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Cycle chic


Cycle chic or bicycle chic refers to cycling in fashionable everyday clothes. The fashion concept developed in popular culture to include bicycles and bicycle accessories as well as clothing. The phrase Cycle Chic was coined in 2007 by Mikael Colville-Andersen, who started the Copenhagen Cycle Chic blog in the same year.

Cycle Chic is a modern phrase to describe something that has existed since the invention of the bicycle in the 1880s - regular citizens on bicycles. Cycling was fashionable from the late 1880s and through the 1940s.

At the end of the 19th century, the height of cycle chic was to play polo on bicycles, using long-handled tennis rackets and rubber balls. Women's wear (such as corsets and petticoats) was impractical for cycling and so rational dress was required. Divided skirts, bloomers and knickerbockers were tried as fashionable women attempted to resolve the matter without provoking hostility, ridicule or violence. More recently, in the 1980s bicycle messengers became a common sight on the streets of major cities, and the messengers' mix of street fashion and cycling gear was seen as an alternative fashion statement.

In 1995, Vibe magazine, owned by Quincy Jones, listed brands that had "infiltrated" cycling such as Dolce & Gabbana, DKNY and FILA with cycle chic. This clothing shares little with the contemporary perception of the phrase, however, as it was more focused the bicycle messenger crowd.

Around the time that Mikael Colville-Andersen coined the phrase Cycle Chic, the bicycle had largely disappeared from the public consciousness as a transport option, at least in many North American cities, though that was not the case in northern Europe. The first photo taken by Mikael Colville-Andersen in 2006, which led to the Copenhagen Cycle Chic blog and the global trend has been referred to as "The Photo That Launched a Million Bicycles". The current bicycle boom in transportation and fashion has its roots in this one photo. IBM's Smarter Planet have documented the birth and growth of the Cycle Chic trend using advanced analytic software - from its origins in Copenhagen through 2012.


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