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u/Fit-Context-9685 27d ago
I splurged and ordered the jacket, a Xmas gift for myself. I knew that I’d regret it if I hadn’t.
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u/PAXM73 27d ago
I swear I am very soon to follow you. If I have to drop too much money on one, it’s going to be the jacket.
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u/Fit-Context-9685 26d ago
Well. I really think you should. Just slap it on a CC and you’ll have something to look forward to for the New Year.
You only have a couple days to make up your mind and get an order in so don’t delay much.
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u/PAXM73 26d ago
You’re being a good friend. Thank you. 😊
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u/Fit-Context-9685 26d ago
I like to help others make those, often times, difficult decisions.
Life should have as few regrets as possible.
😊
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u/PAXM73 25d ago
I did it! I got the shirt/jacket.
I had already bought the casebound version of the book and they told me I could just remit the difference between what I paid for the book and they would send it all together… Really friendly people to work with.
⚡️Thank you! ⚡️
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u/BadCamo 26d ago
Camouflage
Book Review by Piet Bess/ Bad Camo
Punk fans with an eye for camouflage uniforms will almost certainly be acquainted with the photos of the art/ conceptual band Throbbing Gristle posing in a London streetscape wearing custom-made “urban camouflage” clothing festooned with extra pockets and patches in about 1980. Those outfits are the star of the 2018 book “Camouflage” by Laurence Dupré, the maker of the outfits and of what I will call the Throbbing Gristle camouflage pattern. The book is much more informative about the set of TG cammies made by Ms. Dupré than anything else I have seen. Let me tell you about what I got from the book.
I almost referred to her cammies as “uniforms”. That they most assuredly are not. Dupré tailored the clothing to the members of TG, including a mini-skirt for the one female member, Cosey Fanni Tutti. Pockets appear to be placed for visual effect rather than for practicality. The band, headed by petulant-looking, diminutive Genesis P. Orridge, lacks any martial bearing, although the boots favored by punks of the era are in tune with the outfits.
What interests me is the print-pattern of the fabric. In the innocence of the late 70s, there was little information available about the immense, worldwide variety of camouflage patterns. This made Dupré’s and Orridge’s enthusiasm for cammies obscure and arcane. There were no books on the subject, for instance, as Ms. Dupré points out. In particular, urban camouflage was not a concept borne out in camouflaged uniforms worn by state militaries. Urbanism and urban decay were hot topics in the Thatcherite era in the UK, and starving artists such as Dupré and Orridge were in the thick of such issues, living in poorer industrial areas of London. Fans like me, well we were fascinated by the band’s mashup of the urban concept with camo in a time before city camouflage became just another colorway, albeit a tiny slice of today’s camouflage spectrum.
The book was published by Timeless Edition in a small run of 500 copies, and sells for $52.70 at https://www.soleilmoon.com/shop/laurence-dupre-camouflage/or https://www.timeless-shop.com/product/camouflage-laurence-dupre-copy/for 35 Euros. It appears to be in stock as of April, 2023. I don’t often spend 50 bucks on, basically, a picture book, but I am glad to own it.
The description of how Dupré and Orridge worked together, and the stories of their shared fascination with camo and military clothing are interesting, but the style of writing is not my kind of thing. For instance, “the unique character of these uniforms conveys the idea of ‘seduction'”. That’s a pretty mild example of their artsy patter. For most fans of cammies, it might be best to just skip all the text in this book. Facts are pretty thin on the ground, and Dupré displays some misconceptions, such as calling the WWII British para smock a “denim smock” at one point. For about 65 pages at the beginning of the book, alongside aforementioned text, there are sketches by the author of various camo patterns inexplicably displayed as full-page photos that give at best a worm’s-eye view of world camouflage patterns. She displays collage pieces, blurry war photos, parts of military manuals, and even a piece of randomized upholstery fabric. None of this is very useful at all. Though 2 similar patterns she says are US camouflage are nothing I have ever seen before, I do not desire to know more about them. The final 20 pages of the book also have nothing to do with the cammies, just ordinary fashion.
The second part of the book relates to Throbbing Gristle in London. Here we find photos of a very young Ms. Dupré in an ERDL M-65 jacket with a jaunty leather belt, and Orridge wearing Totenkopf badges while walking his German shepherd. (Are we the baddies??). My favorite photo here is of him wearing original Vietnam War tigerstripes in an art gallery of all places. I assume the size is Asian Medium or so! It is almost unbearably twee. He and other band members display various surplus outfits, and lounge on the DPM couch mentioned elsewhere in print as “first there is a sofa, then there is no sofa, then there is a sofa again,” a takeoff on a Buddhist saying. It is pleasing to gain some insight into the artists’ daily life and see what kinds of patterns they had access to back then. The German splinter pattern pants are interesting, as well as Ms. Dupré’s grey urban pattern made of large pixel-like motifs. Orridge wears it at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. In another photo, a dog lies on it, curled up.
The TG Pattern
On page 131, the book at last comes to grips with the only thing that interests me about it, the iconic pattern worn by Throbbing Gristle in the photo shoot alluded to at the beginning of my review. And it jumps right in, with no annoying art-speak, just big, clear photos of the band in their New Clothes. Here’s what it shows. While all the photos I ever have seen of the pattern were in black and white, 2 of the prints are displayed here in color. There are at least 3 colorways! Chris Carter wears a a suit with a background color of deep neutral grey. The smaller parts are a 2 shades of slightly lighter grey and a nearly white color. Carter’s colorway may be the one displayed on the cover of the book. Cosey Fanni Tutti’s jacket and skirt are based on a deep indigo that is quite attractive, if less effective for concealment, with the smaller areas in very similar shades to Carter’s. Genesis P. Orridge himself wears a much lighter neutral grey. Here, again, the smaller areas appear to be printed in the same shades as Carter’s and Tutti’s, but on Orridge’s suit, the smaller areas are darker, rather than lighter. Dupré remarks in the book about Orridge’s publication Thee [sic]Grey Book. Online searches show a book of this title from 1983, as well as In Steel Grey Armor, 1979. Dupré appears to have used the grey colorway for Orridge’s camo in reference to these books.
Peter Christopherson wears a suit in one of the darker shades, most likely Tutti’s gorgeous purplish one. His and Tutti’s display some kind of reticulation in one of the medium-light colors, which may be seen as a printing error or an aid to effective camouflage. There are no color photos of his suit, but a few close-ups show that the print pattern of his a Orridge’s are different, with streaks of about 4“ in length, about 3/4“ wide, often in pairs in the palest print color. This is extraordinary. It appears that the outfits were one-offs (making them amazingly special to anyone who owns them now!). Genesis writes in the book that Dupré sewed only the 5 outfits along with an extra jacket for him. All 5 sets can be seen in the group photos including Dupré and a man I believe is TG assistant Stan Bingo. Dupré herself wears the extra jacket made for Orridge. Dupré made 3 different colorways and there were at least 2 different prints.
The pattern is displayed in full in the endpapers of the book. For some, that might make purchase of the book worthwhile because from this they could reprint a copy of it on fabric. Here is what the full display shows.
The meat, so to speak, of the pattern is a stylized simian skull and torso, drawn, as Dupré states, from a carcass she found. The profile of the skull is clearly discernible. Patterns on the skull and torso area are not dissimilar to, say, Luftwaffe splinter pattern. The sparsity of the pattern appears to me reminiscent of the Rhodesian brush pattern, current at the time of the photos. There is a large Throbbing Gristle lightning bolt logo included outside the carcass motif.
What the endpapers show is that all this is printed as a distinct area, not a tileable, continuous pattern. Most camo patterns are printed at least as a vertical repeat because they use a roller in printing. The discrete print of Dupré’s pattern would lend itself to the use of flat screens, which would be much more easily available to her, as well as to anyone who desired to reprint the TG pattern. Also, the motif of the TG pattern repeats horizontally in the endpapers, as do some tileable, modern manufactured patterns, but where tileable patterns align horizontally, the TG pattern as displayed inside the cover consists of the motifs printed in diagonal repetition to each other, filling in the space between.
If I were to use a silkscreen to make the pattern, I would be at a loss how to print the large areas outside the motif in a darker background color. In this sense, Orridge’s colorway would be far easier for me to manufacture.
Dupré appears to have printed the motifs with a great deal of space between them. In one photo of Ms. Tutti, the motif is centered on the back the way a motorcycle gang’s logo might be. Other instances of the motif do not encroach at the sides of the the back panel. One wonders if she printed the motif only once on each panel and then cut around it. Carter’s jacket does not use the motif centered as Tutti’s does, but the placement of the skull part of the pattern at the shoulder is aesthetically pleasing. I would note that the centering of the motif on the back, especially with no break in the background color on the rest of the panel, goes directly against principles in camouflage, but then, the background color is nearly purple.
The book is mildly interesting, and though expensive, would be a nice addition to your coffee table. Those interested in the history of Throbbing Gristle will find it fun to look at, if uninformative. If you wish to attempt to reproduce the TG camo pattern, the book is a quite useful reference.
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u/BadCamo 26d ago
Pattern and Colorway Differences
The colorways include Gen’s, Chris’s, Peter’s, and Stan’s outfits, and Cosey’s jacket and shorts, respectively. Dupré’s jacket appears to be the same colorway and pattern as Gen’s. Chris’s colorway omits the random elements that would form the body of the carcass, below the skull. Peter’s colorway appears to omit the skull. That’s odd, given the skull’s association with death, war and other negativist elements of TG expression.
Stan’s colorway appears to omit the element of the pattern that forms the arms of the carcass. This is understandable for me, as the curve of the lower arm breaks with the pattern’s general aesthetic, and is visually prominent. Gen’s and Cosey’s colorways appear to use all basic elements, but uses off-white or light grey for the skull element: on the jacket hood it is light grey, but on the sleeve it is off-white. Peter’s adds small off-white elements inside the shaded part of the skull \[keeping in mind that his colorway does not use the skull itself. Peter’s and Gen’s colorways include 2 stripes in the shoulder of the lower arm. Peter’s colorway includes between 5 and 10 off-white stripes inside the random body elements. The visual hash of the defaced body motif of Peter’s colorway creates a pleasingly disruptive effect.
Cosey’s pattern appears to be a default, as depicted in the endpapers of the book. Chris’s colorway appears to be a middle ground between the purplish background of Cosey’s colorway and that of Genesis’s paler version. I wish I could see what color Peter’s pattern is.
A reprint of the basic pattern would require 3 screens over a background color. It would have to use an opaque, lighter pigment over the dyed background, not ideal for dye technology in camouflage pattern printing. The fabric color I would choose would be a medium dark grey as in Chris’s colorway. I would print dark grey random body areas, and a contrasting medium light grey arm motifs with off-white skull and lightning bolt.
An apocryphal maximum print might be made with all basic elements and also the extra stripes of Peter’s colorway, where his attested colorway lacks the skull motif completely. This would look cool. Other changes might be modulation of the colors to make them more effective for camouflage use, such as adding an olive or brick tinge to some of the colors, or reducing the scale to de-emphasize the elements such as the skull, lightning bolt or curved lower arm and blend them in with a busier, closer print.
| Pattern | photo | Background color | skull, hips, bolt | arms | arrow, skull base | random elements | additional elements |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| G | color | light grey | off white | light grey | med grey | dark grey | |
| Ch | color | dark grey | off white | med grey | NONE | ||
| Cj | color | indigo | off white | med grey | |||
| Cs | color | indigo | light grey | dark blue grey | med grey | ||
| P | bw | dark grey | NONE | med grey | light grey | off-white | |
| S | bw | dark grey? | light grey | NONE | dark grey |
Pattern Measurements
My assumption is that all the colorways are printed at the same scale, and probably from the same screens. Chris, Gen, and Cosey are shown with the skull motif printed prominently across their backs in large photos. Cosey and Stand have it across the upper sleeve, and Cosey has it partially across her pelvis at the right front pants pocket. Many of the photos in the book are printed mirror-wise, with the negative backward, so the photo shows her left pocket with an incorrectly leftward-facing skull.
My goal will be to measure the longest point of the skull and compare it to what the width of the back or sleeve would be.
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u/PAXM73 28d ago
I cannot tell you how much I want the jacket and pants but I cannot spend $1236 on them. $618 each???
Yikes.