Long before armies had a word for it, Highlanders knew the trick. In 1582 the scholar George Buchanan wrote that most Highland plaids were brown, “most near to the colour of the hadder”: the heather.

The bright colour of their plaids shall not bewray themGeorge Buchanan, 1582

“Bewray” means give away. By the 1840s Highland estates were dressing their gillies and keepers in tweeds of their own, and according to Country Life one laird sent his stalkers up the hill in different tweeds and watched through a spyglass to see which hid them best.

John Graham Kerr taught at the University of Glasgow from 1902 to 1935. According to Wikipedia, in 1914 he proposed to Winston Churchill that warships be painted to break up their shape.

What went to sea was dazzle: wild stripes that don’t hide a ship at all. They hide which way it is going and how fast.

In October 1917 King George V, a former Royal Navy man, peered through a periscope at a little dazzle-painted model ship and was asked which way it was heading. He said south by west. It was heading east-southeast.

I would not have believed I could have been so deceivedKing George V, as reported

The painter Norman Wilkinson got the credit for dazzle. Kerr never accepted it, and according to Smithsonian the two men “would trade snide comments through the next war.”

The American “Ghost Army” was 1,100 men who fooled the enemy with inflatable tanks, fake camps “complete with fake laundry” and sound recordings you could hear 15 miles away. Its members included the fashion designer Bill Blass. All that rubber led to the odd awkward moment.

Two Frenchmen on bicycles once wandered past the perimeter and watched four GIs pick up what looked like a 40-ton Sherman tank and turn it round by hand. The soldier on guard kept a straight face and told them that American soldiers are very strong.

Tigerstripe was never official US kit. According to Wikipedia, the first Americans allowed to wear it had theirs made up by local tailors, because South Vietnamese army uniforms were too small for most of them.

That is one reason there are so many versions of it. Later batches were made under contract in Thailand, Okinawa, Taiwan and Korea.

Our favourite. Of every pattern in the guide, tiger camo is the one we’d pick. It always looks good.

Two world wars left governments with warehouses of kit nobody needed. It went cheap, and the public bought it. NPR’s Planet Money puts it plainly:

Army surplus stores were rare oddities before World War II. After World War II, they explodeNPR, Planet Money

Kit made for war has since dressed nearly every movement that stood against it: anti-war marchers, mods, punks, hip-hop crews and skaters. Which is how a pattern designed to hide soldiers ended up on our rails, made to be seen.