During the first COVID lockdowns, Perle and the team behind Loup & Cheyenne began dreaming about mobility "because we didn't have it any more" and then began to sketch and draw. The epiphany came that the bike had never been romanticised as an iconic, sexy object in the same ways that cars and motorcycles had and Loup & Cheyenne was born.
With inspirations ranging from Pedro Almodóvar's iconic film posters to the hedonistic and punk rock-spurning counter-culture movement La Movida that originated in Madrid in the early 80s, "...along with Japanese subculture, pulp culture, haute couture, hip hop culture, and a thousand other things [like] architecture, street photography, surf and skate cultures, design, superstar divas, and so on", everything Loup & Cheyenne assembles, everything they build, emerges from carefully selected existing pieces. They buy nothing new, except for Wald American baskets. Nothing.
Much like an haute couture atelier – except with serious punk energy – the Loup & Cheyenne team bring in their artistic director and creative director to tailor their creations to the personalities, desires and bodies of their almost all-female client base. This rigorous process even includes a postural study of the customer undertaken by an osteopath.
From there, the almost all-female team ("with one exception, there are only girls in Loup & Cheyenne") custom builds the bike of the customer's dreams from the countless extraordinary pieces acquired over a period of several years from across Europe, Japan and the USA. What's particularly surprising to learn is that there is no alteration. Loup & Cheyenne do not paint the frames but instead curate and construct from their kaleidoscopic palette of existing materials and parts to reinvigorate isolated and abandoned bike parts with new meaning and value.
