The Bikes of Stages

To celebrate Lance's participation in the 2009 Milan-San Remo race, KAWS embraced a classic paint scheme for Lance's "daily driver" Trek Madone, adding the distinctly Pop touch of his own reoccurring "teeth" pattern on both the frame and wheels (which instantly became two giant mouths) in an effort to subtly turn Lance's bike into one giant, road-gobbling cartoon character. While the bike served him well during this race, it would go down for the count shortly afterward, when Lance made a surprise, last-minute entry in the Vuelta Leon y Castilla race, during which he crashed and fractured his clavicle. Since then, KAWS's beautiful ride has been affectionately dubbed "the widowmaker."

Cutting his teeth making art on the streets of NYC in the 1990s under the enigmatic moniker KAWS, Brian Donnelley hit artistic paydirt when he began a now-legendary series of "interventionist" public artworks on the advertising posters of the bus shelters of SoHo. In a gloriously creative critique of otherwise vapid fashion and general Pop Culture advertising, KAWS inserted himself into the landscape of pouty, disaffected models by covering their faces in his now-trademark XX-eyed skull and crossbones. The result gave birth to a simple but now deeply iconic graphic language that has crossed over into the world of product design for his personal brand, Original Fake, and that the artist approaches with a truly fetishistic zeal. Having worked collaboratively with some of the biggest brands in the world, KAWS' graphic cues bring instantly identifiable ownership to everyday objects in a way few other artists can achieve.