"The stripe is such a dynamic surface structure that it can only be covered at a run," writes Michel Pastoureau. "The stripe doesn't wait, doesn't stand still. It is in perpetual motion."Now
who does that seem like, hmmmm??
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/browbeat/archive/2010/06/04/stripes-are-everywhere.aspxStripes Are Everywhere
Posted Friday, June 04, 2010 9:52 AM
By Troy Patterson 
Left and right, everywhere you turn on the streets of New York, lines are running left to right. Style has cycled around such that shirts boasting horizontal stripes—boat-necked Breton shirts, most notably—are inescapable. Last month's
Vogue sanctified the trend with a spread of house favorites (including
Ms. Moss, Mme. Alt, Sr. Picasso ... ) sporting the look, so we can expect it to go wide in a big way. In happening places, the print has already spread beyond close variations on the classic look to include cardigans, tube tops, tank dresses, maternity muumuus, and high-end baby diapers, and your pupils will soon be flicking at the print no matter where you live, unless you live in one of the very least fashion-conscious corners of our proud country, in which case I hope that you are fully enjoying either the fresh country air or the dank humidity of Capitol Hill.
Sure, why not? Capable of tingling the pupils at a hundred yards' distance, such shirts are bold but not loud, as eye-stopping as crosswalks. With shoppers eschewing plastic bags in favor of L.L. Bean totes, the nautical reference integrates the accessory, giving the wearer an air of the intrepid and also connoting a refined and active leisure (as opposed to lazy luxury). They can vibrate like op-art alerts, and they can seem to scroll hypnotically.
"The stripe is such a dynamic surface structure that it can only be covered at a run," writes Michel Pastoureau. "The stripe doesn't wait, doesn't stand still. It is in perpetual motion." Pastoureau, author of semiotic-studies bonbon titled
The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes, is a French scholar and archivist who has also written on the color blue, achromatic black, and the origins of heraldry. At heart a medievalist, he traces the line of the pattern's history as far back as the 13th century, when it began its run as a marker of outcasts—heretics, Jews, lepers, hangmen, whores, bastards, "cripples," serfs, and of course the archetypal jailbird. But as I once learned in a critical theory course just as my drowsy head jerked back to consciousness, social codes can reverse themselves while signs float like jetsam or something.
Pastoureau reports that naval stripes took off in England or Holland in the late 1700s as the mark of the seaman—"the simple crew member"—and spread to other countries. Eventually they made their way to the backs of gondoliers and other professionals and to those of men, women, and children frolicking at the seashore. Though
The Devil's Cloth fails to note that stripes entered the fashion canon by way of the House of Chanel, Pastoureau, like
Vogue, recognizes the importance of Picasso, "who never missed an opportunity to exhibit himself in stripes, above and below." In the author's view, the artist, dressing the part of grand avant-gardist, costumed himself as a rogue and a visionary, an "oddball zebra" consciously playing with the print's checkered past.
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