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A Review by Adrienne Miller

GIST: An oddball and charming little (128 pages!) biography of a very devious pattern. Who knew that striped fabrics, now a kind of a shorthand for Class, were, from medieval times onward, so fraught with dangerous meaning?

DETAILS: People depicted in stripes in artwork from the Middle Ages are uniformly social deviants of some sort — outcasts, outsiders: "from the Jew and the heretic to the clown and the juggler, and including not only the leper, the hangman, and the prostitute but also the disloyal knight of the Round Table, the madman of the Book of Psalms and the character Judas." Why were transgressors put in striped clothing? Pastoureau, a leading French scholar on Middle Age iconography, theorizes that the stripe was deemed offensive not because it possessed some essential inherent evil, but rather because the medieval eye was unable to process it. "People in the Middle ages seemed to feel an aversion for all surface structures which, because they did not clearly distinguish the figure from the background, troubled the spectator's view."

During the French Revolution, stripes found themselves bound up with the idea of revolution. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this fact (the author is a Frenchman), but why doesn't he even make mention of the American flag, old Red White and Blue, old Stars and Stripes itself ? Sacre bleu! Later came the ideas of the hygienic stripes, athletic stripes, gangstery zoot suit stripes, and little baby boys' striped sailor suits. A very winning social- and art-history lesson.

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