Issue 09
FATIGUE DETAIL
By Anne KeehnPhotos By Aaron Farley
Illustration By Cleon Peterson
During his 40th birthday party, Owen Thornton changed his outfit at least three times. Every hour or so, he pulled on pieces from his collection of vintage camouflage army gear and authentic punk clothes from Vivienne Westwood’s SEX shop. Dressed in a baggy tartan suit, Thornton took the stage and yelled out some punk songs. Later in the evening, a tribute band called the Sex Pistols Experience performed. The scene was playful and kitschy: punk as drag; punk without menace; punk defanged.
In his spare time, Thornton dons his camouflage and takes part in war reenactments. “A bunch of grown men playing dress-up,” he chuckles. Thornton grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the Troubles in a left-wing, separatist, Catholic household. “In my house, my dad had a picture of Martin Luther King, a picture of JFK, and a picture of the pope,” he says. “I grew up with car bombs, darlin’.”
In his extensive military gear collection, there is not a single piece from Northern Ireland. “It’s not exotic enough,” Thornton says. The vintage camouflage pieces he collects represent scenes of intense violence.
But, like the aging punks at his birthday party, the faded military gear in Thornton’s collection has lost its menace: war as drag; war without menace; war defanged. Perhaps Irish military gear still carries a sense of real danger for Thornton. Perhaps it hits too close to home.
At 21, Thornton defected from his war-torn home and moved to London. He sold vintage clothes in Camden market, and became a club promoter and DJ. He developed a career in the garment industry that continues to this day. In 2004, along with partners Nevi Maddy and Amy Satterfield, he started Fresh Los Angeles clothing, now known as Fresh Karma. Based in the Warehouse District of downtown L.A., the label specializes in street fashion: trucker hats, camo prints, distressed fabric, silk-screened T-shirts, hoodies with glittery embellishments.
Thornton’s office at Fresh Karma is stacked to the brim with vintage camouflage. A Nazi army poncho is mounted behind his desk. A Vietnamese tiger-stripe print paratrooper jumpsuit hangs on the opposite wall. Thornton darts around the room and tries on the gear. His eyes light up when he throws on a replica WWII Japanese military hat. He is like a child who plays with his action figures in a living room fort. In an article in SWINDLE #6 about battle reenactments, Thornton said, “When I was a kid, I had G.I. Joes and Action Man. And now, I get to look like that too.”
Thornton’s attraction to military gear seems paradoxical: his disdain for war drove him out of Northern Ireland to the relatively peaceful shores of California. “Personally, I’m a punk rocker, and I would never go into the army,” he says. Yet, at work, he surrounds himself with army gear. He spends an inordinate amount of time on the Internet and at army surplus stores and used clothing outlets scouring for hard-to- find military pieces. When he pulls out an old camouflage T-shirt from Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), a grin spreads across his face.
“There are places in Africa where it is illegal to wear camo if you’re not a soldier,” he declares. “You’ll get shot!”
Thornton won’t get shot for wearing his vintage camo to reenactments in San Pedro or to nightclubs in Hollywood. It is only in non-war zones that people have the luxury to wear camo as a cultural fashion statement. For Thornton, his camouflage collection is a vicarious thrill -a way to connect with symbols of rebellion and danger from a safe distance.
In the last year, camouflage and military fashion have become a big trend in fashion. Camo prints have popped up in collections for Target and Urban Outfitters; they have made it into ads for Dentyne chewing gum. A recent Carl’s Jr. commercial featured a camo-clad soldier on leave. For its fall/winter exhibition, the Museum at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology is exhibiting “Love and War: The Weaponized Woman.” Curated by the museum’s director, fashion historian Dr. Valerie Steele, the show is billed as “an unprecedented look at the influence of armor and other military styles in fashion.”
The U.S. Is in its fifth and third year of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, yet, there is a sense that war is out of sight, out of mind. Combat is waged in unknown, faraway lands. (According to CNN, two thirds of young Americans cannot find Iraq on a map, and 88 percent cannot identify Afghanistan.) A 1991 policy issued by the Department of Defense prevents media documentation of flag-draped caskets of war casualties to Dover Air Force Base. In 2004, the Sinclair Broadcast Group censored the broadcast of “The Fallen”-a recitation of the names of 721 U.S. Forces killed in Iraq, accompanied by their photographs-on ABC’s Nightline. Images of combat may not be readily available in the media. But, at least through fashion, war edges into the periphery of our consciousness.
Right now, camouflage is very much a part of the zeitgeist. Let’s take a dive into Owen Thornton’s collection of vintage gear and watch the evolution of camo and conflict unfold before our eyes.
For more information on camouflage, check out Hardy Blechman’s Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia of Camouflage (Firefly)
