Freddy & Ma & Marpat

(left: marpat = state of the art camo for marines)



















Two more clothes-related links, otherwise completely unrelated.

An ex-colleage of mine and his sister are starting a fashion label, Freddy&Ma, and blogging about it.

I've been intrigued by camouflage since being into army men as a kid. On my drooling camo wishlist is this wicked expensive tome on Disruptive Pattern Material.

Buisness Week had a link to this cool primer on the current state of The Art of Camo at (of all places) the website of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. From the article:

Despite its functionalist status, camo has always had style—and art. Camouflage attracts modernists raised to believe that ornament is crime. Camo ornaments legally, you might say—its pattern has a job to do. Artists and fashion designers have long played off camouflage. Many used bright fluorescent colors instead of dull natural ones. Andy Warhol's camouflage portraits, done late in his life, employed this strategy. (One recurrent fashion joke about camouflage is the perennial camo bikini, a play on concealment and revelation.)

Camo's history became a parable of a wider truth: that the design of even the most functional object—and camo would seem to live and die by its function—inevitably becomes artistic and sytlistic