Slap on your skinny jeans, and get on a hog, because Harley-Davidson is pitching motorcycles to America’s favorite disgruntled demographic: the hipster. For pursuing today’s young and ironically image-oriented subculture, you can’t really fault a company like Harley-Davidson for this move, seeing as it markets its brand around this notion of conformity through non-conformity.
Copying the vintage art house film style of that we see so often on Vimeo (frame borders, sepia tones, and all), I will steal a line from AutoBlog‘s Jonathon Ramsey and say that Harley-Davidson has nailed the Instagram style on its head with this one…right down to its guitar-string audio track and percolating coffee pot cameo appearance.
In many ways though, Harley-Davidson is the ideal hipster brand…if it wasn’t already so mainstream and inundated with boomers. However in a motorcycling demographic where cafe racers, bobbers, choppers, and anything else that is considered vintage reigns supreme, there is a broad overlap of ideals between Harley-Davidson and hipsters, and it would seem the Milwaukee brand is keen to explore that possibility with the Sportster Seventy-Two.
A bike that was built to appeal to the younger demographic that Harley-Davidson so desperately needs right now, the company has bounced around from the bandanna-clad bad boy skateboarders now to the ironically mustached and well-caffeinated urbanites. Time will tell how this new path pans out, but you have to admit two things: 1) It’s not the worst idea to come from Harley-Davidson, and 2) It’s been executed perfectly.
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