wheels on fire; You never forget how to ride a bicycle, right.

Byline: Jane Herman

On a misty morning during New York Fashion Week, model Agyness Deyn cruised up to the Oscar de la Renta show seated atop a black Amsterdam bicycle. She was wearing a lacy white dress, a pair of Gehry-esque gladiator sandals, and a tie-dyed bandanna around her neck. She looked sunny and unstoppable, in spite of the gray sky. Turning heads, she and her ride made headlines the next day, and three weeks later, when the fashion flock arrived in Paris, where Deyn and so many others pedaled some of the city's 20,000-plus shared public bikes en route to the runways there, the bicycle was a bigger It than any handbag from the spring collections.

"Get me on a bike and I'm well happy," says Deyn, who also keeps a Pashley Princess in Manchester and an old-school blue shopper bike in London (the latter has a Union Jack, a gift from her friend Henry Holland, flying off the back). "They're very Mary Poppins-like, so it's fun to ride in the rain, or in whatever I have on, whatever is pretty. I wore Preen to the Calvin Klein party on my bike. I'll wear ball gowns and heels. And if I remember, I wear a helmet."

Wearing "whatever" might seem a flippant and foreign notion to American women, whose thoughts often race to neon spandex and fanny packs at the mere mention of a bicycle, but it's life in Europe, for the Danes especially. "Riding is a cozy habit," says Helena Christensen, who grew up in Copenhagen and now pedals her BMX along New York's Hudson River, and to boxing class and the farmers' market on Saturdays. Yet the Manhattan routes hardly compare to her lifestyle back home. "In Denmark, my girlfriends and I would take them out to parties," she says. "It's easy enough to wear a skirt on a bike. And guys love it."

Imagining this and the intrepid Deyn spinning around the Tuileries in shorts and four-inch heels, one can understand how our minds might switch gears in favor of the bicycle. Add the fitness aspect to its charming aesthetic, plus the fact that it's environmentally friendly, et voila! Two wheels and a wicker basket become the perfect complement to the smart urban girl's spring style, not to mention the best gift to give and receive this holiday season. It's not the first hip fashion point to make a strong political statement, but it might be one of the more effective ones-give or take a bicycle, and we all win.

With hope, Manhattan will soon have a public-bike program comparable to the one in Paris. (Mayor Bloomberg visited that city recently to research the possibility of ...