I’ve noticed recently as I’ve been walking around Nolita that there are an awful lot of striped outfits around, jackets, shirts, tops, skirts and pants. Wide stripes, thin stripes. Horizontal and vertical. Blue stripes, black stripes. Which got me thinking, are stripes really that timeless? I mean when did it become uber fashionable to wear stripes and do stripes go in and out of fashion?
Well according to wikipedia, the breton stripe as it is known originated in France. Shirts were made up of 21 horizontal stripes originally each representing one for each of Napoleon’s victories. Horizontal striped shirts were then made popular in France as part of the Navy uniform in the late 1880s, hence the name the nautical stripe.
But really the striped shirt become popular in the 1930s when Audrey Hepburn, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Bridget Bardot, Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol started wearing them as fashion items.
