Update:NYC 1, DKNY 0 (Inaugural Fashion Green-Washing post)
The second title we considered for this post was: Donna Karen leaves piles of Orange crap around New York City to promote self, but we figured the picture sort of summed that up enough.
STATIONARY BIKES: Note to pedestrians — there will be a surplus of neon orange bicycles around New York next week. DKNY has partnered with the NYC DoT to help it promote biking as an alternative mode of transportation — well, sort of. DKNY is setting up bike stations from Thursday. But don’t expect to hop on one and peddle off to the next show. This being New York, the bikes will be chained.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, the orange bikes are a nod to the free bike programs that some cities and college campuses have around the world, where a bunch of bikes are left around in random locations for people to use at will. The idea is that because they are “free” they can’t be stolen. Granted this may not be a realistic program for NYC, why Donna Karen thought that this would promote cycling is just a tad bit absurd. Maybe if she donated the bikes to kids that needed them after the ad campaign, it might not be so dumb. Unless unless of course they are all dunked in fucking orange paint first and then broken in half. Well it did at least get her a spot in the Times, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Stumble it!
February 2nd, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Perhaps it could be considered commendable that a clothing company and the City DOT would launch a pro-environmental marketing campaign about cycling. That said, there are those of us in the cycling community who saw these orange bikes, emblazoned with corporate logos, and viewed them as an insulting advertising riff on ghostbikes (http://www.ghostbikes.org/new-york-city). Ghost bikes are memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque.
I imagine that I will be viewed as overly touchy about this, but as an avid cyclist who has lost friends to car accidents, I find this marketing ploy quite insensitive.