Quick audit. The Breton top you own, possibly several. The deckchair. The beach windbreak. The scarf you reach for most. The rugby shirt, the pyjamas, the socks you’d save in a fire. The awning of every café you’ve ever wanted to sit outside.

You love stripes. Everyone loves stripes. Nobody asks why.

I had to ask, because that is my way. I have an impulsive need to know why. The first pockets I made were plain, and while people loved the idea of them, they never got excited. So I stitched lines into them, and got a little more excitement. Then I put actual stripes onto one, and something clicked. Not just for me, for everyone. For no reason I could name, I felt better every time I looked at it. Not a little better. Lights-on-in-the-brain better.

Sioux had been thinking about stripes for years. She’d wanted to do whole ranges of them, but they never belonged to the aesthetic of the brands she designed for. A designer can spend an entire career being brilliant at other people’s taste. So when I showed her the striped pockets, she didn’t need convincing. The stripes were part of why she said yes. Where I saw pockets that finally excited people, she saw the opportunity: a range built on the thing she’d been waiting years to do.

Then our friends and early adopters started saying the same thing. Keep the stripes. Sell the striped ones. They’re cool.

By then I had to know what was going on, so I went digging.

Stripes are not a trend. They’ve been turning up in human history for a very long time. Ancient pottery carries them. Medieval churches worked them into stone and glass, sometimes in combinations that look remarkably like humbugs. French sailors wore them so they could be spotted overboard, until Gabrielle Chanel saw the working shirts on the coast and took them into high fashion. Picasso wore them too. Chanel got there first.

There’s a reason your brain purrs at a stripe, and it’s mechanical. Your visual system is packed with cells that respond to lines and edges, which makes a stripe about as straightforward a thing for your brain to process as you can get. And the theory goes that what’s easy to process feels good. Processing fluency, scientists call it.

In other words, your brain likes stripes for much the same reason a tune that resolves feels right. A few lines, evenly repeated, and looking becomes effortless.

And then we found the really interesting bit.

In the late 1960s, a handful of designers took that simple visual language and started breaking the rules. Architecture had talked itself into austerity. White walls, clean lines, colour treated as a lapse in judgement. These designers looked at all that tasteful restraint and decided to paint stripes the size of buildings.

Up stairwells. Across ceilings. Around entire rooms. Full strength. No apology.

They called it supergraphics.

And this was more than stripes. It was bold geometric form let loose at scale. Circles, arcs, lines and blocks of colour, suddenly too big to sit politely on the surface of something. They wrapped around rooms. Climbed buildings. Changed the way you moved through a space.

When I found the photographs, I sat very still for a while.

Because there it was. The feeling we’d been chasing without knowing we were chasing it. Colour and geometry, glorious and unabashed, completely at ease in the serious rooms of life as well as the frivolous ones.

The stripe had grown up. And we’d found our ancestors.

Sixty years on, everyday carry has talked itself back into austerity. Grey, black, beige. Mostly trying very hard not to have an opinion, then hiding in your bag.

And I say that with love. I like beige. But even beige is better in a stripe.

Our stripes aren’t decoration added at the end. They’re part of the architecture of what we make. Every stripe is designed for the object it sits on. The scale, the spacing, the colour. All of it is there to give a useful object a point of view.

It’s in our logo too, if you look closely. An oval carrying stripes. Pure geometric form, drawn in the same spirit.

And yes, stripes on things made for moving mean some people see ours and think of a certain sportswear brand. Fair enough. Adidas didn’t invent the stripe any more than we did. It joined the same lineage. Football kits, running tracks, stripes built for speed. They understood the power of a few bold lines and wore it brilliantly.

We’re not borrowing from Adidas. We’re honouring the same ancestors Adidas has honoured. The long line of people who understood that a few bold lines can give even the most ordinary thing a point of view.

The people who made supergraphics deserve better than a name-drop, so I’ll introduce them properly, one at a time, in letters to come.

For now, the short version. You love stripes because you’re human. We put them on our range because we can’t help it either. Regular readers know the rest of the song: made properly, designed differently, and no space for a knife.

Sera

These are the good days.  For loving stripes, mostly.