This past Thursday, I presented my paper “Camouflaged to Stand Out: The Evolution of Military Camouflage in the 21st Century” at the Sartorial Society seminar. You can see a recording of my presentation along with those of Dr. Danielle Sprecher’s on men’s corsetry in the mid 20th Century and Catarina Ferreira’s on the Materiality of Corsets here. I will be serializing my paper here for the next few editions. I am also working on a new project on the T-shirts and other merch made for the First Gulf War in 1991. You can find a lot of these shirts at your local thrift stores and on Depop today. If you have any in your closet or memories of these shirts from the time, please reach out. More on that to come. For now, here is part 1 of “Camouflaged to Stand Out.”
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Military uniforms no longer reflect the dominant civilian culture. Western militaries have shrunk in size since the mid 20th Century, conscription is no longer the norm, and those in the military are no longer “citizen soldiers” but “professionals.” This smaller professional cohort has become its own culture to the point that the civil-military divide has been widely discussed and studied for over 60 years. While in times past, citizen soldiers attempted to reflect mainstream popular culture and styles in how they fashioned their uniform, the modern military has its own popular culture and fashions that are in dialogue with other militaries, not civilian cultures. The casualization of uniforms is also an important component here. Throughout WWII and the Cold War, Western armies had distinctive “field” or combat uniforms and “garrison” uniforms. Now, essentially only one uniform exists - regardless of if you are in an office or a Combat zone. This has placed a heavier “fashion” burden on the combat uniform as it is the only way to represent the military.
The modern military uniform has two contradictory objectives: to help camouflage the wearer and identify them on the battlefield. Camouflaging the soldier is an obvious purpose, but one that has only emerged in the past 100 years. In contrast, the objective of identifying the wearer as a member of the armed forces, a friend or foe, can be traced back to the introduction of military uniforms in the 17th Century. In this regard, we think of British redcoats or the gray and blue uniforms of the American Civil War, for example. The era of camouflage has been a short one, doing away with bright colors of shiny buttons for splotches of earth tone colors. From WWI through the 1980s, there has been a constant progression towards more utilitarian camouflage uniforms. However, as Paul Fussell wrote, with all armies in camouflage uniforms, the dilemma “will arise when all armies are clad the same -- in camouflage patterns indistinguishable from each other.” The world where all armies are in camouflage has tipped the scales back towards traditional ideas about uniforms. Are the different Camouflage patterns different from brightly colored uniforms of the 18th and 19th centuries worn for form over function? While militaries emphasize the scientific approaches to camouflage development and uniform utility, bucking ideas of fashionability, these uniforms are still heavily symbolic and vital to institutional identity. The uniforms of today are as concerned with prestige, status, style, and discipline as they were 100 years ago.
Camouflage patterns exploded after the Second World War and the Vietnam War. Both eras had distinctive styles, some drawing from nature (tiger stripe, lizard, leaves) while others incorporated more abstract shapes to disrupt the figure’s outline. When the Canadians began researching what would become CADPAT or Canadian Disruptive Pattern in the 1990s, it was thoroughly modern. Using a range of colors found in the Canadian landscape, the pattern was rendered digitally into a pixelated motif and was issued to Canadian soldiers in 1997.
Before CADPAT was even issued to the Canadian Army, the US Marine Corps took notice. At the time, all branches of the US Armed Forces used the same camouflage pattern on Combat uniforms. With an explicit desire to stand out, the Marine Corps began the development of its new camouflage pattern. "This uniform not only needed to actually work, it needed to be unique,” said one of the Marines working on the design.
Struggling to find a unique, modern look, the Marines looked to an unlikely source, Ralph Lauren. Looking for another color to add to their pattern, The Marines settled on a color from the Ralph Lauren Santa Fe paint collection called Coyote -- now one of the most prominent colors used for military uniforms and equipment.
After completing numerous tests and trials, the Marines settled on a pattern. But then, having seen a sample of CADPAT, the decision was made to keep the Marine color palette but adopt a similar CADPAT pixelated design. This would lead to the adoption of MARPAT (Marine Pattern) in green woodland and tan arid patterns in 2002. As the Marine spokesperson at the time said, “we want to be instantly recognized as a force to be reckoned with...we want them to see us coming a mile away in our new uniforms."
Till next time,
CWM.
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