Author: Evan Nicole Brown / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the animal kingdom, adaptation to one’s surroundings is a matter of survival. Take the ever-changing chameleon. These lizards are widely known for their ability to shift the color and pattern of their skin.
In some cases this makes them less detectable to predators, but one of its primary purposes is as a social signal, a form of nonverbal communication between reptiles.Naturally, humans have developed the same strategies. All around the world, military personnel don camouflage to, well, disappear. The advantage is obvious: A blur of brown and green is easily overlooked as a target, particularly against the backdrop of a lush jungle. Yet much like the chameleon, camouflage patterns have evolved into more than just a method of concealment.
Upon clicking and scrolling through Camopedia, an ever-growing online catalogue of camouflage patterns used by militaries around the world, the impact of regionalism on field uniform design becomes apparent. The database is vetted by both historians and camouflage enthusiasts alike to be an accurate reflection of what a soldier from a given part of the world will be wearing. In addition to various varieties of green, India’s offerings include a noticeably gendered magenta for women and blue for some male police personnel. The British Army’s “brushstroke” design could be as artistic as it is tactically successful. Over time, camouflage patterns have become as much about identifying nationhood—standing out—as they are about blending in.
Though India’s unsubtle variations are considered rare, they illustrate how camouflage isn’t just about hiding in battle. “When the average person thinks of camouflage, they think of something that’s put on to disappear,” says Eric Larson, Camopedia’s executive editor. “But camoflauge has actually become, for a lot of these countries, more of a national identifier.”
Larson has collected camouflage for 25 years, meaning he has been “picking up as many different uniforms from around the world as I could,” he says. His personal collection boasts more than 2,500 individual items. He started Camopedia because there were few resources available to help people identify the patterns, when they appear in photos or video, for example.
World War I is thought of as the dawn of modern camouflage’s military application. “[It was] the conflict where people started experimenting with collecting data and intelligence without being seen,” Larson says. In the following years, the art of camouflage gained momentum, and the patterns evolved to match the environments in which battles would be fought. The 1960s, professional camouflage designers began to apply science and optics to…
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