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Baskets Are the New Minimalism
It’s a classic example of fixie bike lust: the carefully accented color coordination, expensive but mismatched wheels, improbably narrow handlebars, and, of course, lack of any unsightly “extras” such as gears and brakes. But wait...is that a basket we see?
We love – and love to hate – those slim fixie kids. In our fair city -- and, 
apparently, in every other city and town on the globe (our friend just back from Budapest reports that the place is crawling with them) -- one either a) rides a fixie, b) wants to ride one, or c) hates fixies and their aficionados. Preliminary and informal research (soon to appear in the Journal of Mundane Behavior) indicates that these groups can be mapped with a simple Venn diagram:
About half of those who hate riders also (secretly?) wish they rode; a small portion of those who ride also hate other fixie kids or, in rare cases, themselves. As a San Francisco attorney of our acquaintance remarked to us during a recent Critical Mass, "It’s strange, I often don't like the people who like the same things that I like."
But kids aside, the bicycles are beautiful -- it’s well known that the two most beautiful films ever made, the Lumière brothers’ Bicycliste (1896) and Jorgen Leth’s Umlige Time (1974) are fundamentally about the sleek beauty of the fixed-gear bicycle. So what’s with the sudden front basket epidemic? We’ve even spotted fixies with (gasp!) fenders. We predict that fixie riders will soon be falling over one another to attach all sorts of chromed racks, mirrors, lights, bells, and whistles, like the Vespa-riding Mods in that old Fine Young Cannibals video (yow).
