"Marinière"

Garments with sailor stripes have become very common, a classic in fashion for both men and women that emerges, especially in the summer season, but behind the "marinières" there is a lot of history. Coco Chanel was the one who made the "marinières" fashionable when she adapted, for her nautical collection of 1917, the garments that she saw in the fishermen and sailors of Deuville, a vacation place for the European cream that she began to frequent thanks to her lover Arthur "Boy" Chapel and where in 1913 she opened a very successful shop where you could find, among other things, those Breton striped sweaters that would contribute to the liberation of women from uncomfortable corsets. Yes, the origin of the Breton stripes or "marinières" was, as the name suggests, in French Brittany and their weaving had a practical reason as these woolen sweaters were knitted very tightly, practically waterproof so that fishermen and sailors were the warmest possible when they went to sea and at the same time they could be easily spotted if they were unlucky enough to fall overboard, but it was the French Navy who decreed in 1958 that they had to have 21 white stripes of 20 millimeters and 21 blue stripes of 10 millimeters, presumably for Napoleon's victories over the British Empire. So, with the help of Coco Chanel, a work garment became a fashion icon and a feminist claim, since this garment, so closely related to the masculinity of sailors, began to be worn by many women including Parisians who spent the summer in Deauville and who brought back their sweaters to the City of Light to become a symbol of the most sophisticated Paris. From this contribution of Chanel, many designers followed her and contributed to the reaffirmation of sailor stripes. Among them, Yves Saint Laurent, who included them in his collections since the 60s, and Jean Paul Gaultier, the "Enfant Terrible" of fashion, who loved the sailor clothes his mother used to dress him in when he was child and who reinvented the icon again and, with his spectacular imagery, turned it into a symbol of his own brand as well as an LGTBI symbol with perfume included, Le Male. Such a warm welcome always has repercussions on celebrities and many female Hollywood stars, especially between the 50s and 60s, such as Audrey Hepburn or Brigitte Bardot, wore it with pleasure, but many actors like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and personalities from other areas such as Pablo Picasso and even Kurt Cobain. With the passage of time the sailor stripes became something unisex evolving and adapting to fashion. Surely those early 20th century sea workers would raise their eyebrows in amazement but... Who doesn't like marinières?