Dazzle Camouflage Skirts and Swimsuits

Above Here's one more example of the fashionable adoption of dazzle camouflage bathing suits near the end of World War I. Add this to our previous posts on the same subject. Accompanying this photograph was the heading WARS[sic] EFFECT FELT IN BATHING SUITS: Camouflage is supposed to hide things. Bathing suits seem built to reveal. Yet here are these beach nymphs in paradoxical camouflaged bathing suits. The same photo appeared in various newspapers in the US and Canada around the same time, this one in The Winnipeg Tribune, in the Society Section and Woman's Magazine, Saturday, August 16, 1919, p. 1.

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From the "It's Town Talk" column in Free Lance (New Zealand), Issue 972, March 6, 1919, p. 22—

That the new "dazzle camouflage" design on summer skirts may be all right for the ethereal nymph-like form, but for over umpteen stone specimens the least said the better.

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From "Camouflage Finds Use in Fashions" in The Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton OH), April 15, 1920, p. 8—

LONDON—The artists who decorated our recently almost invisible ships and who hid the armies of the western front behind and under painted canvas and "ersatz" villages are out of a job.

Hence the spring millinery styles.

The dazzle hat has arrived, and with it a game.

Says one fashion writer:

"If you see coming toward you a woman who in some unaccountable way seems to melt into a sort of rainbow mass above the shoulders, don't be alarmed; try to find her hat."

To the uninitiated the new spring designs seem to be meaningless collections of colored stripes and zigzags. Some are even more like forked lightning.

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