On 12 March 1919, the Chelsea Arts Club held a costume party, called a Dazzle Ball, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. By April 1918 conservative Australian newspapers were ridiculing this ‘sartorial disaster’. In a presage of 1920s exuberence and enchantment with the modern, dazzle seemed not only to represent this new age of modernity, but to be a celebratory distraction from the Great War. At first, they mimicked the dazzle ships so familiar in harbours around the world. British and North American bathing costumes began to appear in dazzle patterns. Even before World War I was over, dazzle pattern schemes appeared in women’s fashion. And it fitted with a changing sense of modern art and style. New York Tribune June 15 1919Ī dazzle paint scheme on large ships that had once been monotonous grey or black was indeed striking. The “dazzle” designs of gayest hue defeat the usual purpose of camouflage, that of promoting low visibility’. ‘The newest things in bathing suits brighten the beach at Margate, England. He noted that ‘In order to deform totally the aspect of an object, I had to employ the means that cubists use to represent’. The unit’s commander, artist Lucien de Scevola ackowledged the influence of cubist paintings in their efforts to ‘dissimulate things’. The first section of French camouflage painters was formed in 1915 and their technique became known as zebrage because of its resemblance to zebra stripes. The rush to camouflage and dazzle military equipment offered the opportunity for some artists to put forward their skills toward the war effort as ‘camouflage painters’, rather than soldiers. On seeing a camouflaged artillery piece in the streets of Paris early in the war, Picasso was heard to remark, ‘It is we that have created that’. Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had appeared just before World War I and the manner in which Cubism distorted its subjects influenced military camouflage. The key to the connection between dazzle and fashion was art. In recent years the military look has been a well-spring for fashion to draw upon-from street wear to suits, from Stussy to Gucci, ‘camo’ has become almost ubiquitous. But with intriguing camouflage patterns extending from military hardware into uniforms by the 1930s, military fashion was back. In the 18th and 19th century the ‘cut and dash’ of uniforms was a recruiting attraction. Civilian dress often mimicked the military, though the introduction of a more drab khaki by World War I interrupted this trend. So how did dazzle ‘camouflage’ end up as a fashion statement? Fashion has a long and close connection with military dress. It made it awfully difficult for submarine commanders to consult the information and sillouhette outlines in the 1914 edition of Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships to determine what the vessel was, what speed it might be doing, whether it was armed, a merchant ship or perhaps a warship with anti-submarine capability and something to be avoided. The idea, in essence, was to confuse U-boat captains by making it difficult to plot accurately an enemy ship’s movements when manoeuvring for an attack, causing the torpedo to be misdirected or the attack to be aborted. Its goal was not to blend a ship with its background, since viewing conditions at sea are notoriously variable, and there is no simplistic, reliable match between ships and their ocean surroundings.A waterline 1:600 scale model recreating similar models used in World War I to test dazzle schemes as viewed from a periscope. It was intended initially for naval camouflage, and specifically as a way to protect merchant ships from highly effective torpedo attacks by German submarines (called U-boats). The term dazzle-painting was adopted by the British in 1917, in reference to an innovative use of disruption patterns. Such tactics have also been widely employed throughout human history. Less familiar but potentially far more effective is high difference camouflage or figure disruption in which a single thing appears to be a discontinuous hodgepodge (or mishmash) of unrelated components.īlending, mimicry, and disruption-as well as disruption and blending combined, called coincident disruption-are found in abundance in the natural world. CAMOUFLAGE ARTISTS (called camoufleurs ) make it an arduous challenge to see a shape against a background (called blending or background matching ), or to distinguish one kind of thing from another (called mimicry ).
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