Camouflage Fashion | Swimsuits, Stripes & Headgear

Dazzle-Painted Bathing Suit (1919) [colorized]

Above This is a young, fashionable sun bather at the beach at Margate in 1919, dressed in a scandalous dazzle-painted bathing suit. The fad was enormously popular—it went viral at the time—and widely covered in the press. We've talked about this in earlier posts, the only difference being that this is our colorized version of one of the news photos.

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Anon, "Camouflage Finds Use in Fashions" in The Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton OH) (April 15, 1920), p. 7—

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 zig-zags. Some are even more like forked lightning.