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PIMP MY VELO

SOUPED-UP CYCLES | October 14th 2008

Not content with free wheels, young Parisians are now recycling cycles. Kabir Chibber pedals away...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

The French have decided--in much the same way they feel entitled to have jobs, or win football championships--that they have the right to cycle free. A friend of mine recently complained about having to change Vélib' (the public rental bikes launched so successfully in Paris last year) every 30 minutes so that he could travel for nothing, rather than pay the €1 charge incurred for staying with the same bike all the way across town.

Despite this--or perhaps because of it?--the bike shops of Paris are thriving. Spawning, even. Vélo Vintage (pictured above and below) opened last May, after the police discovered its owners selling secondhand bikes from their home, and gave them an ultimatum--open a proper shop or stop trading altogether. The young entrepreneurs, Eddy Delgado and Hugo Badia, scour the villages and towns of rural France looking for unusual, unwanted cycles, which they bring back to Paris, recondition, and then sell on for between €50 and €150. At their tiny shop in the 18th arrondissement, a shabby and unfashionable district of northern Paris, their small stock of chipped, old, yet oddly beautiful bikes are hung from the walls or lined up next to each other, the frames stamped with the sort of brand names that inspire instant nostalgia in the cycle-loving French: Atala, Romet, France-Loire, La Perle.

"None of our bikes is made any more," Hugo says, standing next to a small, cream and red version of a 1970s Chopper: super-high handlebar, crotch-threatening gear-stick in the centre of the frame. He wears thick-framed, retro spectacles and his hands are covered in oil. "But we love them. We don't care about the rust or what colour the frame is, just as long as the bike works and is cheap. To be beautiful, a bike doesn't have to be new."

Vélo Vintage is open for only two hours every weekday evening. Its decor runs to white walls with a rainbow decal and candy-coloured neon strip lights, a portable television set on a stand, and a box full of old vinyl records (also for sale). Customers are invited to test bikes by driving them around the streets; Hugo and Eddy say the majority are what they call BoBos--bourgeois bohemians, people who are "not poor but want to look like it", as Eddy puts it. Members of the tribe can be found loitering at the front of the store--when it's open.

Although naturally Hugo insists that spending thousands on a bike is "obscene", across the city in the smart 3rd arrondissement, it's quite possible to blow as much as €1,400 on a single machine. At BiCyCle Store, opened in May by Alexandre Billard, a former cosmetics salesman, customers wander among some of the world's most extraordinary-looking and expensive bikes, displayed in cool rows in a minimal, concrete-floored space that has more than a touch of the contemporary art gallery about it. The bikes on show range from a well-mannered Dutch frame to the kind of flame-painted low-riders traditionally favoured by Los Angeles gang members.

"To me, a high-quality, expensive bicycle is as attractive as a high-quality, expensive car or motorbike," Alexandre says. His favourite is the British-made Brompton folding bike, which he sells for about €890 and describes as the "Rolls-Royce of its type"; but his stock also includes the steel-framed Kronan, an original Swedish army design that defines practical simplicity, and the e-Solex, an Italian redesign of a cult petrol/pedal cycle from the 1940s, which now runs on more eco-friendly electricity and looks like a moped on a diet.

The granpère of the Parisian cycle scene is Bicloune, just around the corner from BiCyCle Store. For over 25 years it has provided a personal service, reconditioning secondhand and vintage bikes that range from the collectable to the frankly eccentric, and customising them right down to the frame for around €1,000. A large two-storey space jammed with bikes of every type and price, Bicloune specialises in collectable oddities: an early-20th-century Swiss bike that has no chain, or a rare 1950s racing bike from Motoconfort, a now defunct French brand better known for motorcycles.

But the newcomers keep coming up fast behind. La Crémerie, in the 10th, sells only BMXs--those small, chunky-wheeled stunt bikes much loved by skateboarders and ten-year-old boys--in luminous yellow and electric blue. Meanwhile Cyclope, in the grungy 11th arrondissement, specialises in "fixed-gear" bikes that have no brakes; perhaps the perfect product for Parisians, who don't seem to use brakes even when they have them.

If the French have always adored cycles, why this latest intensification of the love affair? Alexandre puts it down to the obvious: record petrol prices, congested roads and an overwhelmed public transport system. "It has almost forced us to rediscover cycling," he says. "And now the bike itself has become a symbol of environmental awareness, of urban living."

Or perhaps, as the American writer Christopher Morley said in the early part of the last century, "the bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets", then Parisians believe that a bike should let you express your inner Baudelaire--even if you're actually an accountant. A bike signifies your beliefs. It's the magazine you have tucked in your back pocket. The neighbourhood you live in. The brand of cigarette you smoke. Back at Vélo Vintage, among his rusty, "re-loved" bicycles, Eddy Delgado thinks there is a much simpler reason. "Paris is such a beautiful city," he says. "And to see it, really see it, you have to be riding a bike."

Bicloune 93 boulevard Beaumarchais, Paris 75003; +33 (0)1 42 77 58 06

BiCyCle Store 17 boulevard du Temple, 75003 Paris; +33 (0)9 51 61 68 29

La Crémerie 49 rue Albert Thomas, 75010 Paris; +33 (0)1 48 04 30 82

Cyclope 100 rue de la Folie-Méricourt, 75011 Paris; ?+33 (0)6 72 86 23 99

Vélo Vintage 58 rue du Ruisseau, 75018 Paris; +33 (0)6 13 13 42 27

Photographs by Stephan Zaubitzer

(Kabir Chibber is a writer based in London. He has also contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times, and spends his spare time learning the art of boxing.)