FREE WHEELIN’

FREE WHEELIN’

BRIAN RATHJEN

DECOUPAGE NOT DÉCOLLETAGE…

“Show me your luggage and I’ll tell you who you are.” - Louis Vuitton slogan

“Honey…it’s Decoupage not Décolletage…”

Dontcha love it when you get corrected? Again.

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Somewhere back in time – just a tad over 40 years ago – BMW introduced the GS motorcycle.

A few years later Kawasaki brought the KLR 650 into the fray and with these machines, the beginning of the ‘Adventure Rider’ had begun.

If you look back in time there have been dozens of famed and unfamed motorcycle riders that have ridden over the horizon and down the road less traveled – many before there were even any real roads.

In the late 1800s and the turn of the 20th century those lucky to travel carried their clothing and items in large steamer trunks; named for the shops that carried them. During the Roaring Twenties travel by steamer ships really took off and during that time hotels and trendy destinations began creating elaborate labels and what we now call “stickers.”

According to Mattéoli, a Chilean-born writer who moved to Paris as a girl and spent months running up and down the hallways of the famous Hotel du Louvre, built in 1855; Her book WORLD TOUR opens with a decorative greenand-red label of the Paris hotel, circa 1930.

This is what she said about this style of art:

“Most of the famous designers who drew the hotel labels are attached to the Art Deco period, such as the Italian Mario Borgoni. His hotel labels were like posters. He was a painter and a decorator and his style -- the elegant Liberty lettering, and his shadings of red or orange -- became a sort of a trademark of the printer Richter & Co, and it was widely imitated. He often did not sign his work and started a new career at 61 years old in the USA as a publicity and fashion illustrator. There was also the Austrian Franz Lenhart, very active during the late 1920s, and the Italian Filippo Romoli, who designed many hotel labels like the one of Hotel Des Bains, in the Art Deco style, and who had the good idea to sign them.” Today nding an old steamer trunk decorated with original stickers like these is priceless to the collector. But, have not today’s adventure riders begun to follow in this fashion nearly one hundred years later? When we were at the BMW MOA National rally in Spring eld, Missouri this year it only took one lap around the parking lot to get my evidence for this. For some travel and destination stickers are a source of validation - basically, “Look where I went and you did not!”

Far away destinations and places not even on the map, world oddities and the like can all be found on these machines. Some riders simply play the game and sticker their bags with places they have never been, nor never will. They’re just having fun, yet others, and I’ve seen this many times, might pull the ‘P-Word” – making a kerfuf e about this. Those that make a rumpus about this, to me, are the rider’s version of the woman with 5 cats and no social life. Seriously, what do you care?

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