The bicycle craze was more than just a pure product of fashion and modern mass consumption, however, and it wasn’t necessarily an expression of progressiveness. The bicycle was adopted into a middle-class culture (the wheel was far too expensive for most of the working class, at least initially) that remained solidly Victorian in outlook, ridden by people whose perspective was founded upon rigid dichotomies between “right” and “wrong,” “man” and “woman,” “authentic” and “fake,” “respectable” and “not-so-respectable.” The bicycle served to bolster these Gilded Age principles in the hands of its users, functioning as a mobile platform on which its owner’s genteel credentials could be displayed and proven.
One way of doing this was to buy the most expensive, luxurious and tasteful bicycle and accessories possible. From decorated chain-guards to novelty cycling bells to handle-bar revolvers, consumers spent more than $200 million on bicycle sundries in 1896 alone, as opposed to only $300 million on the bicycles themselves that same year. Nowhere did the consumer culture surrounding the bicycle manifest itself more than in the area of attire. By sporting the latest styles, wheelmen and women sought to project a public image of taste and wealth for their peers to appreciate. In 1898, The New York Times wrote that “Sweaters…will probably be seen but little among the better class of riders this year, as the extra comfort gained by their wear is considered more than offset by the impossibility of preserving a spruce appearance when wearing them.” A well-meaning author pressed home the point in The American Cyclist, declaring that “I cannot repeat too often that, in matters cycular (sic), STYLE IS PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING; without it, strength is wasted, appearance sacrificed, and pleasure lost.”
Style was at the center of the cycling promenades and parades that drew thousands of riders and even greater crowds of spectators to the boulevards of the city throughout the mid-to-late 1890s. The most popular setting for these displays was Riverside Drive—the “paradise of bicyclists” in New York, as Harper’s Weekly labeled it in 1894. The New York Times reported that “the Sunday procession of cyclists has got to be one of the sights of the city,” and the great collections of cyclists who gathered every weekend was described by reporters as a kind of formal spectacle—a “procession,” a “pageant,” a “parade.” Such terms were a result of the emphasis on presentation and display that, above all, distinguished middle-class cycling from more utilitarian travel.