By: A Call to Mediocrity Mar 5, 11:08 AM |

As I write this, sitting at my dining table in the late afternoon, a glass of red wine at the ready just off the port side of my laptop listening to the new Dios “Cosmic Rays” album, feeling my breath move across my chin, which happens to have been freshly released from a winters beard, our main man at Embrocation HQ, Jeremy Dunn, is trolling the aisles of the North American Handmade Bike Show. I know that to most of you my current situation sounds ideal. Truly an afternoon hammering away at these silver keys is enough to satisfy most, but I must admit I am little jealous. The twitter feed is going crazy as each show attendee starts to weigh in with photos of their current discoveries and obsessions. I am not going to start listing all the heavy hitting items, I have a feeling the big boys in the industry will bring you all the best replete with winning captions. If you are like me you are holding your breath for both James Huang’s and Road Bike Action’s coverage; really those two have set the high water mark for our industries journalism.

There is one thing though that I don’t think is getting nearly the attention that it deserves. This is the trope of the attractive decidedly non-cyclist model on a bicycle-poster. So far, all of the NAHBS feeds have missed or skipped over these poster boys and girls. I don’t believe that a bicycle show can truly be a bicycle show without poster models, and if this is the case then let NAHBS be warned, they are on thin ice as far as this habitual bike show attendee is concerned. To be fair, I don’t think that the standard girl in bikini, guy in briefs model is necessarily the right method for the hand-built show, but honestly I think some men and women clad in the latest Brooklyn inspired Americana meets Beatnik fashion would be a boon to any builder looking to get her or his brand some additional publicity. Think of it, the photography could be fashionably crossed, processed or possibly shot as a Polaroid, and maybe there is a little story about how this person is not only a model but also a photographer/sculptor/engineer/doctor/barista/etc. Listen builders, this technique is really going to move some numbers. I for one would be happy to see the sex sells model applied in more sophisticated way and I think that NAHBS is just the place to do it. As a side note, every time I ready a caption or hear some one refer to a piece of bicycle equipment as sexy it enforces my understanding that our schools are failing. I can understand if someone refers to a Real Doll as sexy, strange but understandable, but a bike part, that’s just completely missing the point.

With the information super highway, the ol’ internet, at the beckon call of our collective finger tips any one of us, unless you are under the unfortunate rubric of parental controls, has the ability to access countless sophisticated images of good looking people, but this would be missing the point. The attractive person shop poster is a staple item of any bicycle shop, carried back from Interbike as if one were a crusader carrying a relic back from the crusades. This is an intrinsic part of bike shop ephemera, as important as black grease under a mechanics fingernails or a three way Allen wrench. Sexy posters will always be in bicycle shops, so instead of the same rehashed models borrowed from monthly Mini-Truckin’ shoots set to stand over some beat beach cruiser in a terry cloth bikini while smiling out from under what appears to be an indoor water fall, whose source seems to be just out of frame. Let’s do this thing right and lead the next generation of shop employees down a path towards a higher aesthetic, because in the end sex sells isn’t going away, but we can do our best to make it look better.