The Curiosity Chronicles

Curious about…Breton.

Yesterday in honor of being in Paris I watched the movie “Coco Before Chanel,” which chronicles Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s rise to becoming an international fashion icon. In one scene she strolls down a beach in Deauville in Northern France and watches the fishermen gathering their nets, wearing classic French Breton stripes, which of course later become a signature item in Chanel’s iconography. I wondered how this classic garment came to such popularity.

 The striped Breton shirt as we know it today came into being shortly following the 27th March, 1858 Act of France which introduced the navy and white striped knitted shirt as the uniform for all French navy seaman. The official striped navy shirt or French sailor shirt soon became more generally a working mariner garment as it was picked up by many nautical men; seafairers and sailors across the region of Northern France. It was said that when a sailor had fallen into the sea, the distinctive block pattern of stripes on the French striped shirt made him easier to spot amidst the many blurred colours of the waves. 

The flag of Brittany is called the Gwenn-ha-du, which means ‘white and black’ in Breton.

Interestingly, the original shirt featured 21 stripes, one for each of Napoleon’s victories. Not only did this shirt become the standard of the French (merchant) navy and fishing fleets, it was soon exported to other navies around the world and became big as a fashion item a century after. 

In the late 1950s and ’60s, the shirt was heavily associated with beatnik French New Wave cinema - worn by girls with gamine looks like Jean Seberg in “Breathless,” and Jean Moreau in “Jules et Jim.”

What Of It? Next to perhaps the berét, nothing is more French than a stripe. I’m fascinated by how something so simple can become so iconographic of an entire culture: the French, like the English, have a real knack of adapting and updating their own traditions, and Breton stripes are still as relevant and evident on today’s catwalks as they were on the beaches of Brittany at the turn of the century.

I am Curious about cultural iconography, about things which stand the test of time, about updated traditionalism.

Curious about…Essentialism.

“Elegance is refusal.” Gabrielle Chanel

Inspired by being in Paris, a less-is-more post today.