Scooting Along, After A Fashion

He's about 21, slick black hair, thin black tie coupling his fitted white shirt at the neck. Over top is a Navy military-style parka - the kind with the fur-lined hood. And under a Chelsea-booted foot is the stubborn kick-start of a 1959 Vespa scooter, a two-wheeled icon of industrial design and a heavyweight symbol of 1960s British youth culture.

Right now, though, the nobility of that iconography seems pretty far away.

One kick - a shudder and a groan. Another - a cough, a sputter and almost a start. A third - nothing.

"Sometimes I wish someone would just push it over a cliff," he mutters.

Oh, the trials of fashion. Fickle engines notwithstanding, though, for a growing constituency of the younger set, the Vespa is becoming the ultimate fashion accessory.

Fueled recently by frequent appearances in the pop-culture forum - British pop bands Oasis and Blur have helped dust off the scooter's decades-old appeal - the bikes are once again in high demand, and more than 30 years since they first made the transition from utilitarian post-war transport to urban cool.

They appear routinely in fashion spreads all over America now, as well as music videos. A new magazine from San Francisco devoted to the scooter lifestyle, titled, appropriately enough, Scoot! Quarterly, was launched in 1997. And "Hell Bent For Leisure," a documentary about the West Coast scooter scene by Vancouver, B.C., producer Anya Downey, recently made its debut.

"We're sort of hitting another beginning," says Victor Voris, proprietor of Big People Scooters, a shop devoted to the reconditioning and repair of the classic machines. From his spot on Airport Way, Voris has serviced the trend from one wave to the next - and the current one's just about ready to crest.

"About every 10 years, there's sort of a big revival," says Voris, 32, standing in his shop among various parts, posters and regalia festooned with the Vespa symbol. In a glass case on the wall is a host of patches bearing the names and symbols of bands closely associated with the bikes in the '80s - the Specials, the Jam, the English Beat.

Voris is in a good position to chart the ebb and flow of scooter enthusiasm: He bought his very first bike, a 1974 Vespa Rally 200, in 1979, when he was 14.

At the time, the second wave was gaining momentum. Running alongside the punk movement of the late '70s and early '80s was the Mod revival, an aesthetic born in the early '60s in England, based on old rhythm and blues, rebellion, fine clothes - and scooters. The British band the Who took the mod movement mainstream in the mid-'60s and then helped fuel its revival in 1979, when it made "Quadrophenia." The film told the story of a gang of poor British kids with a love for fashion, music and the mirror- and chrome-bedecked Vespas that became synonymous with their identities.

Voris' first Vespa was much less dramatic. Battered and bruised, it didn't even run when he got it, so he set about making it do so. While being elbow-deep in grease wasn't exactly glamorous, it gave him a first taste of the community these vehicles have fostered - a community that plays much like an extended family running from Vancouver, B.C., to San Diego, and all over the world.

At the time, the Buzz Club - Seattle's first scooter club - was forming, and when members found the teenage Voris grappling with his scooter's guts, they were only too happy to help.

"I didn't even know who they were. I was just this kid messing around with this bike in an antique shop," he said. "But they were there all the time, helping me put it back together. That was my first taste that there was any sort of social dynamic connected to these things."

Dynamic it was. Through the late '80s, scootering hit a height in the Northwest, with annual weekend rallies - gatherings of hundreds of scooterists perched on their Vespas or Lambrettas, the two dominant Italian scooter types - in Seattle, Victoria, Portland and Vancouver.

Everyone knew one another - they were recognized by their bikes.

People met to swap scooter knowledge, share in their deep affection for the bands of the day and "just hang out," said Syd Wayman, 28, a devout scooterist who still helps organize rallies.

"When I was first into it, it was really a big deal to go out and talk to people about the scooters, and the fashion and the music - the whole thing," said Wayman, who has a 1974 Vespa Primavera and a Spanish-made 1980 Lambretta Jet 200. "There are a lot of people who have been buying them recently, though, who just don't hang out with us at all."

While a lot of the kids of the '80s - adults of the '90s - haven't lost interest in the bikes, a younger set has started to enter the scene. The early-twenties crowd, discovering a pre-made '60s-style package of ska and blues, three-button suits and thick-banged, shaggy hair - the byproduct of nouveau mod Britpop influences like Oasis - are willing to pay many times more for a scooter than their predecessors. Vespas are now more accessory than lifestyle choice, said Wayman, and the new buyers seem more interested in style or collectibility than joining a collective.

"We try hard to include everybody, but there's just so many different people now," she said. "But I don't understand why, if you own a classic machine like this and you're living in the city and you're in your twenties, you wouldn't want to get involved. Why not just buy a Honda?"

This, of course, is an insult: Plastic Japanese scooters are a laughable antithesis to the swooping, curvaceous, all-steel body frames on the classic Italians.

Voris says Vespa buyers are all sorts of people now. At one time, he might have known everyone who came through the shop personally. Not anymore.

"It's not just the one group of people, it's the whole range. I have middle-aged women who come in wanting to buy one for their husband for Christmas, or kids who want one for cheap transportation. It's everyone now."

It's ironic, Voris notes, that the demand starts to explode as the number of available scooters is waning. He's doing well, though - "for a dying business," he laughs - considering that Vespas haven't been imported to North America since 1984. Any scooter scene now relies on their owners to make sure the bikes survive.

The payoff for such diligence can be handsome, Voris says as he walks through the yard behind his shop. Part warehouse, part museum, the yard is a minor legend among scooterists of Voris' era, because it contains the lifeless husks of no fewer than 200 scooters of all different eras and origins. They could all be restored - someday - Voris says. The day that such an undertaking would be worthwhile may be coming soon, given the demand.

"My rule of thumb used to be to never pay more than a dollar a cc (cubic centimeter)," he says - for example, that first Rally 200 was $200 - "and three years ago, I paid $6,000 for a bike.

"Things have changed a lot."