No fixed gear hipsters in China?
Jason Spaceman
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Are There Really No Hipsters in China?Irony-resisting
Chinese bicyclists have skipped the fixed-gear trend that has swept
the rest of the world.
By J. David GoodmanPosted Wednesday, April 21, 2010, at 2:22 PM ET
BEIJING—A multicolored messenger bag slung over one shoulder and short-
brimmed hat cocked to the side, Nie Zheng parked his brakeless bike in
the corner of a trendy cafe in the Beijing Central Business District
before settling into a molded plastic chair to chat about his
particular obsession. "It's been a dream since I was a kid to get a
bicycle like this," the 40-year-old fashion photographer told me. "But
no one sold them here." It took nearly nine months, he said, to get a
track bike he wanted sent from England in 2007.
Such devotion is something of a rarity among the fashion-conscious in
China, where bicycles are simply not mainstream cool. In fact, this
bike-saturated nation has—so far—managed to skip entirely what is
arguably the biggest global bicycle fad in a generation: the fixed-
gear.
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Read it at http://www.slate.com/id/2250893/
J. Spaceman