Blog Mirror: Epochs Field Guide to Camouflage

I'll confess, I find camouflage interesting. 

This is in part because I'm a hunter. 

When I was young, a long time ago now, if you saw camouflage in daily wear, it meant that the wearer was undoubtedly a hunter.  Indeed, when I was in junior high I had a neat winter coat that was blaze orange on one side and had the "duck hunter" (WWII) camouflage pattern on the on the other.  It was reversible, and it was a neat, down, coat.

At the same time, or thereabouts, I joined the Civil Air Patrol.  The Vietnam War hadn't been over long and the CAP actually had some tiger stripe uniforms that it issued to those small enough to wear them.  Tiger Stripe is a neat camo.  I wore those for duck hunting until I outgrew them and donated them to somebody else.  Little did I think they'd become highly collectable.  Oh well.

In recent years, however, camouflage has spread into daily wear big time.  Lots of folks who have never fired a gun and who get no closer to wild game than the pigeons in the park wear camouflage clothing all the time.  I've thought about posting about that here, but I haven't yet.  Now somebody else has, so I'm linking it in:

Epochs Field Guild to Camouflage:

Introduction

Menswear in the last few years has seen a profusion of camouflage motifs. In the past you would occasionally see camo used in a fashion collection or a subculture like punk, hip-hop or the 1990’s jungle scene. It’s really only in the last decade that it has become a staple, largely driven by heritage–minded Japanese brands and the streetwear scene. This is your field guide to the history, original use & application of camo in modern clothing

It's a neat article, but I should note.  It contains an error in a caption. That caption being:

 A usmc soldier in Frogskin camouflage near Normandy, France.

Nope, that guy is in the Army, not the Marine Corps.  No Marines served in ground combat in the European Theater of Operations (there would be shipboard Marines, of course, and the Marines did have a presence on the ground in Iceland during the war).  The frog pattern camouflage was introduced first in the Army, for snipers, but the average GI associated any camouflage patter in Europe with the Waffen SS, which made wearing it in an American sector dangerous.  So it was withdrawn from Europe.  Sources differ, but the frog pattern uniforms were either simply given to the USMC which kept up with issuing them to some thereafter, or maybe they simply adopted it independantly.  Again, I've seen both stories.

Anyhow, neat article with a neat assortment of camouflage patterns discussed.