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 bicycle-advocacy 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.”

Image Cynthia Rowley on one of her beach cruisers during her spring 2008 show in New York. Credit... Thomas Concordia/WireImage - Getty Images

But 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 cycling journalist in Somerville, Mass., 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.”

Birgitte Philippides, a makeup artist who has been a bike commuter in New York for 20 years, said she finds amusing the idea of riding a shiny “It” bike in a city where you need to chain down your beater Murray three-speed with two Kryptonite locks. “The fancy-schmancy bikes, the ones you see in the Paul Smith windows, you couldn’t leave that out on the street for two minutes,” she said.