Monday, July 1, 2013

Leopard Blue, "Blue is the New Yellow"

"BLUE IS THE NEW YELLOW" says TREK in their latest advertisement. The new bike color of Radioshack Leopard is officially named "Leopard Blue" and is avaiable through TREK's PROJECT ONE color program. The color is very, very close to Bianchi's "celeste" which dates back to post World War I.

The ad, above, shows Jan Bakelants holding off the peloton yesterday in stage 2 to win the stage and take the yellow jersey.

Here is an excerpt from a story we published in 2012 about Bianchi "celeste":

BikeRadar recently had an article about a visit to Bianchi in Treviglio, outside Milan. I found the section about the origin of Bianchi "celeste" interesting:

"This Bianchi celeste green has many stories behind it. One tale spins it as the turquoise color of the Milan's sky, another suggest that it was the eye color of the former queen of Italy for whom Edoardo made a bicycle. The latter story is likely pure myth as there was never a queen Tiffany of Italy—and neither Queen Margherita of Savoy (for whom the actual Margherita pizza is in fact named) nor her daughter-in-law Elena of Montenegro had turquoise eyes.

The truth is less inspiring, but no less interesting. The most likely origin of the paint is that it was a mixture of surplus military paint from the First World War, it was cut with white in order to tone down its martial nature. Regardless, this color continues to evoke the tradition that is Bianchi, and in that is quite inspiring for riders of the famous bicycles."


1984 Bianchi

2013 TREK

Photos: Bianch by Ray Dobbins, TREK by Road.CC

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3 comments:

  1. I find this outrageous. I hope every Bianchi fan (or fan of Italian iconoclasts) gives Trek a hard time. I certainly made comment on Trek's Facebook page.

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  2. ^ shut up. It was Leopards color. It is more blue than that picture shows. It is basically just robins egg blue. Bianchi didn't invent the color they use they just gave it a dumb name, have had NO consistency in the actual color (sometimes its more green sometimes more blue. If you're going to patent a color etc you better make sure its actually one singular color and not a spectrum of all light blue-greens. Screw Bianchi.

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  3. In Italy they use the word "celeste" to refer to any sky blue color, and I hear them describe sky-blue cars using that word a lot. Bianchi's color is always more green than that, even though it has changed through the years. Recently it is a pearlescent green-torquoise color.

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