Why stripes are shapely, sexy and transgressive

By Matthew Sweet

There’s a theory about stripes. It involves sex workers, street entertainers and Satan, and was advanced by Michel Pastoureau, a French historian and heraldic symbologist, in “The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric” in 2001. Stripes, he asserts, have always been transgressive. The key players in his story are the 13th-century Carmelites who arrived in Paris from Palestine in two-tone cloaks, so offending decorum that Pope Boniface VIII banned all religious orders from slipping into anything stripy. Pastoureau is the chief – ok, possibly only – proponent of this theory. But as you examine these pages, and find yourself thinking about how stripes enhance the contours of the human form, and daydreaming, perhaps, of bathing costumes and tailored suits and those T-shirts worn by dockers and tarts in Jean Genet novels, then be assured that nobody will damn you for concluding that there is something to these speculations about their sexiness.
Matthew Sweet