Stripes. Parralel Lines

To an Anglo-Saxon, a thing of beauty is the application of an idea in practical manner. To the Gallic mind however, the true beauty is in the concept. Apropos of that reflection, I read a book recently that could've only been written by a Frenchman. The book is called "The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabrics." It was written by Michel Pastoureau an expert on medieval heraldry and paleographic archivist at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne. Why in the world would I be interested in such an arcane and recondite subject? It all started with an afternoon dressing The Fairfield Men's Store windows with owner Naresh Mansukhami. He said stripes are always fashionable. So when I saw a book review about "The Devil's Cloth," I couldn't resist it. It seems a controversy broke out in 13th century France about the wearing of striped fabric. Some Carmelites monks came to Paris wearing striped robes. The order had been founded in the prior century in Palestine and its exotic, eastern origin may have contributed to the average Parisian looking askance at its monks. It seems at this time throughout Europe striped clothing was reserved, sometimes required, of certain marginalized members of the population. It was the clothing of prostitutes, jugglers and clowns, hangmen, in other words, social deviants. In Germany, orders were issued that stripes were to be worn by lepers, cripples, bohemians, heretics and sometimes Jews. There are also literary texts of the period, both in vulgar Latin and more so in the vernacular such as romances, where stripes were the clothing of treacherous knights, usurping bailiffs, adulterous wives, rebel sons, disloyal brothers, cruel dwarfs and greedy servants. In time medieval heraldry weakened the antipathy toward stripes and led them from diabolic to domestic consideration. Stripes soon found a home in uniforms, civil and military, in the 15th century. By the 17th century the aristocracy was wearing stripes and little of its former ignoble symbolism remained. In 1775, everything changes. With the American Revolution of all things, stripes became revolutionary and romantic. Following America, France went stripe crazy, storming the Bastille in tricolors! Even I, who has been known to sometimes prefer the realm of metaphor to reality, think the author is stretching it when he tries to make a connection, geometric and symbolic, between the bars of the Bastille, the prisons of the Reign of Terror and the striped clothing of the revolutionaries. I do, however, like the idea of the revolutionary as a vestigial devil, juggler, hangman. Pastoureau also does a virtuoso linguistic analysis, comparing verbs in French, German, English and Latin that share the radical stri beginning and also the meanings of not only to stripe, but to separate, to punish, to bar. He goes too far with chastising Freud for not thinking more about our striped pajamas, sheets, mattresses as grills and cages! And he finally flips out fabulously French in the closing pages when he sees striped patterns in much of man's imposition on nature with ploughshares, rakes, railways, electric poles, telephone lines, highways and bar codes. Wheew! I think his last sentence says it all… "Too many stripes can finally drive you mad." Me? I prefer to keep my sanity and take one of Naresh's spread-collar, button-cuff broadcloths, with a regimental tie that highlights its… STRIPES