DISRUPTIVE PATTERN MATERIAL: An Encyclopaedia of Camouflage: Nature, Military, Culture
By Hardy Blechman
DPM Ltd, £100; 944pp, 2 vols
ISBN 0 954 34040 XBuy the book
“Army Surplus” — selling battlefield gear for camping and other recreations, including college life — was a phenomenon of the Baby Boom years in the United States, that strange moment of relieved optimism after 1945. One happy consequence of the Second World War was astonishing improvements in mass production. And there was a lot of production left over for the masses. Maybe you did not buy a Consolidated Liberator B24 bomber, but you might buy a bivouac tent or ETO (European Theatre of Operations) fatigues.
Tom Wolfe was first to notice that Ivy Leaguers enjoyed dressing down in camo, while ghetto kids wanted the status details of sharp suits. Something created for the Army always had the potential for ironic inversion when made generally available. Now camouflage is catwalk. Moschino, Dolce and Gabbana, Evisu, Issey Miyake, Dior, Roberto Cavalli, Comme des Garçons, Louis Vuitton, Richard James and Matthew Williamson, none notably bellicose, have all in recent years used camouflage cloth on high-fashion apparel.
Camouflage is a 20th-century phenomenon, a direct consequence of new military technologies. Observation balloons had been used in the American Civil War, but they were tethered and had limited effect on the conflict which remained essentially close combat. But the arrival, first, of machineguns, then of spotter planes, changed the geometry and scale of battle.
Soldiers were once brightly coloured for purposes of threatening martial display as well as ready recognition, but when a belt-fed recoil-operated Maxim gun had a range of several hundred yards, high visibility became a liability for the squaddie more than an operational convenience for the commanding officer. Early in the First World War French soldiers suffered heavy casualties, partly on account of their bright red trousers. Accordingly, a Section de Camouflage was created in 1915, recruiting stage designers and artists. It happened in Germany, too: the painter Franz Marc (who with Kandinsky formed the Blaue Reiter group of Expressionists) designed camouflage for the Kaiser’s army.
Creative design of camouflage material for uniforms goes back only to 1929 when the Italians introduced a beautiful disruptive pattern called telo mimetico (literally “imitative cloth”). Since then the development of camouflage has been a continuous global phenomenon, but one which has been as much concerned with national identity for politicians as with environmental disguise for soldiers. The military historian Tim Newark explained in 1996: “Each new nation looks upon the creation of a camouflage suit as a step towards independence as important as creating its own flag.”
And the ingenuity is mesmerising, especially in emergent Africa. There is President Omar Bongo looking fine in “duck hunter” while Burkina Faso’s President Sankara is fetching in “vertical lizard”. With an absurdity deeply revealing of the conflict between vanity and survival that animates all of us, much contemporary camouflage has long since transcended useful function, returning instead to pre-modern notions of display and prestige.
All this (and very much more) is illustrated in an astonishing, monumental, exhaustive and exhausting, two-volume, slip-cased book, Disruptive Pattern Material by Hardy Blechman, a London fashion entrepreneur whose Maharishi label began recycling camouflage material in the early Nineties. At first Blechman used camo, appropriately, for less visible applications such as the inside facing of lapels or the underside of pocket flaps. But in 1995 he began buying camouflage material rejected by the Army, making up garments and enhancing them with embroidery. Madonna and All Saints became customers.
Fashion has often been informed by the military. The classic T-shirt was first supplied to the US Marine Corps by the Hanes Company in 1901. Aquascutum and Burberry made their name selling versions of military “trench” coats. Coco Chanel was inspired by maritime uniforms. We have had aviator shades and the USAF A2 and RAF Irvin B3 flying jackets. Latterly, we have had combat trousers (those lateral pockets were originally for ammo). And significantly, military fashions have always enjoyed an ironic re-uptake by interest groups with no natural sympathy for the armed expression of conventional authority: thus camo has been seen on Black Panthers, Swampy, assorted tree-huggers, Okeechobee rednecks, Hatha Yoga hippies, Woody Allen, peace-niks and Natalie Appleton.
But Blechman goes further than sequins on battledress. In 1998 he began scanning the material that comprises this encyclopaedia of camouflage. It is a monumental achievement, comparable in its way to that counter-culture classic The Last Whole Earth Catalog. But it is also a bit of a dippy one.
Of course, or perhaps “naturally” is a better term, the United States has done more work on camouflage than any other nation. What’s Norman Schwarzkopf wearing? That’s “six-colour desert camouflage pattern for dry hot terrains” designed in 1962, issued first in 1981. Army BDU (Battle Dress Uniform) camouflage began development at the Engineering Research and Development Laboratory at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The evolution of the popular “Woodland” pattern was a response in the Sixties to the arrival of night-vision goggles. Research eventually determined that a mixture of: light green 354, dark green 355, brown 356, and black 357 provided, when printed on 50/50 nylon cotton, an effect that “closely mimicked the visual and near-infrared spectral reflectance properties of typical woodland”. Which is to say soldiers looked like trees. And then what happened? In 2004 “Woodland” was replaced by a digitally generated pattern.
The Russians have made their own distinctive contribution to the history of visual disinformation. In order to impress Catherine the Great on her visits to Ukraine and the Crimea, Count Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin built fake houses which became known as “Potemkin villages”, forever after an expression for aggrandising deceptions. More recently, Spetsnaz, the scary Special Forces, has developed a speciality of camouflaging eyeballs: Blechman publishes a photograph of someone doing something very unpleasant with a Magic Marker.
More significant is another technological advance originating east of the Urals. When Ben Rich, an engineer at Lockheed’s famous Skunkworks — its highly publicised, although allegedly top-secret, R&D facility in the San Fernando Valley — discovered a paper by an obscure Russian telecoms engineer called Pyotr Ufimtsev, it inspired Stealth, the reductio ad absurdum of camouflage, and the F117 Nighthawk. There was an old military adage that “you can’t hit what you can’t see” and in “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction” Ufimtsev laid the basis for a technology of irrational shapes, sculptured fractals and weird angles that made aircraft invisible. Or, more accurately, invisible to radar.
Disruptive Pattern Material shows that Hardy Blechman enjoys a challenge. I cannot wait to see what happens when Maharishi drops its old-tech, embroidered camo fatigues and gets into the four-dimensional diffractions of Stealth.
Stephen Bayley is the author of several books on design and objects, and was founding director of the Design Museum
