Fashion / Function
Stay Wild
Northern Lights Optic’s Yamaha HL500 Snow Bike
When Orion Anthony pulled up at Italy’s Ristoro Pasini, the crusty old Italian Alpine restaurant & bar, customers checked their drinks for psychedelic drugs floating amid the ice cubes. Nope, it wasn’t a hallucination. It was a vintage Yamaha HL500 bred with a modern snow-bike kit.
Anthony made the bike with Rob Phillips at Husky Restorations in New York. “The whole time we were developing this bike, most people in my snowmobiling circles shook their heads and asked my why,” he says. Yeah, we were wondering the same thing. Why?
Turns out the bike is inspired by the sunglasses that Anthony makes at BC’s Northern Lights Optic. Really? “A great product is very important, but it also needs to have a great story behind it so that people really feel it. I wanted to create something that has never been done before, like the feats of the early explorers who wore the eyewear styles that inspired my collection. Something to evoke that same sense of adventure and freedom, with a vintage twist.”
And that, folks, is how fashion should function!