N a cluttered and paint-splattered studio in Dumbo, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he spends most nights working, Scott Chester is designing a motorcycle for Spider-Man. Not the Spider-Man who climbs bridges to fight the Green Goblin, but the one who fortifies city structures against terrorist attacks for the New York City Department of Transportation and whose real name is John Jones.

Mr. Jones is typical of Mr. Chester's customers, "supermen or women who want something up and above their friends who ride," Mr. Chester said. His customized motorcycles start at $5,000. To make them, he uses parts from various makers, creating a new shell for the bike, which he finishes with an owner-specific paint job. For a world-traveling lawyer, he is painting a Harley-Davidson Sportster the color of antique parchment and covering it with maps of places the lawyer has visited, including Myanmar and Machu Picchu. For a scientist who discovered a sunken barge carrying gold in the Bering Sea, he turned a 1995 Honda CBR 900 RR into something that looks like a World War II P-40 Warhawk fighter plane, complete with bared teeth trying to chomp the wheel. And for a baseball-loving factory owner in Nicaragua, he built a Yankees bike, pinstripes and all.

Mr. Jones's bike will be dark red with webs on the nose and tank and Spider-Man swinging above the glow of the New York skyline on the side panels, his hands on the bike's tail. The bike, a 1984 Kawasaki 900 Ninja will receive an angular, swept-back Yamaha R1 2001 front end, custom plates on the sides and a high, short Ducati tail, which rides high above the rear wheel.

"It's like, you have your Calvin Klein jeans with your Diane von Furstenberg blouse," Mr. Chester, 37, said of his makeovers. "The best of the best. And the ones that match."

The fashion metaphor is no fluke. Mr. Chester, who calls his company Acid (for Arielle Chester Industrial Design, named for his 13-year-old daughter), is working on a line of clothing for motorcyclists — and for those who want to look like them. That's in an addition to his custom-painted helmets, a line of cigars featuring his slick urban graphics and his paintings of industrial cityscapes, made with auto body paint on metal panels and refrigerator doors, which were recently shown at a gallery in Manhattan.

Fashion has always influenced Mr. Chester's work. He drove a bike right into the fashion world in 1997 when he customized a pair of motorcycles for Tommy Hilfiger, painting them in Mr. Hilfiger's signature red, white and blue for use in fashion shows and promotions. After that, Marc Ecko, the designer of Ecko Unlimited, a hip-hop clothing line, commissioned two bikes, including one painted with a Brooklyn street scene with Ecko stickers on the streetlight poles. Then, Ralph Lauren's wife, Ricky, asked Mr. Chester to create a helmet for Mr. Lauren, based on a photograph that Mr. Lauren had taken of horses on his ranch.

It was not until 2001 that Mr. Chester moved from metal to fabric. For her fall collection, Diane von Furstenberg was looking for a graphic print that reflected the graffiti she saw on the streets. Evelyn Luna, a former classmate of Mr. Chester at the High School of Art and Design, was working as a print director for Ms. von Furstenberg. She brought in Mr. Chester, who developed a design that incorporated the DvF logo and Ms. von Furstenberg's signature. The design, "Crosstown Traffic," became the name of Ms. von Furstenberg's fall 2002 collection.

Now Mr. Chester is making the leap to designing on his own, along with Ms. Luna and Ashman Walcott, a former network administrator for The Associated Press who manages computers and imaging for Acid.

In designing clothes for motorcyclists, Mr. Chester says he has one clear advantage: he is one. More than other designers, he understands how things look in motion — which graphics can be read at 70 miles an hour, how fabric will react to blowing in the wind. Others, he said, "will design it statically. I will design it dynamically." And all of his pieces — leather pants, heavy rip-stop nylon overpants, a leather and stretch-Kevlar pullover jacket with a high collar — have to be durable, weatherproof and strong enough to offer riders protection.

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