Iconic Prints in Fashion History: Ten Prints and When They Arrived

Every print on this list started as something practical: a sailor's shirt, a shepherd's cloth, an army's concealment. Fashion arrived later, and the date it arrived is usually the interesting part. Here are ten, in rough order of when they became more than workwear.

After the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746, the Dress Act banned Highland dress, including tartan. It was repealed in 1782. When George IV visited Edinburgh in 1822, tartan became the fashionable face of Scotland, and it has been in and out of fashion ever since, most famously in 1970s punk. Our plaid and tartan guide covers how to build the weave logic.

A French Navy regulation of 1858 specified striped knit shirts for sailors. Chanel brought the stripe into women's wardrobes in the 1910s. Evenly spaced navy on white stripes remain the model for every nautical print.

The dot got its name from the polka, a dance craze of the mid-nineteenth century. It has been a fashion constant ever since because a dot is the simplest repeating unit there is and it scales from pinhead to dinner plate.

Houndstooth is a woven check associated with shepherds in the Scottish Borders in the nineteenth century. Christian Dior's 1940s collections helped make it a Paris signature. See houndstooth pattern design for construction.

Honolulu tailors and shops began selling printed shirts in the 1930s, often cut from imported Japanese cottons. Bold tropical florals and island scenes defined the look. Today's floral patterns in resort wear still borrow its scale and its saturated color.

Leopard spots had been fur and fashion for decades, but Christian Dior's use of the print in the late 1940s is often cited as the moment it became a high-fashion staple. The irregular rosette, with a broken dark ring around a tan center, is what separates leopard from cheetah. The leopard patterns category shows the range.

Brigitte Bardot married in a pink gingham dress in 1959, and the humble picnic check was suddenly glamorous. Gingham works because it is a clean two-color check with a mid-tone where the colors cross, so it reads soft even in strong colors.

Yves Saint Laurent's autumn/winter 1965 collection included shift dresses built from color blocks and black lines taken from Piet Mondrian's paintings. It is the cleanest example of an art reference translated into a pattern: flat primaries, thick black grid, white ground. The checkered patterns category is a good neighbor for experiments.

Tie-dye entered fashion with the counterculture, in bright spirals and bursts that made every garment slightly different. The resist idea is far older, in traditions like shibori and bandhani, so the late-1960s version is best understood as a fashion moment, not an invention.

The French army formed a camouflage section in 1915, and the irregular, blended shapes of military patterns spread to civilian wear through surplus jackets in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the one print here designed to make things disappear.

• A clear origin. Navy, shepherd, picnic, army. Each print arrived with a story.
• A simple unit. A stripe, a dot, a check, a spot. You can describe all ten in one sentence.
• Room to change color. Houndstooth, gingham and tartan survive in every palette.

When you redraw a classic, keep the proportions that make it recognizable and change one thing, such as scale, color or the way the lines are drawn. If you want to try a houndstooth or stripe variation, Browse Styles in Pattern Weaver lets you pick from 44 categories and 5,700+ styles, and each pattern comes back as a seamless tile.

Some of these prints are tied to designers: see famous fashion print designers for the people behind them.