Despite its functionalist status, camo has always had style—and art. Camouflage attracts modernists raised to believe that ornament is crime. Camo ornaments legally, you might say—its pattern has a job to do. Artists and fashion designers have long played off camouflage. Many used bright fluorescent colors instead of dull natural ones. Andy Warhol’s camouflage portraits, done late in his life, employed this strategy. (One recurrent fashion joke about camouflage is the perennial camo bikini, a play on concealment and revelation.)

Camo’s history became a parable of a wider truth: that the design of even the most functional object—and camo would seem to live and die by its function—inevitably becomes artistic and stylistic. Camouflage was associated from its beginnings with art and artists. Artists were put into service in World War I to camouflage equipment and installations. Gertrude Stein famously reported the remarks of Picasso and Braque, viewing camouflaged military equipment on parade in Paris at the beginning World War I. “We did that,” Picasso said. “That is Cubism.” That may have been Cubism, which would have made the lovely lavender and pink lozenges of German Albatross fighter planes, fitted together like cells of a honeycomb, “hexagonalist.”