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Bicycles Designed to Look Expensive

By Adam Marsal

Although the BMX bikes were originally made for riding in dirt and mud, they found their way to the recent collections of high-fashion brands. In this article, you will find BMX and some other bikes that were designed with the idea to shock you with exclusivity. Can it get any snobbier? 

BMX veiled in Fendi’s luxury leather

Shouldn’t you afford the luxury leather goods by the Italian high-end fashion brand Fendi, it probably won’t be any better with this stylish BMX. The bike was designed by Nigel Sylvester, US rider living in Manhattan, who made his fame rather by creating original digital content than his riding skills. Once included in ”30 Under 30” list of the Forbes magazine sports category, Nigel became one of the most acclaimed and influential BMX riders of today. His customised frame has been decorated with legendary Fendi’s Double F Zucca print leather created by Karl Lagerfeld back in 1965. Nigel intended to bring luxury fashion and cycling together. The collaboration with a fashion brand was nothing new for Nigel who designed a similar bike for Luis Vuitton two years ago. The price of Fendi’s new leather steed has not been revealed but we can deduce it from their leather purses that are offered from 1,000 to up to 4,500 euros.

BMX with the smell of perfume

Dior Homme’s artistic director Kris Van Assche hooked up with Bogarde to build a BMX that would perfectly fit over the fireplace at your summer lodge. The bike made by the Parisian fashion guru was launched with a price tag of 3,200 US dollars at the Sole DXB Streetwear Festival in Dubai. Only a limited 70-piece series of chrome-tinted bikes was manufactured to delight the fans of the French luxury brand with a tradition starting in 1946. The idea of collaboration was successful and so another model followed, this time with a crisp white paint job for the Art Basel event in Miami.

The Dior Homme fancy bicycle. © Profimedia, Bestimage

An exclusive bike for an exclusive boutique

Teaming with a well-acclaimed Parisian concept store ‘colette’, Bogarde created an exclusive BMX bike decorated with colette’s iconic white and blue polka dots just shortly before the giant boutique was closed once for good in 2017. The frame designed by French artist Toma Pegaz wore a hand-engraved collete logo on the head tube reinforcement. The rare bike was made to go flawlessly hand in hand with the ideology of Karl Lagerfeld who once said: “It’s the only shop where I go because they have things no one else has.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BEOw8kAwUkO/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

The bike that, literally, shows money

Banknotes have always been inspiring and this SE Bikes 2010 OM Flyer $100 Bill Wrap is no exception. The retro frame was wrapped in 100-dollar notes and equipped with gold and green bike parts. We haven’t counted all the notes in the design but we know that it will cost you eight 100-dollar notes to buy one.

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Who said that Bugatti should be cheap?

Aerodynamically optimised and weighing less than 6 kilograms, this blue carbon-fibre bicycle was said to be the lightest and possibly the fastest urban bike ever made. Created in collaboration between Bugatti and German luxury bike producer PG in only 667 units, this model belongs among the high-end products you can add to your snobbish trophy collection as the first piece was sold in an auction for 39,000 US dollars.

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Expensive and controversial

If all the previous bikes were made to look exclusive, this road bike turned to be the most expensive in history by a mixture of circumstances out of which most were controversial. It’s the same bike used by Lance Armstrong in the 2009 Tour de France race. The US professional cyclist was later stripped of his medals because of doping. The artist Damien Hirst covered the frame and rims with real butterfly wings, which made the bike to be sold in Sotheby’s cancer benefit charity auction for 500,000 dollars. The use of real butterflies angered the animal rights organisation PETA, which labelled this piece of art as a “horrific barbarity.”

The controversial butterfly bicycle. © Profimedia, AFP