With the impetus of increasingly mechanized textile production, stripes have expanded beyond fashion and into furnishings and interiors: lighting up the beaches of Forte dei Marmi with color, the marine style enters homes through signature statement pieces and accessories alike. Here, from the legendary marines, we arrive at Coco Chanel and the 20th century with the creative’s celebrated Breton chemise. Featured on the typical uniform of those aboard ships (it was March 27, 1858, when the Marine Nationale introduced the tricot rayé bleu indigo et blanc as the official uniform of the marines), the blue and white pattern first became a style for bathing suits, and then beyond the beach. While Georges-Louis Leclerc, better known as Comte de Buffon, described zebras as the “most elegantly attired of all the quadripeds,” revolutionary and romantic stripes were giving way to normality, taking to clothes and accessories to be worn in our free time, spawning the success of marine stripes. A few years later, in Maryland, the 13 horizontal stripes - 7 red and 6 white - waved in the air together under a single banner: the flag of the Stars and Stripes. From the subversive expression of the sans-culottes, who often wore traditional long socks with striped fabric, the story evolves even earlier overseas, where the independence movement of the New World led to the American Revolution in 1775. Thanks to secularization, it was during the Ancien Régime that stripes, in a “passage from the demonic to the domestic,” as Marco Belpoliti wrote on La Repubblica, became elitist: “vertical stripes for the aristocrats, horizontal stripes for the servants.” From Louis XVI to the Directorate, the pattern once destined to the incarcerated and rebellious revived the wardrobe and interiors of upper-class families, with a couple of small differences: while the Ancien Régime preferred a two-toned repeating sequence, the Revolution, inspired by the cockade and the French flag, chose three colors and a single sequence of colors. Stripes were rejected, as they created disorder on the surface that, natural or constructed, represented a tool for reading “built of layers, that is, cut out like raised pastry.” “Structure is given priority over form and color,” explains Pastoreau. When Louis IX of France, known as Louis the Saint, returned to court after his failed crusade in 1254, the group that accompanied him to Paris known as the “barred friars” - the religious belonging to a beggar class like the Franciscans and Dominicans - were despised for their traditional striped cloaks, considered an affront. Associated and imposed on the most humble social classes, stripes soon became a sort of brand (the same of those pajamas used, more recently, in concentration camps). For this, they were left to the wardrobes of the marginalized and transgressors, like slaves, servants, heretics and the condemned. As Michel Pastoureau explains line by line in his book The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes (1993), during the Middle Ages, stripes were considered causes of disorder. From the outcasts of the Middle Ages to Coco Chanel’s Breton chemise: how did stripes become the graphic mark of a certain joie de vivre? A summer style par excellence, the lined pattern can be spotted from the beaches of Versilia to the cafés of the French Riviera, hiding a history of redemption behind its repetitive geometries.
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