Vol. 03 No. 05
This week Combat Threads is still in the 1960s and 1970s, looking at how military uniforms could be used for self expression. Before we get into the post, quick house keeping. Next week on March 31st I will presenting a chapter of my thesis at NYU Costume Studies Richard Martin Symposium. Two of my costume studies classmates will also be presenting their thesis work, Emma on female textiles worker’s publications in the 19th century Massachusetts and Katherine on artificial women in fashion. Rachel Tashjian, Fashion News Director of Harper's Bazaar, is the keynote speaker. If you are in the city and able to make it come say hi!
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The college campus provided, as it had for so many other social movements the world over, the fertile ground for these movements and changes. Colleges were seen as the reason students had been turned into radicals and hippies. “Army jackets are worn as a symbol of rebellion,” reported a Princeton student in 1968. This equation of surplus clothing and radical hippies was often repeated to describe students nationwide. Military uniforms were often mentioned, along with sandals, love beads, denim, and long hair. A Connecticut University newspaper report of an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) meeting focused on the style of the attendees, noting “beards and mustaches were prevalent; beads and vests, already a clothing commodity emphasized too much, were in evidence. An army jacket here, sandals there.”
The Northern Illinois University yearbook described a fictional freshman returning home for Thanksgiving as having “[a] mustache, beard, long hair, sandals, and peace chain. ‘Off the Pigs’ was scrawled on his army surplus jacket.” embellishing the backs of military jackets was a common form of self-expression – especially with anti-war or authority messages. Military surplus clothing provided the perfect blank canvas. Bigger than denim jackets and less prone to fading, cotton field jackets were a perfect choice. Using military surplus to declare an anti-war message was, of course, rich in irony. In the 1969 University of Connecticut yearbook, a female student protestor wears a WWII wool enlisted man’s coat with a painted piece of fabric pinned to the back reading, “Support the Mets, not the war.” Besides slogans, the peace sign often made an appearance. This well-loved US Army M-1941 field jacket bares many hand-sewn repairs and mismatched buttons. While nothing is known about its original owner(s), it is adorned with peace signs; one made from two pieces of felt on the right sleeve and another in permanent marker on the back.
Another field jacket adorned with a peace sign is this M-1943. As with the M-1941, the original owner is unknown. It features the slogan “Tinkerbell lives” written on the right pocket, a reference to the character in the children’s story Peter Pan which was made into a Disney animated film in 1953. The shoulder loops of the jacket are decorated with yellow and blue specs of paint in a manner resembling confetti. The back of the jacket has “Thou shalt not kill” written at the top in quotation marks and below “God,” attributing the quote. While “thou shalt not kill” has its roots in the Torah, the commandment became an anti-war slogan during the Vietnam war, as demonstrated by a photo of protestors in Bryant Park holding a large banner with the phrase in 1969. In the center is a large peace sign in white, black, and red paint. Other images from the late 1960s and early 1970s show the peace sign painted on the back of military surplus shirts and jackets.
At various times, commentators, historians, and witnesses have all attempted to explain the popularity of surplus clothing amongst the counter-culture youth of the 1960s and early 1970s. The argument is usually one of subversion, revolution, defiance and, and irony. Troy Patterson, in his 2015 New York Times Magazine article “How the Army Jacket Became a Staple of Civilian Garb,” explained it as “The counterculture kid in Army gear could razz the warmongering machine that had endowed the jacket with symbolic power, and he could honor boys destined to die in their boots, and he could also effectively affect a bohemian pose.” Alison Lurie, in her 1981 book The Language of Clothes, explains it as an outward sign that the protestor is not “a coward or a sissy,” but “that he was not against all wars — just against the cruel and unnecessary one he was in danger of being drafted into.” Lastly, Jane Tynan, a senior lecturer Central Saint Martins, explained the attraction to uniforms in their period as “an ideal focus for young people searching for symbols of power to desecrate.” All of these explanations place surplus uniforms as being overtly, confrontationally political. For the Black Panther, the use of military uniforms was intentional, meant to coopt the power of the state and empower its members. A 1970 photo by Ilka Hartmann of a Black Panther demonstration in San Francisco shows a teenager, back to the camera, wearing what appears to be an M-1951 field jacket with the words, “black is beautiful” written on the back in likely marker or ink.
But for many students, the style had less to do with militant opposition to the war than a general dropping out of mainstream American cultures and expectations. The rejection of Mainstream American consumer culture was, of course, a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and the US War in Vietnam, but this did not make every military surplus-wearing young person an activist, militant, or revolutionary. Surplus uniforms were available in large quantities at cheap prices, allowing students and other young people to use surplus uniforms in their personal style. Army surplus, like jeans, were affordable basics that came to define the youth style of the era. A college student in 1968, reflecting years later, offers his explanation:
I went hippie. Or more accurately pseudo-hippie. I did not head to San Francisco nor did I live on the streets. But I was dressed appropriately for protest marches, and that’s what mattered. We were so sure we were counter-culture individualists. Radicals! Looking back I realize that you cannot be non-conformist while confirming to a style all your peers have adopted. But it’s fair to say, as a group we had left the mainstream.
Besides making a political statement or conforming to the non-conformist counter-culture, many surplus uniforms were simply practical. Students had long prized practical, hardwearing, and cheap clothes – which had been by and large military surplus since the end of WWII. Field jackets, and other field uniforms, were designed for use in combat and featured large cargo pockets that many found attractive. “I picked up an oversized olive green jungle fatigue jacket like the ones worn by GI’s in Vietnam,” recalled a high school student in Bloomington Indiana in an interview with a writer. “It had deep pockets ideal for carrying plastic baggies of weed, pipes, foil, and papers in and out of the house without raising the suspicion of parents.”
Customizing military surplus uniforms allowed the garments to become personalized and symbolic to the individual, even if the symbolism was often directed towards political aims. But not all embellishments of jackets were political in nature. This M-1965 field jacket has a multicolored marker drawing of the Road Runner cartoon from the Looney Toons series on the back. Cartoon and comic-strip characters popular in the 1960s were often favorite subjects for both civilians and military personnel alike. Characters like Snoopy, Andy Capp, and Road Runner were all used for quasi-official military patches made in Vietnam, featured engraved on lighters, and embroidered on tailor-made souvenir jackets.
The practice of adorning jackets with drawings and slogans in the military dated back to at least WWII, but the Vietnam War would see an explosion of the practice of soldierly self-expression. Helmet covers were a blank canvas for permanent marker slogans and graphics. Countless sewing shops produced embroidered patches, hats, and jackets with all manner of graphics and slogans of personal significance to the American military personnel who commissioned them. Both civilians and soldiers alike looked to forge a sense of personal identity and style from military uniforms. It is hard not to see it as a simple human drive to define oneself, to have an individual personality. In the memoir Helmet for My Pillow, Robert Leckie writes about his experience in WWII, “it is the quartermasters who make soldiers, sailors and marines. In their presence, one strips down. With each divestment, a trait is lost; the discard of a garment marks the quiet death of an idiosyncrasy. I take off my socks; gone is a propensity for stripes, or clocks, or checks, or even solids; ended is a tendency to combine purple socks with brown tie.”
Till next time,
C.W.M.
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