Motorcycle historian Paul d’Orléans takes a deep dive into the uneasy but essentially productive relationship between the modern-day custom scene and design teams at the major manufacturers.
In the ancient days of the 1990s, custom motorcycles were incredibly popular, but their baroque excess made them irrelevant to the motorcycle industry. The death of the fat tire custom in 2009 made barely a ripple in the OEM world, but that was the first time, really, that customs were not leading motorcycle design by the nose, and folks forgot the unacknowledged back-and-forth between tinkerers making cool bikes—and the stodgy industry taking notes.
Going backwards in time, trackers, choppers, café racers, bob-jobs, Promenade Percys, and cut-downs had all impacted factory designs, but nobody talked about it until Bike EXIF became a monster.…