The Vanity Fair slideshow is 17 photos in a series called Photos: Classic Bicycle Design Over the Last Century.
 |
| Photo from Vanity Fair |
Of course a fixie makes it into the list. The fixie is really just all other bikes with the junk removed, so we inhabit a space at the base level of cycling. All other bikes aspire to this but are prevented from achieving this simplicity by necessities like carrying gear, keeping water from spraying up your butt or stopping in a timely and safe fashion.
Apparently these bikes (below) aren’t made any more. I can only imagine that at their peak they weren’t going to rival Giant in production terms. Adjusting saddle height would have been a chore.
 |
| Photo from Vanity Fair. |
The bike above brings to mind the tall bike. Tall bikes have never been part of the bike scene in Australia. I know they pop up in the New York bike scene and the like. Tall bikes can be made from a couple donor bikes if you have elementary welding skills, and then you can impress your mates with a spot of tall bike jousting. Could be the next bike polo.
The last bike I include here because a mate of mine had one when I was a kid. He used to impress us by nearly riding halfway up a hill we could ride up every day of the week. (In fact I had to because I lived at the bottom of it, something that depressed the hell out of me on school days.) Vanity Fair says “this bike can provide its riders with some serious cycling time despite its light weight.” That’s the lead balloon version of light weight, and with all that redundant energy-sapping suspension the bike’s only real function was to impress us by the mere fact that he could (almost) keep up with us on our state-of-art 5-speed Malvern Star racers.
 |
| Photo from Vanity Fair |
You can check out the Vanity Fair slideshow right here.
