G’day – Are you a part of the fashion police? Do Hipsters turn you into a raging wildebeest? Get ready to tear your own eyeballs out with blunt textas.
Recently I wrote about a peculiar trend emerging, the ‘fashion motorcycle clothing’ seen adorning websites all over the world. The kinds of clothing that marketers are slapping on ‘fashion’ labels on, but calling them motorcycle clothing then selling them to hipsters who are used to paying $400-800 for a pair of jeans, ruining it for everyone.
Anyway, I found this: Kalup.
After a lengthy load time of 17 seconds you are clobbered by a strange array of 60s inspired homo-erotica and women turning into (naked) furniture. You gotta admit, it’s pretty out there.
“Our contribution to the feminist discourse is so sexist, even women like it.”
Ahuh, sure they do. The Slave Suit is a mere €2580 (equating to $4170 AUD) I can think of approximately a hundred and eighty million different kinds of anything I’d buy before this.
Who would actually wear this?
Or what about this? The Oblique jacket front, retailing at €1370 (equalling $2k AUD) this is surely a costume?
I have a ridiculously hip gay friend who would probably wear this, at the weekend, to the gay bar. He doesn’t ride motorbikes though…
Why is this lady naked, and why are they ignoring her? What is it supposed to symbolise?
What are they doing to this bike?
What are these two guys doing, are they in love? With each other? Or the motorbike?
I’m so confused by all of this. I clearly don’t get it, despite my dorothy stripes. But to top it off these guys even made a video of the making of the photo shoot, that’s where we are at with this company.
A video, about the making of, the photo shoot, for these ‘motorcycle’ clothes that are seemingly more to do with fetish and fashion, than anything to do with motorcycling I can think of.
Turns out their campaign (ok so it WAS a marketing campaign after all) caused a bit of a stir in Spain where feminists kicked up about the objectification of women as seen in their photography and filmmaking.
I swear since I first started looking at this bizarre site, they have updated the context of what they are doing here, claiming:
“We are fetishists.
We worship speed.
We adore motorcycles. We like fashion and style.
And of course, we love women.”
It never had the first line when I first found it.
So I looked on their blog and found the outraged feminist activists who also seemed to think there was a bit of a problem with the scenery here. Rightly so!
A Change.org petition was created, which at the time of writing this have 19,404 supporters.
Clearly I wasn’t the only one slightly confused by their imagery after all. Phew.
What do you think? What place does fashion, or even fetish, have in the motorcycling mainstream?
