Camouflage and its Vicissitudes1 |
… to ‘get made up’, to put on cosmetics and costumes in order to play a theatrical role – or to be deceptive … to disguise oneself for illicit purposes.
ROY R. BEHRENS
In a peaceful corner, cut out of the torrent of traffic that swirls through the Elephant and Castle in London, stands the Imperial War Museum in its own small park. Plane trees shade the grass in the September sunshine, so that the neo-classical building appears less like a museum than a church set in a graveyard without headstones. Only the enormous guns parked on the forecourt, and the tanks like dinosaurs towering above the visitors in the entrance hall, shockingly remind the visitor that this is not just a museum, but a museum dedicated to war – and an Imperial one at that. Inside, the political correctness of disability access, educational provision and the Holocaust exhibition make an attempt at disavowal of the museum’s central subject, and since it is primarily a museum of the First and above all the Second World War, this disavowal is intensified as death, war and killing are subtly transformed into a memorial of Britain’s finest hours. Indeed, a notice urges the visitor to make a voluntary contribution, so that ‘your history’ may be preserved, while the shop sells a rather magnificent selection of ‘Warstalgie’ items to remind visitors of rationing, blackout and the Home Front. This is not to deny that it is an excellent museum, but the experience it offers is shot through with what seems like unintentional irony.
The same might be said of the camouflage exhibition held in 2007. This covered all aspects of the subject: camouflaged ships, fake camouflage trees erected as cover for combatants, art using camouflage patterns and faked burning buildings to divert the enemy, but the item that first greeted the visitor at the entrance was Yohji Yamamoto’s elaborate 2006 two-piece in shades of brown camouflage: a many-layered, voluminous skirt and a complicated, wide-collared jacket with nipped-in waist, all reminiscent of the late 1940s’ New Look. For ‘Camouflage’ included camouflage in fashion, an irony in itself you might think, and it ended as it began, with haute couture: a strapless, huge skirted evening gown by Jean Paul Gaultier from 2000. In this, as in the Yamamoto, the sombre, dingy colours worked against glamour. The skirts of the Gaultier gown, made out of tufts and ever-deepening frills of a dull, muslin-like material, unpleasantly resembled a mop or a rag rug, so that the garment aroused unease and dissonance.
In recent decades, fashion designers have appropriated camouflage as though it were ripe for glamorising, at the same time as camouflage has swamped the armed forces. The hellish desert, dust and ochre monochrome landscapes of combat footage from Iraq and Afghanistan are peopled with soldiers in strange mottled outfits reminiscent of toddlers’ playsuits, a far remove from the stiff khaki of the Second World War. Even generals have substituted these shapeless overalls for the military tailoring of a former era. The casualisation of dress has thus reached the last redoubt of authority and discipline.
Yet it appears that even these trips to hell can be glamorised. Khaki, war, sex and glamour came together in a fashion shoot by Steven Meisel for Vogue (Italia), September 2007, in which semi-clad models posed as prostitutes for tattooed squaddies in an Iraq army camp.
The khaki army clothing on show in the exhibition was, however, mostly from an earlier period. A First World War cape with a hood like a burka – with just two slits for eyes – was truly sinister. An officer’s jacket remained conventional apart from the paint applied to camouflage it – paint that looked like spots of dried blood. A garment from the Vietnamese National Liberation Army had grey, black and brown blotches like a leopard’s pelt or crazy paving, while a Rhodesian T-shirt could have come straight from Urban Outfitters. There was even a camouflage maternity outfit for the female soldier, and what I took for a punky 1980s’ jumpsuit turned out to be a naval frog suit in a colourful jigsaw pattern with a black zip up the front.
The exhibition explored the way in which camouflage has infiltrated fashion in the last 40 years. Under the heading of ‘Rebellion’ was displayed the old uniform of a Vietnam Vet; many Vets, it seems, customised their army clothing with badges and slogans to reinforce their anti-war message. No exact date was given, but it was also in the 1960s that the international ‘alternative’ society of youth culture discovered combat trousers and army uniforms – in London from the now (sadly) defunct army surplus shop, Laurence Corner in Hampstead Road. In the early 1970s it was de rigueur if you were in the ‘alternative’ left, a ‘Libertarian’, feminist, anarchist or general revolutionary to own an army, air force or naval greatcoat. My own khaki overcoat was in some ways the best garment I ever owned, my absolute favourite. It was extremely warm, because it was made of thick, stiff wool and lined with Viyella (a wool and cotton mixture), and its tailored shape fitted like a glove. It felt empowering and I thought I looked wonderful in it with my straggling hennaed curls and Cuban-heeled boots (although when, in 2011, I discussed this assessment of my then appearance with an old friend she gave me a very satirical look, so perhaps I did not appear to others as I did to myself). Better still, the older generation hated it. My girlfriend’s mother clicked her tongue vociferously whenever I turned up in it. But when I visited my mother in the King Edward VII Hospital in London (the one used by royalty, and to which she gained entry because her father had been a naval officer) I became belatedly aware that she was utterly mortified by my outlandish appearance and that I should have worn my best ‘normal’ outfit.
It took no time at all for fashion designers to grab the trend. As early as 1967, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac had found a roll of camouflage material in a flea market and used it to make a garment signifying protest against the Vietnam War. On display was his 2000 camouflage short evening dress, ornamented with a wide diagonal sash in the rainbow colours of the peace movement. Also displayed was a recycled camouflage jacket by the British label Maharishi, appliquéd with red and pink letters that spelled out ‘all you need is love’.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Punk popularised the trend for camouflage combat trousers; the exhibition displayed a pair worn by Joe Strummer for The Clash’s 1982 Combat Tour. In that decade camouflage still carried traces of dissent and the notion of urban guerrillas. It could also be used to convey a counter-intuitive message.
By the 1990s, however, rebellion had dissolved into the mainstream. Camouflage became just another pattern, its countercultural past a dim ‘ur-memory’, if that, as it itself became camouflaged in the general mish-mash of casualised dress at the turn of the millennium. At the same time, new camouflage patterns incorporated images such as logos, so that instead of its role to ‘conceal, deceive and distort’, in the words of the exhibition, it aimed to ‘advertise’.
The exhibition ended with a series of photographs of (non-rebellious) students wearing garments, making use of various kinds of camouflage. These days, it is just another ‘choice’. Meanwhile, on the battlefield too, camouflage is losing its purpose, as new scientific techniques of thermal imaging are used to snuffle out hiding combat troops.
What appears to be a much-enlarged version of the Camouflage exhibition was held at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa in 2009–10. Julia Pine, who reviewed it, wondered if the vogue for this military style had something to do with a general militarisation of society and also to do with the increased surveillance in societies today. She wonders if it reflects ‘wider problems concerning conflict, power structures, issues of concealment and revelation in a culture of increasing surveillance’.2
It may have had more to do with the rebellious subcultures that first brought camouflage into countercultural fashion – the Che Guevara effect, if you like. This was at a period when there was recognition, however superficial, that to bring about revolutionary change was unlikely to be achieved without violence. Camouflage signalled the readiness of the revolutionary to take direct action, even armed insurrection. When such attempts failed miserably (and were ill-conceived from the outset), revolt dwindled into style, just as in an earlier period, countercultural bohemian fashions were enthusiastically taken up commercially and became a superficial badge of ‘lifestyle’ rather than the uniform of a truly alternative way of life.
Camouflage seems to have derived from the French verb camoufler, whose original meaning had to do with joking and trickery. Its appeal is perennial because it still plays with the ideas of hiding/revealing and of danger/playfulness. It sends a contradictory and subversive message, balanced on the cusp of pleasure and danger.
A second 2007 exhibition, ‘Sailor Chic’, focused on nautical wear, was housed in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, another building of grandeur even more imposing than the War Museum. ‘Sailor Chic’ demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between uniforms (in this case naval ones) and fashion. The exhibition catalogue explored the ambivalent relationship between uniforms and subversion, pointing out that the sailor is a figure of particular importance to a naval nation such as Britain, and that it suggests ‘obedience, order, bravery and loyalty, but also a freedom of spirit, independence and rebellion’.
It appears to have been the Victorian royal family who introduced naval styles into civilian garments, initially in the shape of sailor suits for children. With the growth of seaside holiday resorts and the growing belief in healthy exercise and sports, nautical styles were adapted for women’s bathing wear, while in the 1920s, Coco Chanel loved the striped matelots and bell-bottom trousers worn by sailors in the Mediterranean and in Russia, using them to promote an androgynous high fashion image of female freedom and independence. Yet, sportif, naval fashions could also be adapted to urban chic, the clean lines of navy blazers, white pleated skirts and striped collars seeming particularly suited to spring by haute couturiers such as Yves St Laurent.
The sailor image was used subversively in pop culture. Glam Rock in the 1970s made use of its androgynous qualities and homoerotic aspect. The sailor, after all, is at once butch and masculine and yet also open to the lure of sex with men. In the 1990s, Jean Paul Gaultier brought the ‘hello sailor’ imagery into haute couture – and reinforced the idea with his 1990s’ scent bottle for Le Male, shaped like a sailor’s torso. Sailor Chic also noted how fashion in wartime assumes a chameleon-like mimicry of military styles and references. In 1914, Marcel Proust had noted that immediately after the outbreak of the First World War women’s fashions were reflecting the new reality:
Figure 4: My mother in sailor dress c.1917. At this age she disliked wearing it, but her father was a naval officer and her mother insisted on it for this reason.
young women went about all day with tall cylindrical turbans on their heads … and … straight, dark-colored Egyptian tunics, very ‘war’, over very short skirts; on their feet they wore thong-laced boots … recalling those of our dear boys at the front … they wore rings and bracelets made out of shell fragments or the bands from seventy-five millimeter ammunition.3 The fashions of the Second World War equally drew on the aesthetic of uniforms and their bisexual glamour. At the 2005 launch party for Sarah Waters’ novel The Night Watch (set in the Second World War), held in Winston Churchill’s War Rooms in Whitehall, all the guests were dressed in period styles: Land Girls, RAF officers, WAAFs, glamour girls, Home Guard. And it was quite surprising how much sexier everyone looked in uniform. Something about these garments and their reference to discipline and restraint forces sex to ooze out of the split between the uniformity of the dress and the waywardness of the individual.
Yet while both exhibitions made much of the ambivalence of these two varieties of military dress and their ability to signify both conformity and rebellion, neither made as much as they might have of the deviant or forbidden quality of sex in uniform, and that dark relationship between the erotic in fashion and in war. Uniforms unite two axes of the erotic in dress: the forbidden; and erotic power.