STRIPES: PIN, PENCIL, CHALK, AND ROPE

Striped textiles most likely entered European fashion through Moors influence in southern Spain in the 8th century. Stripes were unusual in Medieval Europe and even passionately disliked. Europeans regarded fabrics where the foreground and background were not clearly distinguishable with disgust. Hard to believe, but there are even records of a French craftsman being sentenced to death “for wearing striped clothes”.

Medieval hatred for balanced stripes explains the prevalence of unbalanced stripes today. An unbalanced stripe is a vertical stripe, asymmetrically positioned, where the stripe is either narrower or wider than the background. Most common menswear stripes––pinstripes and chalk stripes, for instance––are examples.

Stripes that are the width of a pin are called ‘pinstripes.’ Depending on the fabric, the distance between these stripes can vary from 1/10th of an inch to 1 inch. In either case, the background and foreground remain distinguishable. Usually, for pinstriped fabrics, a single warp yarn is woven into a plain weave separately, effectively creating a tightly spaced series of dots and giving the stripe a dense and sharp outline.

A variety of the ‘pinstripe’ often found in shirt cloth but rarely in suit cloth is the ‘pencil stripe.’ Just like the pinstripe, the pencil stripe is created by adding warps into a plain weave, but more than one warp yarn is required to create the effect of a carpenter’s ‘pencil mark’.

Chalk stripes, unlike the previous ones, are woven as part of the warp of the weave, not separately, which makes these stripes appear somewhat blurry. This blurriness, which is said to resemble a tailor’s chalk line, gives this type of stripe its name. The spacing on chalk stripes can vary, but usually, the narrower the spacing, the more formal the fabric will appear.

Traditionally, the chalk stripe would have been an off-white stripe, made of up to five threads, on darker backgrounds. Today, any variation of same-weave stripe is considered a chalk stripe: often on flannel, sometimes on worsted suiting, but never on shirts.

On worsted fabrics, however, the stripe is usually recognisable as a ‘rope stripe,’ which is effectively a type of chalk stripe, but diagonal wales in the weave break up the stripe into little segments, giving it a twisted rope-like appearance.

Historically, any striped fabric would have been considered of lower formality. Consider, for instance, the “Stresemann”: a grey striped morning trousers worn with black frock coats or tailcoats during daytime activities. In the early twentieth century, the striped suit became a staple of upper-middle-class professional life and sporting events. Today, stripes can be found in every wardrobe, from fashion to classic tailoring.