Chapter 11 4. Modern stripes (19th-20th century)-1

hygienic stripes Historians have speculated that there are various reasons for the presence of stripes on pajamas.In fact, the same problem that striped pajamas raise is the problem of all "underwear," that is, clothing that comes into contact with the body.Why do these types of clothes often have stripes of various colors?When can this custom be traced back?How to insert it into the long non-linear history of the striped fabric? To answer these questions, it is most important to examine the symbolic systems of society and the allegories of clothing rather than the history of knitting, weaving techniques, and cleaning customs.Perhaps the problem with stripes here is more of color than anything else.A little mention of this in the following pages allows us to break free from the shackles of pejorative stripes and rediscover the world of derogatory stripes glimpsed in the romantic age.But this is a stripe of another nature, no longer a matter of horizontality or verticality, but of color and width, and especially from the point of view of personal hygiene raises the question of social order - social order and stripes are always inseparable .

(1) Hygienic stripes For a long time, roughly from feudal times until the second industrial revolution, Westerners could not tolerate clothing and fabrics (shirts, veils, trousers, shorts, sheets) that came into direct physical contact with anything other than white or natural colors other colours.Sometimes, such as in some monk codes, it may be expressly required that these garments be undyed.There is zero degree to which undyed is more expressive of color than white.The reason for this is that color is regarded as something somewhat unclean (especially colors obtained from animal sources), something somewhat superfluous and extremely undignified.Color must be kept away from the subtle and natural surface formed by the skin.At this point, the Western ethics of color in different eras have the same goal. Whether it is the Western Monastery or the Franciscans in the 12th and 13th centuries (St. Bernard and St. François are the two enemies of dyeing and color), Chinese The restrictive luxury laws at the end of the century, the Protestant Reformation (very conservative attitude towards color), the Catholic Counter-Reformation movement (it can be said that it had to adopt part of the moral standards of the Reformation movement), or inherited the principles of Protestant ethics in this field and many other fields. Early industrial society [71].So from the 11th century to the 19th century, a bed sheet or a shirt could only be white or colorless. [72]

The first changes occurred after 1860, first in the United States and Great Britain, then elsewhere in Europe.Breaking away from Protestant, capitalist, and bourgeois morality, manufacturers and their customers gradually became accustomed to buying and selling underwear, toilet linen, bed linens that were no longer the same white or ecru but "coloured" and pajamas, the trade was at first veiled, and later, shortly after the First World War, more blatantly.[73]The slow transition from white to color lasted for about a century, with different types of textiles and clothing evolving differently.Wearing a sky-blue shirt was unthinkable in 1860, fashionable in 1920, and commonplace by 1980 (blue men's shirts are even more common and more commonly used than white shirts) ).On the contrary, sleeping on emerald green or bright red sheets was an unbreakable taboo in 1860, and it was still so in 1920 and 1960, not quite the same ten years later.Today, such situations can be encountered, but not commonly.In the case of bed sheets, as opposed to shirts, there has been no gradual evolution, but rather accelerated and sudden changes over the last two decades.

The transition from white to color does not happen everywhere simultaneously.Everywhere, though, the same transitions were used on all carriers: pastels and stripes.In fact, no matter where, people don't go from white to bright and rich colors all at once. There is always a transition period, whether it is for bed sheets, underwear, towels or pajamas. colors and striped fabrics.Accompanying phenomena often occur in the transition to color at the same time, for the same object, either by the use of a pastel or depleted colour, or by the combination of white with another, equally less depleted color ( in the form of stripes).In both cases, at the very beginning of the process, around 1920-1940, it was mainly cool colors that performed this task [74].

Here one notes with interest the almost regular equivalence between stripes and pastels in Western clothing systems from the late 19th century to the late 20th century (in other eras or in other cultures it's another matter entirely).Soft color is an incomplete color, an incomplete color, "a color that dare not speak its name" [75].Streaks—in this use—are half colors, crippled colors, colors joined with white.In both cases, the color is "broken" (almost referring to the heraldic meaning of the word), and although quite different in technique, the two ways of breaking serve the same dual purpose; giving white Polishing makes the color pure, preserves the health of the body and social morality, and at the same time makes it possible to break the long-term imprisonment of white or undyed cloth.Moreover, what cloth and clothing undergo in this respect, other objects that deal with sanitation, health, and the flesh sometimes undergo: kitchen and bathroom walls, hospital halls, swimming pool tile veneers, cleaning utensils, Dishes, toiletries, pharmaceutical packaging, the transition from clean white to a variety of vibrant colors always stops in pastels or striped surfaces.

Staying in the field of fabrics, however, we find that hygienic stripes, a product of industrial society and thus quite different from the medieval stripes we have analyzed in detail, are widely used in everyday life.We wear striped shirts[76] and underwear; we use striped towels and hand towels; we sleep on striped sheets; our mattresses are also striped.Is it possible to think that these pastel colored stripes that touch our body are not only to keep our body from getting dirty, but also to protect our body?Protect it from being soiled or polluted, from outside assaults, but also from our own desires, from our overwhelming impurity?Here again we see the fence stripes and filter stripes we mentioned earlier when talking about prisoners and convicts.

In any case, what is evident is the way society has established detailed rules on hygiene stripes over the decades.Typical examples of this are shirts and men's suits (in the modern sense of the word).A true sociocultural semiotics of stripes has been established that can divide individuals and groups according to the stripes they wear: wide or thin stripes, stripes that combine bright colors with white or pastel colors with white Combined stripes, vertical or horizontal, continuous or discontinuous, some considered vulgar, others tasteful, some thinning or emaciated [77 ], others look younger or older, with trendy stripes and unfashionable stripes.What's trendy goes out of fashion, it goes the other way, this social class is different from that, this country is different from that, often, even always.But a few enduring examples seem to have resisted the wear and tear of time since the last world war and are acceptable to a wide range of social classes.For all clothing that comes in contact with the flesh, and even for some outerwear, thin and light stripes are preferred over wide stripes and stripes of contrasting colours.Thus, both the banker and the villain wear striped suits and shirts, but never the same stripes: the former wears thin dark stripes, the latter broad bright stripes.

The latter was considered vulgar.It is obvious, however, that public professing a certain vulgarity can sometimes be "the most avant-garde."Likewise, the more masculine connotations of stripes on clothing seem to have grown into a fixed perception, despite the fact that many women wear them.Sometimes men's striped decoration is contrasted with women's floral decoration (often associated with the typical contrast of long and round), but this is not absolute: if it is rare to see men wearing polka-dot or floral underwear— It's almost heretical - but not the other way around, as many women wear panties or bras with delicate, elegant and beautiful stripes.

In this century, the rules of clothing stripes have become more and more rich, subtle and delicate, but the stripes related to hygiene and body are obviously not changing alone, it is combined with stripes of another nature to form and enrich these rule.Among these other stripes, one is the most important: the navy stripe.