Start the week topic

[guest40]

I don't know about "style" so much, as most jap/asian machinery takes its designs from the Euro American leads. Proof, you want proof , look at the early Japanese Dreams and Calida's... fugly to the extreme. I think the issue should more related to a bikes character.
The old british metal was cantankerous, the American stagnated designs that could be easily personalised but always they had a character. The more you swore at it the more you loved it.
To make them run you would need to be a bush mechanic and knew every bolt and nut by name.

The Japanese stuff just starts and goes..and goes and goes.         ho hum!

[Steffan]

There is something in what you say mate. My Bullets cause me endless hassle but once they start and go all is forgiven. I have been at the point of getting rid of the pair but once we're thumping down the street, it is love all over again. Not many bikes have that................


Avagoodweekend all, off camping with the family

Steffan

[guest18]

Hmmmm to my mind almost anything can be fashionable but to be stylish it has to have some practicality.

Look at clothes, fashionable clothes often look impractical/dated, however it's often said that stylish clothes almost always remain fashionable, sometimes they may look archaic but most people will look at them and opine that they look good, and practical.

In the same way I think an SRX is stylish, I don't think it will attain the cachet of "a classic" ie. widespread acceptance as an exceptional design/bike, but I think if you pull up next to a group of people who haven't seen one a significant proportion of the group will agree it looks good, very few would say ugly.
By that definition the design and style hasn't dated and is broadly approved of and therefore I would class it as stylish rather than fashionable.

Carrying on the thought, a well set up Enfield can be stylish, it's practical and different enough to be individual without suffering from design elements inflicted to fit in with a fashion. An unreliable, leaky or badly set up Enfield however loses it's stylish cachet as it becomes unreliable and impractical...

Of course style is very much a personal perception, some might say Terry Thomas has style, some would call him a filthy minded letch, Steffen may protest he isn't stylish however choosing an army green Enfield (and standing out from the crowd that way) IS a style, whether chosen for practical reasons or not, will it do anything a CG125 will not for your chosen trip/s....?!
(no offence meant, and I'd love a shot on it(!) it's just as an example mate)
Of course it may well be that you don't care what other people think of your individual stylishness or indeed lack of style, but every time you choose to buy one colour over another, or indeed one type of vehicle over another, we make a choice which is governed in part by style whether we conciously choose to or not.

If our motorcycles were purchased purely on practicalities we'd all be riding some sort of medium small semi(or fully) enclosed variant on a scooter, or with the current choice of machines either CG/YB125's or CB/GS/ETC 500's, the remainder being on Deauville's it being the only other currently available *practical* middleweight long distance bike I'm aware of on sale just now.

But they are not... hence diversity and a wide variety of views on what is stylish.

Which is probably a good thing, (even though I'm still writing in the train of thought style!  ) 

[squirrelciv]

Kurt mate, I think your getting style mixed up with character. All my bikes have had character, few were ever stylish 

[niblue]

Which is probably a good thing, (even though I'm still writing in the train of thought style!  ) 

Indeed. One good thing about bikes is that they're relatively cheap to buy so it's quite reasonable to have a combination of practical and stylish. Until recently I had a Deauville (which is a great bike IMHO) for practical but also went through quite a range of other bikes that were more for fun/interest in parallel with it.

The main reason I've got an XBR is 'cause I loved the look & style of the thing when it came out mid-eighties and I was a teenager with a 125. Having just bought the CBF for practicality (replacing the Deauville) my next bike change will quite possibly be something interesting but less than practical (to replace the CBR) although at this juncture I've got no idea what it might be yet!