By ALEX WILLIAMS

Nearly every morning, Renaud Dutreil, the chairman of the North American unit of the luxury and fashion conglomerate LVMH, rides to his Manhattan office on a black Gazelle, a stylish Dutch commuter bicycle.

From his desk - which sits beneath a 1952 Robert Randall photograph of a woman pedaling through the countryside in gray flannel Christian Dior - Mr. Dutreil oversees the business operations of LVMH, which has several brands that have focused on bicycles of late.

Fendi, for example, recently introduced the Abici Amante Donna, a handmade $5,900 bicycle with a front-mounted beauty case and saddlebags in Selleria leather ($9,500 for the version with the optional fur saddlebags).

At Louis Vuitton, the designer Paul Helbers evoked bike-messenger style in his line at the Paris runway shows in June. Last spring another LVMH brand, DKNY, helped execute the Bike in Style Challenge, in which aspiring designers were asked to create fashionable bike apparel. And in June, Hublot, the luxury watchmaker, partnered with BMC, the Swiss bikemaker, to create a sleek black 11-speed, for about $20,000.

Until recently, bikes were merely fashionable. Lately, it seems, they are fashion - and they don’t have to be ultraexpensive novelty items to qualify. As fashion companies start marketing bicycles and bike gear, Mr. Dutreil, a supporter of bicycleadvocacy programs in New York, said he wants to see more cyclists pedaling around in high style, just like that woman in the Randall photograph.

“An elegant lady or man,” he said, “on a bike that is elegant, that’s really the new art of living.” Some purists worry that their beloved bikes are being turned into a showy status symbol.

“There is definitely a downside to biking when bikes become a fashion fad,” Wendy Booher, 39, a journalist in Somerville, Massachusetts, wrote in an e-mail message. “If you unleash a herd of teetering, wobbly fashionistas into city streets without any real knowledge of how to ride a bike in traffic, accidents can (and likely will) happen.”

There is also the risk of an expensive bike being stolen.

But designers have marketed environmentally sensitive clothing in recent years, so it makes sense that some of them would eventually adopt the greenest form of transportation.

“The luxury industry has to show a new way,” said Mr. Dutreil of LVMH. “It’s very logical to connect the art of living, and the elegance, to a new duty, which is to respect our environment.”


With fur saddlebags, the Fendi Abici Amante Donna sells for $9,500.