Camouflage: Not Just for the City

[dZ]

http://www.iht.com/articles/29861.htm
Camouflage: Not Just for the City

Guy Trebay
New York Times Service
Tuesday, August 21, 2001

NEW YORK
Their clothes are designed expressly not to be noticed, in styles that
used to undergo major change about once every 20 years. Their garments are often
constructed so durably that people are known to include specific favorites in their
wills. They exert a tremendous influence on capital F fashion, as evidenced by the
recent proliferation of camouflage cloth garments from New York sidewalks to the
runways of Parisian haute couture. Yet the last group most people think of as fashion
conscious are the 14 million people that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates
go into the woods each year with gun or bow.

In 1999, the last year for which figures are available, Americans spent $259 million
on hunting and fishing apparel, and more than $1 billion if you factor in boots and
shoes. Three of the top five categories of such sales are accounted for by people who
hunt, fish or go camping, said Mike May, a spokesman for the Sporting Goods
Manufacturers Association. "It's the biggest growth area," he said, "after fitness
equipment and golf."

Autumn sportswear catalogues from Cabela's, C.C. Filson, L.L. Bean and other
retailers are now filling hunters' mailboxes. And specialty stores have begun
reordering sold-out items from the most popular hunting and fishing lines.

Many sports people are as attuned to the cut, fabric and line of a garment as any
fashion-besotted socialite. This is as true of the customer for L.L. Bean's Total
Illusion 3-D Camo outfit, with its patented odor-eliminating technology,
realistic-looking cloth foliage and spooky hood, as it is of patrons of British Sporting
Arms online. Not only would the latter's $595 Laksen tweed jacket satisfy a
sportsman's latent D.H. Lawrence fantasies, its smart styling, military cut (and
built-in game pouch) would make it a fine addition to any fashionista's wardrobe.

More than at any other time, sportswear buyers and manufacturers are "very
conscious of fashion," said Diane Sustendal, a former consultant to Alexander Julian
and other menswear creators. Designer clothes are often judged on the strength of
their silhouette; in designing clothes for hunters, the opposite is true. "The most
important function of camouflage is not to make you look like a tree, it is to break up
the human silhouette," J.R. Miglautsch, editor of Whitetail.com, quoted a friend
saying in an online essay. "It is easy to blend into a bushy environment," the friend
continued, "but camo is for when you are not exactly where you are expected to be."

Perhaps Miglautsch has not yet seen the Total Illusion camouflage from L.L. Bean,
which is brush-patterned and appliquéd with realistic polyester leaves. Changes in the
appearance of camouflage cloth itself are instructive, not merely because the fashion
pack adopted it wholesale.

Before Stephen Sprouse took the military camouflage Andy Warhol used in a series
of his paintings and worked it into Day-Glo clothing designs in the 1980s, before
Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons made ironic use of disused military cloth in
the late 1990s and before John Galliano turned camouflage cloth into the emblem of
Dior this spring, the pattern underwent some startling evolutions in marketing and
design.

"The bottom line has always been function," said Steve Culhane, product manager for
the big game clothing division of Cabela's, a 40-year-old outfitter in Sidney,
Nebraska, that sells sportswear at seven retail stores and through the 60 million
catalogues it distributes each year. "But there needs to be a certain amount of shelf
appeal, so there is always some fashion involved."

Traditional hunter's clothing, Culhane said, was the black and red check plaid that
instantly evokes Paul Bunyan. After the Vietnam War, this pattern was essentially
replaced by the amoebic green, tan and brown of old battle clothes. "Most hunters
were going to surplus stores and buying up military garb," Culhane said, "until the
designer Jim Crumley came up with a fabric that made you look like a tree."

Crumley's Trebark is still popular in the field. From it were derived many other
camos, their original designs hand-painted, that attempted to make the wearer easy to
conceal in a dappled woods or a stand of cattails in a marshy blind. Since computer
graphics came into wide use, there has been "an explosion of patterns," Culhane said,
with nearly 100 now to chose from. Some use digital imaging to keep hunters
concealed; some also add features that foil animals' ability to detect colors outside
their natural spectrum or that lock human odors behind a carbon-fiber shield.

"We don't chase fashion," said Gary Bergeron, manager of hunting and fishing
clothes for L.L. Bean. If anything, fashion would seem to be chasing them.