I like striped shirts and I cannot lie

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In the very early 1990s, there was a short-lived clothing company called Crayon. As far as I could tell, Crayon was mainly for skateboarders, but that may just be because I saw their clothes at skate shops. And when I say clothes, I mean T-shirts. And when I say T-shirts, I mean the most beautiful striped cotton shirts the world had ever seen: thick (but not too thick) bands of creams and browns and cyan, or black and gray and green. The proportions and the color choices were ideal³ , and the shirts were clearly a throwback to a ‘70s look, but modernized and streamlined. You’d think stripes were already streamlined, but nope: Crayon proved they could be streamlined further.

I owned one Crayon tee, but not for long. At some point, it vanished, and I’ve regretted its disappearance ever since, trying for decades now to fill the hole in my heart with parallel lines of, well, all stripes.

If you have seen me in person, you know that I often wear striped shirts. Many take their cue from the marinière, the classic French fisherman shirt: thin navy bands across white long sleeves. This design apparently dates back to 1858, when the French Navy specified it in detail, including the number of stripes, which had a specific purpose beyond aesthetics: “to help locate a man who had fallen overboard or was engaged in dangerous manoeuvres.” How typical of the French to attempt to save lives but inadvertently invent a style icon! The marinière took off, Coco Chanel made it a part of her collection in 1917, and throughout the 20th century you saw it on Picasso, Warhol, and James Dean. That I, Matt Gross, am now wearing it—mine are from the Japanese brands Anatomica and THE¹—is clearly a high point of Western culture.

My non-marinière shirts are legion, too. There’s a pocket tee, from Beams, with thick blue and white stripes speckled with Funfetti-esque dots of color. A faded red-and-yellow shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves from the Portuguese brand 351. And three tees from the Brooklyn company Kule: two of them long-sleeved—one pink and green, the other pink and grey—and a blue-white-and-red short-sleeve that is so jaunty my wife bought one for herself. I may have even more, but they’re buried under so many other clothes I couldn’t dig them out of the dresser.

Stripes are, of course, not all I wear—I’m psycho but that not psycho—but they are my favorite things to wear. I just… There is something about those parallel lines that strikes (or, given their arrangement, strums) a chord deep inside me, and I’m only now trying to understand why.

Stripes, I did not know until I started working on this piece, have a long and controversial history. In medieval Europe, according to The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes² , by Michel Pastoureau, they were scandalous. Blame Leviticus, apparently, whose prohibition against clothing made of two fabrics apparently extended to colors as well. Those who did wear stripes tended to be outcasts: performers and prostitutes, clowns and, later, criminals.

Obviously, this prohibition did not last, and stripes eventually became more than a commonplace—they transformed into powerful, instantly recognizable symbols. The barber pole. The flag. The zebra. Wall Street pinstripes. Adidas, whose tag line was for years “die marke mit den 3 streifen.” #humblebrag?

Why stripes work, however, remains a little unclear. Michel Pastoureau, according to his reviewer in The Guardian, dismisses all practical reasons for their popularity: that stripes are about the cheapest patterns to weave, that cylinder printing might have had something to do with the vogue for striped wallpaper, that the Industrial Revolution transformed striped fabrics into a mass product. But availability doesn’t guarantee popularity—it just makes it possible. Indeed, popularity and scarcity layer as tightly and as beautifully as the stripes on a classic marinière.

Maybe there’s some psychology at work here? Vertical stripes are said to have a slimming effect, elongating one’s body as the eye goes up and down, which is something I, who stands nearly five foot seven, would surely appreciate. Except that another fellow in the Guardian says the opposite is true:

Contrary, yes, but still pointing to the power of stripes to alter perception one way or the other.

I, too, prefer horizontals to verticals. The latter strike me as gaudy sometimes—think mafiosi or harlequins—but more often soft or sloppy: Their length across a garment is unsustainable; their parallel nature bends and decays as the clothing’s structure changes at shoulder seams and pant cuffs. Vertical lines struggle. They are constrained—to pinstripes, to careful proportions, to propriety. They are not lines but mere line segments, cut off at each end. They are finite.

Horizontals, however, are not just stripes but rings. They encircle us in stacks we can trust will never intersect, no matter how fat or thin they are in relation to one another. Even the way the bands around a marinière sleeve will not precisely match up with the bands around the torso gives me joy. It’s as if sleeve and body exist in complementary—dare I say parallel?—worlds, at ease and unconflicted in their proximity.

This is not to say one type of stripe is good and the other bad. No, I take the Augustinian view: All stripes are good, but there are certainly greater and lesser forms of good. We haven’t even begun to discuss diagonal stripes, for instance, nor patterns that are essentially stripes with interruptions. Just to the right of my desk is a mannequin around which I’ve draped a bathrobe that I stole from Bangkok’s Peninsula Hotel on January 3, 2000. The pattern is thick, dark blue-green stripes on white—but at regular intervals the stripes jag up and down and intertwine, then go about their merry way until the next jag. I haven’t worn that bathrobe in years, but that pattern compels me to keep it around.

Irregularities, I think, strengthen patterns—by showing how patterns break, they make the patterns recognizable as patterns. (The exceptions that prove the rules, I suppose?) Joy Division’s famous Unknown Pleasures cover is really just a set of more-or-less parallel lines, suggestive at each end of infinity but disturbed in a manner that reinforces (rather than interrupts) the essential linearity of the image. The noise, the lightly organized chaos, gives it depth—in all senses of the word—by reassuring our brains that the pattern we all recognize begins in a knowable past and continues off into the future.

But I realize that what I’m focusing on here is why I like to look at stripes, not necessarily why I like to be seen wearing them. I mean, I guess it’s a bit of projection: I want your brains to go all math-y when you see me walking down the street, bopping to the beat, with my stripes on my chest and my Adidas on my feet. (Yes, I am imagining an Uzumaki-type situation here.) And I do just somehow feel good wrapped in a pattern I understand. Beyond that, I just want to have a look, a uniform that can allow me to stand out as a fairly generic 50-year-old white man but that isn’t too ridiculously outré. Stripes, in all their variable glory, are what do it for me these days. Because if there’s anything that will get me, or you, through thick and thin, it’s stripes. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Café Anne

The always great Café Anne newsletter just published a great story on a local character in my neighborhood, and you should read it:

Read a Previous Attempt: Make Hollywood weird again

1  THE’s is manufactured by Fileuse d’Arvor, which is now owned by Armor-Lux.

2  Or at least the reviews I read of it.

3  They actually looked a bit like M. Matisse’s shirt up there.