Fashion error: Misadventures in camouflage

The following editorial appeared Wednesday in The Chicago Tribune:

Ever notice how many people you see wearing camouflage apparel in public? Well, maybe not. Wearing camouflage, they’re invisible, right?

Not always, because no one has designed a pattern that blends into the background at a mall food court or a Little League baseball game. So those woodland and desert patterns tend to make the wearer more conspicuous, not less.

Unless you’re hunting deer or ducks, that’s often the point. Camouflage has found its way into all sorts of products where its practical utility is, well, hard to see. You can buy camouflage toilet seats, beer koozies, shower curtains and wallets.

You can even buy Mossy Oak underwear, which theoretically would help conceal something that is not supposed to be visible in the first place. The trend extends as far as racy lingerie. The camouflage strapless corset and thong at Lingerie Diva is probably a big Valentine’s Day item in some places.

Camo used to be strictly a functional feature, but at some point it became a fashion statement — advertising that the wearer is rugged, outdoorsy or rural, if not all three. Plenty of hunters still don it to achieve stealth in a blind, but most of them don’t feel out of place wearing it in town after the season is over. Urban hipsters have been known to sport it in a spirit of subversive irony.

But there are people who wear it every day for the most practical of all reasons: to keep from getting killed. No one has a bigger appetite for clothing that makes one hard to detect than the U.S. military.

But that doesn’t mean soldiers are necessarily good at the design decisions. Reports a story in the online magazine Slate, "There’s a lot of brown in Afghanistan, says one aggrieved soldier, but the U.S. Army’s camo print contains not a speck." This, nearly 11 years after American fighting men and women arrived en masse.

The pattern that made its appearance in 2004, a gray and green pixelated one known as the Universal Camouflage Pattern, turns out to be OK unless you want to escape the notice of armed hostiles. As the online newspaper The Daily reports, "The government spent $5 billion on a camouflage design that actually made its soldiers more visible." Now it’s in the process of replacing this unfortunate wardrobe.