Eric at Soldier Systems Daily was feeling all nostalgic for US Woodland camo yesterday – maybe because he’d come across the Woodland camo FR Combat Shirt and Trousers from DRIFIRE at the Modern Day Marine exhibition.  And for us old-timers who were issued Woodland camo BDUs, its hard not to feel nostalgic about it when we look at UCP…

But then, just to make us all feel even older and uncool, one of his readers sent him this photo from New York luxury clothing brand Barneys:

Prompting the question of whether Woodland camo has skipped cool and gone straight to hip.  Well, aside from the fact that this is clearly not an authentic Woodland camo print, a lot of us wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of skinny jeans anyway (even if we could fit into them).  And we certainly wouldn’t pair them with our little brother’s tweed jacket and denim shirt – or pose like a snooty little girl either.

But I digress.  Is wearing camouflage now cool and hip?  It used to be that only Army nuts (like me and my friends at school), homeless vets, bikers, metal-heads, punks, skateboarders, snowboarders, and other “fringe” dwellers would wear camouflage as everyday clothing.  For the fact that it is now becoming hip and trendy, I blame the Fashionistas of the Portobello Road area of Notting Hill in London – about 10 years ago they started desecrating surplus camouflage jackets and trousers with sequins and applique decorations and sold them as “fashion” in trendy little boutiques.  I once saw a nice 1968 Pattern DPM smock that had been ruined in this way, being sold for £600!  (the store owner was clearly expecting somebody with loads of money and very little brain to buy that item)

Meanwhile, TacticalHipster had their own post-modern ironic take on the question, saying “Hmmm, seems legit… Thats why I wear uniforms from a war you probably never heard of.”  Which seems right to me – that’s why I sometimes wore a mint-condition Austrian M57 pattern jacket when I was at college.

For a while, when I lived in Amsterdam, I wore a Czechoslovakian Vz60 “Mlok” pattern parka.

Later I switched to a reproduction WWII British “sausage skin” camo windproof smock (which also came in handy on a parachute course in Holland in 2004).

Do you think maybe that’s what inspired this chap’s choice of camouflage couture?

But going back to Barneys, if you think what they did to that young man was bad – check out what they did to this poor girl….

Maybe they should stick to camouflage after all……..