The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes
By Michel Pastoureau (translated by Jody Gladding)
Washington Square Press, 128 pages
Reviewed by Cameron Norrie
I tend to think of stripes fondly, associating them with the colourful, groovy designs of 1960s Carnaby Street clothing - or I did, until I read Michel Pastoureau's The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and discovered the bizarre and often cruel history of stripes and striped clothing.
Pastoureau describes the medieval period's tendency to use stripes to identify those viewed as outcasts in society, including: serfs, the condemned, prostitutes, jugglers, clowns, hangmen, Jews, lepers, cripples, "bohemians, and heretics. The negative, or evil, stripe also appears in iconography and literary texts, worn by: treacherous knights, adulterous wives, disloyal brothers, cruel dwarves, greedy servants, Lucifer, the madman of the Book of Psalms, and Judas. A fascinating illustration included in the book, from a mural in Italy painted around 1340, depicts three young women condemned to prostitution saved by Saint Nicolas - all three in striped garments. In 1254, when monks of the Carmelite Order returned from the Holy Land in striped cloaks, scandal broke out - they were ridiculed and accused of being in league with the Antichrist. The wearing of striped habits for all religious orders was banned. In 1310 a 'cobbler said to be a cleric' was sentenced to death for being married and being "caught in striped clothes."
Pastoureau follows the stripe through history, as it is associated with servants, then later ("reclaimed"?) as revolutionary during the French Revolution. The punishing and degrading stripe reserved for prisoners, was again used by the Nazis in the concentration camps. Along all these vicious or negative stripes, good stripes also began to appear: a celebratory stripe, a romantic stripe, a seaside stripe, a children's stripe (sailor suits and Obelix!), an athletic stripe and a hygienic stripe.
Aside from the sociological-visual aspect of the stripe, Pastoureau discusses a similar phenomenon occurring in language. French in particular possesses a number of words that illustrate "how bars are stripes and stripes are bars": the French barré (stripes, illegitimacy), barrer (to bar), rayer (to stripe, but also deleting, eliminating), corriger (correct, also means both stripe and punish, with the related term maison de correction, house of correction - "a place of confinement where the windows have bars and the prisoners - sometimes - wear stripes").
He also considers the weird "visual problem" of the stripe - it serves as both a visual marker, seen more clearly than the plain surface, yet it is also a trompe-l'oeil and illusion that both "clarifies and obscures the view, disturbs the mind, confuses the senses." This short book is fascinating in its detail, revealing the depth to which the stripe has entered humankind's symbolic language and has been passed on in a variety forms in culture and society, both ugly and harmless.
(Note: this book made me think about stripes and I remembered news stories about prisons in the United States that were bringing back the striped uniforms, no doubt to demonstrate to the public how the officials involved are "tough on crime"...The article linked below does not take the issue very seriously but it has photos of the new "old-style" striped uniforms as well as some historical photos and information, and mentions that in a Russian prison the stripes are painted on the prisoners' clothes...)