Bikers

Youth movement and style. The image of Perfecto, the leather jacket by Schott worn by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, directed by Stanley Kramer in 1954, is destined to undergo infinite mutations within the typology of biker culture. The biker, as an archetype, is related to the ground in the way that a surfer is to water. In both, the passion for a sport is interpreted as a lifestyle. Or, put a better way, a lifestyle is inferred by expanding the symbolic limits of a sport. In both, the essential thing is to ride the wave, or the asphalt, in terms of means and purpose at the same time. For bikers, a feeling of dissatisfaction and a desire for escape, seen as a model, have their origin in the inability of some World War II veterans to adapt to domestic life after leaving the service. In the U.S. of the 1940s and ’50s, in a climate dominated, also from a media point of view, by increasing conformism, bikers abandoned both every previous model of biker life and any attempt to assimilate themselves into the upper classes. Proudly adopting a genuinely working class style of dress (jeans, T-“shirt, and a jacket) they created a model that would endure even for those who would never ride a motorbike. The character type of the rebel was embodied first by James Dean and then by Bruce Byron, an almost mythological character in Scorpio Rising (1963) by Kenneth Anger, and they would also serve as models for Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1968).