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DKNY Stops at Nothing to Encourage Environmentally Friendly Transportation

The color isn’t the only thing that’s offensive about this bike.Photo: BikeBlog

On Friday night, DKNY chained neon-orange painted bikes to signposts around Bryant Park and Chelsea, in an effort to encourage us to consider environmentally friendly forms of transportation this Fashion Week. We initially thought the idea was silly since, good sentiment aside, you can’t ride bikes or do anything eco-friendly in clothes worth wearing to the tents, and today Racked reports that the bikes have sparked ire:

Activists are unhappy with the effort, noting that it seems to be a knock-off of ghost bikes, the white-painted memorials to cyclists that have been killed while riding. In response to an earlier post on the subject, a Racked commenter wrote: “The bikes where put into place late Friday evening and by Saturday afternoon they had all been defaced and removed spontaneously and, most likely by any one of the tens of thousands of bike riders in New York who found it offensive…”

Besides, if you stumbled upon one of these ridiculous things and didn’t know why it was there (and really, if you’re not part of the select segment of the population privy to these pressing, fashionable matters, why would you?), you probably wouldn’t think, Golly, I need to do my part to save the planet. More likely, you’d think, WTF. That’s what we thought, anyhow, when nearly tripped over one on the corner of 14th Street and Eighth Avenue the other day. Then we remembered that we got a press release about the damn things, and we cursed the world. —Amy Odell

Seemingly Innocuous DKNY Marketing Effort Manages to Offend Many [Racked]

DKNY Stops at Nothing to Encourage Environmentally Friendly Transportation