The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) [Hardcover]

Stripes were thereby authoritatively banned from religious garb, and they became assigned to nasties: "Treacherous knights, usurping seneschals, adulterous wives, rebel sons, disloyal brothers, cruel dwarfs, greedy servants, they may all be endowed with stripes on heraldry or clothes." Cain and Judas don't always have stripes in their pictures, but they get them more than any other biblical figures. As time went on, the stripe was associated not so much with badness as lowness. Servants wore stripes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Eventually, the jauntily fashionable folks of those times took to wearing stripes, but wore them vertically, which distinguished them somehow from the reprobates who had to wear them horizontally. Everything changed in 1775, when the pejorative aspect of stripes (which has never completely left) was largely abandoned that they might become the clothing of the revolutions. Stripes became a good thing, but they also remain naughty. Pajamas, underwear, and bedsheets used to be uniformly a pure white, but in the nineteenth century, the white got diluted, either by quiet striping or by pastels. It may be that such striping represents once again the barrier, this time against our own desires and our unquenchable lusts. We are reminded perhaps that we are all potentially as errant as convicts.

This is an odd book with both close arguments and speculative hypotheses. It has wonderful footnotes, including one telling how the author's father visited a department store with Picasso, who insisted on ordering pants that would "stripe the ass." Stripes are everywhere, and they mean something, and that meaning has expanded in surprising ways over the centuries. If you like stripes, and who doesn't, you will find that your appreciation for them (especially for their surprising connotations of naughtiness) is magnified by this entertaining intellectual confection.

Michel Pastoureau is an accomplished French paleographer and archivist and an expert on heraldry and other symbology. This book, he informs the reader in his introduction, is the one among the thirty-five he has written that most "truly corresponds to what I had hoped to write at the outset." His idea for the book, as well as his burgeoning interest in, and curiosity about, the stripe derived from his interest in Medievalism. "In medieval dress, everything means something," and therefore he knew he was onto something big ' regarding stripes. Asserting that the stripe is "not a form but a structure," Pastoureau organizes this exposition chronologically, beginning with the 13th century. He explores the history and the meanings of pattern and structure from a social point of view; his knowledge of production methods will please textile historians, and his playful and open-minded approach (he asks a lot of questions, to which there may or may not be answers) incites both awe and curiosity in the reader.

The stripe's changing meaning is explored; two chapters, "From the Diabolic to the Domestic," and "From the Domestic to the Romantic" are especially useful. He follows the stripe into its contemporary uses and meanings ("A stripe often leads to a uniform, and the uniform to a penalty.") His discussion of its many roles and ramifications takes off in "Stripes for the Present Time," on contemporary stripes.

Pastoureau is eager to share both his sources and his further thoughts, and does so in his 112 generous and interesting endnotes. (He has studied the social meanings of animals and colors, too.) So, for example note 28, on the leopard (for there is a section on spots in this book) remarks " The bad name given to the leopard in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries allows the lion to unload on the leopard all its own negative aspects." There is a good index, too.

Far from being merely another little book on a footnote to fashion or art history, this is a scholarly and philosophical work that is by turns deeply playful (Pastoureau discusses striped toothpaste, too), deeply thoughtful, and generously invites the reader to join the conversation. A topic that you might have thought too small or unimportant to be the subject of a book proves itself to be wholly worthy. A great book.

What did striped cloth and clothing mean? Why, indeed, would it mean anything?

In the first chapter, Pastoureau muses `The problem of the stripe does indeed lead to pondering the relationship between the visual and the social within a society. He then poses the questions `Why does the West, over the very long term, have the majority of social taxonomies expressed through visual codes? Does the eye classify better than the ear or sense of touch? Is to see to classify? Why is the derogatory sign system-the one that draws attention to outcast individuals, dangerous places or negative virtues, more heavily stressed than the status-enhancing systems?' The questions are disquieting, staccato, sometimes painful.

About 225 years ago, the American Revolution's use of stripes was adopted in Europe's changing fashion and social mores. But the pejorative striped garment remained alongside the playful and fashionable stripe as a mark of the social outcast, the inmate, the madman, the thief. What does that say about Western culture? Did we, and do we continue, to use stripes to hold at a safe distance the questionable? Do we use barred barriers to allow us to peer safely onto the unclean, the disturbed without being subject to the reach of their conditions? Is the stripe a visual sign of our attempt to control our surroundings?

While pondering the author's questions, the notion of sacred geometries and M.C. Escher returned time and again. Try as I did to expel the distractions of what seemed only marginally related, the nebulous concepts persisted. The unsettling truth is that stripes are an "uncontained," open-ended geometry. Escher's birds and lizards were closed systems, stripes have no end, even when severed, the stripe marches beyond mere visual boundaries. A geometric renegade, stripes defy enclosure in any manner. And we react to them with both caution and delight.

This beautifully designed little book falls short only in its visual delivery once opened. I was left wanting full-color plates of the black and white given examples of striped clothing since about 1240.

This is a book worth reading and adding to one's library, worth mulling over the questions it asks. Again and again.