At Whitetail Ski Resort last weekend, the first one who caught my eye was a snowboarder cutting down the slopes in neck-to-boot gray camouflage.
A few minutes later, a skier passed overhead in a chair lift; he was wearing trousers of a dark woodland camouflage. But the final straw came in the form of a small girl not more than 3 who was stumping through the lodge clad in a snowsuit of pink-and-gray camouflage.
That’s when it struck me: Just when did we become a camo nation? And why, in a world of plaids, paisleys and gingham, have we begun dressing even tiny children in the garb of hunters and warriors?
It’s both charming and weird. Everyone knows that clothes, and even colors, are embedded with social meaning. The Goth girl in funereal black lace, the baby boy in baby blue, the clean-cut candidate in navy suit and red tie — each type of attire projects a distinct, if inexact, idea of the person wearing it.
Camo has inescapable tough-guy connotations, conjuring up images of sweat, stealth and sudden violence. On one level, surely this makes it a bizarre choice of pattern for plump civilians living comfortably in cities and suburbs, let alone for their small children. (On another level, who better than soft, cosseted civilians to wear clothes that make them feel powerful?)
Of course, camo has long been the favorite apparel not just of legitimate soldiers and hunters, but also of extralegal rebels and paramilitaries: Think Che Guevara, Subcomandante Marcos, or the dangerous thugs of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army.
Perhaps that’s why to me it’s both comical and a little wince-making that affluent American parents have taken to dressing their children in it. Squint, and that crowd of teenagers at the mall could be the Mahdi Army.
“It’s cool,” said an 11-year-old skier, when I asked why he wears camo. “I like the way it looks.”
“I just like the pattern, I guess,” said an older boy.
Based on my empirical investigation, this is, in fact, how most camo-wearing people explain themselves: “I don’t know. I just like it.”
“I don’t believe that,” scoffs a friend whose 14-year-old son wears camouflage cargo pants. “As the mother of a kid in camo, there is no question in my mind that it conveys a fringe, Delta Force kind of message.
“All you have to do is compare it to seersucker and you know full well there’s something else at work,” she says. “I think it’s the SWAT team, commando image that men everywhere secretly want.”
Camo as a mass-market experience seems to have started about a decade ago. That’s when the people at L.L. Bean began noticing a surprising number of orders for camouflage hunting gear from urban ZIP codes known more for sports cars and starlets than for duck blinds and deer.
The company, which began as a purveyor of hunting gear, started adding camo patterns to the rest of its merchandise, eventually including girly options in pink, orange and light blue.
“There’s something real about camouflage,” compared to other patterns, says Jim Hauptman, director of design at L.L. Bean’s headquarters in Maine, seeking to explain its popularity. “It has a grounded, authentic, legitimate feel to it.”
I’d like to think a sense of solidarity with American troops serving overseas might account for some of the camo-wearing we’re seeing. If, by carrying a camo tote bag with pink monogramming a fashionista is demonstrating her awareness, however fugitive, of our larger national struggle, I say good for her.
“If it’s an expression of support, then I’m grateful for it,” says Lt. Col. Les Melnyk, a press officer at the Department of Defense.
Just before leaving Whitetail, I stopped one last fellow — he was wearing green marsh camo ski pants — and asked him why he chose them instead of, say, a pair in dark blue. Was he trying to look cool? Did he want to seem tough? Did he hope to project an aura of sweat and stealth?
“Well, m’am,” he replied politely, “Actually, I’m in ROTC. I got these from the Army.”
I laughed out loud. What a great reason.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
