Any young rider knows that parents can be as unpredictable as El Nino when it comes to buying you stuff, and my father is no exception. Every once in a while, using a decision process I have not been able to come near to figuring out, he decides it's time to go out and buy me a decent suit. His decision to engage in suit-buying has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with how many decent suits I actually own, (if anything, there's an inverse relationship between how many suits I have and how many he thinks I have) or whether or not I will actually need a decent suit in the near future, or whether or not he wouldn't really be better off buying himself a decent suit. It's a completely non-logical process---he calls me out of nowhere, says, "Do you think you need a decent suit?" to which my answer is almost always "Yes", and away we go.
Dad and I differ in a number of important particulars. He's a fit-and-trim type of guy, where I'm kind of a roly-poly dude, even after having lost sixty pounds in the last year. He has a totally positive attitude, in direct contrast to my amazing ability to mope and gripe. Perhaps most bizarre given our respective ages and backgrounds, he is at least mildly interested in fashion and dressing well, while I don't see anything wrong with wearing an old "Rockvillle BMX" shirt to work.
Fashion has always been totally foreign territory to me, but out of respect to my dad and a general conviction that a gentleman of my education and experience (stop laughing, d@%mit!) should be able to dress himself, I have in the past ten years or so taken the time to learn a little bit about the world of men's attire. Keep in mind that when I say "fashion", I'm not talking about Tommy Hilfiger and that kind of worthless, WT, cynically marketed crap---I mean Joseph Abboud, Ermenegildo Zegna, and Saville Row, clothes that possess a certain je ne sais quoi. That's French for "I don't know what they're supposed to possess, but you won't catch me saying so". Maybe I'm crazy, but I see a real parallel between the men's fashion industry and the world of BMX, particularly a subject that I get more e-mails on than almost anything else: picking a new bike.
Shall I elaborate? Okay, check this out: Let's say that I am a young European of decent birth and family who needs a new suit., My first step, and this is the step that has generally been taken by the upper classes in both Europe and America for a very long time, would be to go see a tailor. If I'm in England, I will visit an area known as Saville Row; in Italy, I might choose the Milanese shopping districts; in France, I can stroll through Paris and pick out tailors at will. Once I have chosen a tailor, I will sit down with him (it's always a man) and we will discuss what kind of attire I need. Perhaps I'm a London banker and need the deep blue "City suit". Maybe I'm a designer for Alfa Romeo and am looking for an off-white, three-button summer suit. I could be an English sportsman who needs a hunting jacket and several pairs of pants to go with it. It doesn't really matter what I need; I'll see a tailor, because a true aristocrat never buys "off-the-rack". We'll get into what "off-the-rack" is a little later, so bear with me.
Once we agree on what kind of suit I need, the tailor will pull out some "bolts" of cloth. This will be the actual cloth used in my suit, so I can check it out and make sure I like what I see. With the cloth decided on, I will stand for my first measuring. Over the next few months, I will come back two or three times to be re-fitted. Once the re-fitting process is done, I can have my stuff.
This way of dressing is absolutely unbeatable. Since the tailor knows you personally, he can design your clothes to hide your Jim Boswell Signature Model Potbelly or any other defects. You will be comfortable because the clothes were made exactly for you. Most tailors stand behind their work for their entire lifetimes, so you can be sure that any rips or tears will be competently repaired. Best of all, your suit (or dinner jacket, or casual attire) will be exactly what you want - no compromises necessary.
All you'll need for this kind of attention is between two and fifteen thousand dollars per suit, more for a dinner jacket (called a "tuxedo" here in the Midwest) and less for a simple shirt and pants without a coat. Expensive, huh? For clothes you can wear your entire lifetime, maybe not.
What's this process remind you of, besides the John LeCarre book The Tailor of Panama? Hmm... could it be building a new race bike "from scratch"? That's what it reminds me of. Just like with a tailor, you get exactly what you want, in the right colors, and the right materials. If you have enough cash, you can even get a custom frame, although I don't recommend it for riders who have any growing left to do. Building your race bike from components will cost you, but at least you'll get exactly the right stuff---at least, we hope it's the right stuff. Unlike a good tailor, even the best bike shop won't rebuild your custom bike with different parts if it's a bad fit, at least not unless you're prepared to pay up.
Let's return to clothes for a second. Say you're a super-successful tailor whose name has become reasonably famous among the people who can afford this kind of thing, and the people who can almost afford this kind of thing. Trouble is, there's only one of you to go around. What can you do to increase your cash flow?
Simple. Put some of your best suits down on paper and have them mass-produced in a garment factory somewhere. Put a tag on the suits with your name on it, and hang them on a rack in clothes stores with the biggest price tag you think you can get away with. This is called doing "off-the-rack", because you'll never meet your customer---he'll just grab your suit off the rack in the store and hope it fits. Sure, most good clothing stores have a tailor on-duty to do your cuffs and that kind of thing, but basically these are suits designed to fit everybody who is, for example, a 46 Long, or a 38 Regular.
I have an Armani suit hanging in my closet. It wasn't cheap, but it was a lot cheaper than it would have been to fly to Italy and let old Giorgio fit me for a custom-made one. I'm not under the illusion that this is some kind of custom suit---it's a way to get the "look" of a top Italian suit without having a real tailor-made one. Same way with the Zegna stuff. If you visit the Zegna website, you'll notice that they advertise the ready-to-wear stuff as "an affordable alternative to handmade." Sure, if three thousand bucks is affordable.
Does "ready-to-wear" and "off-the-rack" remind of you of anything, besides the Kim Basinger movie? Sure it does - complete bikes! Maybe you can't afford $1400 for a best-of-everything, Robby-Rupe-handmade 20"- but for $450, you can get a complete Redline that looks and rides a lot like a custom-built bike. Maybe the stem won't be the one you would have chosen, and maybe the pedals don't grip the way you want them to, but, man, the money you saved!
What if you only have $150 for a suit or a bike? You can get a JC Penny suit, which is kind of a generalized imitation of a real suit, or someting like a Dyno VFR, which is kind of a generic BMX bike made as cheap as possible. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. A JC Penny suit is good enough when you are interviewing for your first job, and a Dyno VFR is good enough to race your first race with. You don't always need to spend big bucks to get started. As a matter of fact, I'd recommend against it - what if you buy a $2500 Brioni double-breasted suit to work at a bank where they frown on the "Italian" look, or what if you buy a $600 Gary Fisher complete bike, only to find out in your first race that the darn thing is too small?
Once you get started in BMX, should you even consider a complete bike, or should you upgrade what you have, piece by piece? There's no simple answer, but I will say that the more expensive a complete bike is, the worse of a value it is. I think it's a good idea to buy a $350 Redline and eventually put the cranks, stem, and seat you really want on it, but I don't think it's a good idea to buy a $800 Powerlite and then end up doing the same thing.
Chances are that you and the manufacturer don't have exactly the same idea of what your bike should be, any more than Hugo Boss can fit me for a custom suit without ever meeting me. If you buy a GT complete bike, you're going to get stuck with the GT cranks, stem, bars, and pedals. Do you really want all that junk, I mean, stuff? Do you want to pay for it? Won't you save money in the long run by slowly changing your current bike into the one you really want, one part at a time?
There's one circumstance where I really recommend buying a complete bike, and that is if you are a regular 20" racer who wants to try the cruiser class. In that case, you are best off buying an inexpensive cruiser just to see if you like 24" racing. I would take me a while to count the number of riders I have known who have spent a year or more building the perfect cruiser only to find that they hate racing cruiser, and cruiser riders who built a $1000 20", only to find that they didn't like racing 20". You get the idea. Start cheap.
Most of the riders I hear from nowadays start BMX with a fairly expensive ($300 and up) complete bike. I'm not sure that's the best way to go, but if you have a top-dollar complete bike, you should work with it for a while before getting rid of it or changing the frame. Don't make any expensive changes until you can sit down and really understand what you're trying to accomplish. As an example, I would not, and do not, bother with buying three-piece cranks until I have bent the original one-piece cranks supplied with a bike. If you have money that's burning a hole in your pocket, spend it on local racing. The improvement you'll see from riding more often is a lot greater than what you'd get from buying some CNC-machined doodad.
In the long run, you are always better off taking the time to make your own decisions about what you want your bike to be. Chances are, too, that the weakest component on your current bike is its rider, so think about that before you ask your parents (or your spouse, in my case) for the cash for a new complete scoot. Above all, don't forget what my father told me never to forget about racing, or fashion for that matter---it's supposed to be fun. Hey! Shut down this computer right now and go RIDE! No, I don't care how cold it is! See you next month!