SubscribeDevil Stripes
Posted in Visual, Art, Design, Illustration, Photography, Video on November 2nd, 2007. By Ona Vinyamata.
Media Coolhunting Visual is a playgroung where we try to give names to visual trends we spot around the web. This is not going to change, but this week the challenge was taking a consolidated visual tendency to try to go deeper on it an explain its roots.
Art Directors, Designers and all the other creatures of the same kind use in their visual recipes trends that have come and gone and that are back again. We like what trends express of our message, and of course how they do it. But do we always know exactly why we use certain resources to transmit certain things?
Let’s take stripes for example. We’ve seen stripes a lot in fashion, but also in backgrounds and as key details in bigger pictures. Not really knowing why, we use stripes to express, for example, strength and personality.
Somewhere around the Exodus 22, we read something that makes stripes gain a little bit of sense:
Life for life,
eye for eye,
tooth for tooth,
hand for hand,
foot for foot,
burn for burn,
wound for wound,
stripe for stripe.
When where stripes used as a graphic pattern for the first time? Why does the previous quote relate stripes to an “eye for eye”? Could have Gandhi said at that time “Stripe for Stripe and the world will become blind”? Would it have the same meaning as when he quoted the “eye for eye”?
Elizabeth Frankenberg states about all this:
The stripe first made its mark during the Christian Middle Ages, when literature and iconography endowed many a man with a two-toned garment.
Michel Pastoureau wrote in 2001 a fascinating book that chronicles the semiotic history of stripes. In the book, he refers to prisoners’ stripes, seersucker suits, the court jester, the ringside referee or St. Joseph’s breeches. All these characters, he says, disturbed or perverted the established order. Some of them still do. They ““transgressed the social order, like a stripe transgresses the chromatic order of dress.”
But the ideology of the stripe was bound to change along with the changes taking place in the Western world. As Western society became more secularized, and revolution more prevalent, the stripe served as the perfect symbol for opposition to the social, political, and artistic norm.
The stripe became a banner for individuality and solidarity. For the stripe unites the figure with its substance, the finite with the infinite; it warns, provokes, and equalizes.
Is it a coincidence, then, that Apple chose the picture where Picasso wears his emblematic striped tee for the “Think Different” ad? Sure not.
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