MAJs gay bikes [she’s in her fitness era]

can see some discourse circulating regarding two major themes, let's check in on what the cultural critics have to say

on the paint:

conceptually the drip is the death of ego and individualist ideas of fate, it's a way of telling the world that they have given up the idealisation of complete control.

They can spend months choosing the right design, building their perfect object, that they can construct whatever beautiful dream their heart and mind can imagine, use their skilled and practiced hands to bring it into reality for all too see. yet the final look and presentation of it all is on fate.

we can chose the colour of the drip, maybe where it goes, but our final branding by it is out of our hands, in the hands of the the very foundational forces which surround us. inevitably, our life is not so different from the paint dripping down the frame, our fate is set by that which comes before us and that which resides over us.

on the mis match fork

Historically mismatched forks stem from the world of hobbyists and have subcultural and countercultural values, as well as being a form of social capital for an owner.

an OTP bike will come perfect, pristine and often colour matched (disregarding the race to the bottom bike pricing for carbon forked steel frames by Taiwan boutique designers from America and Europe), bikes designed for the mass market, for the average person who generally as our society demands to succeed, are conventional, polite and inoffensively positioned

a bike with a mismatch fork signals something else entirely however, a bike which has been hobbled together, or drawn from separate sources. be it at the point of design as they bought all the parts individually and built with their own hands or be it because they used them till destruction and had to find a suitable replacement. the bike itself is not a singular object, for every part has its own value and must be addressed individually on a case by case basis.

while the average buyer may see this bike on the street and not bat an eye (and if they do it is in disgust), the owner does not care, for what the owner seeks is the rubber necking of someone else on a mismatched fork. like a call from a penguin lost on the ice, seeking its own kind who will notice the hours of graft and care they placed to construct something many buy off the peg to better success.

which leads us to the ironic design of setting out to construct this for a bespoke bike, for it's one thing to do this from existing objects, but to construct this as an object in and of itself? at the point of design conception? does this make the work that of a poser, or an coy in joke at the hands of the designer, this will be for the audience to decide no doubt.