyday French the word denotes any leather jacket with an off-centre zip. Contents A...
The bosozoku: Japan's biker gangs and their outsized machines
CultureTokko-fukuKaido racer Born in 1950s Japan under the name kaminari-zoku, the « thunder tribe », the bosozoku motorcycle subculture peaked in 1982 with 42,510 members recorded by the Japanese police. The term itself was forged in the press between 1962 and 1973. Their machines pushed modification to the extreme, from the rocket cowl to the three-tier seat and takeyari exhausts, while the embroidered tokko-fuku completed the outfit. The legislative crackdown of 1978, then 1982 and 2004, brought numbers crashing down; the aesthetic legacy lives on among the kyusha-kai and the kaido racers. Contents Before the bosozoku: the « thunder tribe...
Police motorcycles: from the American motor officer's Harley to the Garde républicaine's BMW
Detroit 1908, Paris 1920, the California of the patrol Kawasakis and the Garde républicaine motorcycle squadron: a century of police motorcycles, their successive models, their specific equipment and their mark on popular culture.
Baggers and dark custom: the two faces of modern American custom
On one side the bagger, the American saddlebag tourer turned style object and race machine with the King of the Baggers. On the other, Harley-Davidson's Dark Custom , an aesthetic of black and stripped-back simplicity. Two opposite faces of the same need for identity.