The Breton Shirt, a Navy Regulation That Counted Every Stripe

On March 27, 1858, under Napoleon III, the French Navy added a striped knit shirt to the official list of clothing issued to its seamen. It was a working garment, blue and white and long sleeved, issued to the crews rather than the officers. What makes the decree famous now is how fussy it was. The body was to carry 21 white stripes, each twice as wide as the 20 or 21 indigo stripes between them.

That shirt is the marinière. English speakers call it the Breton shirt, and it has outlived the empire that specified it by more than 150 years.

A uniform with a stripe count

The numbers people quote come in two versions, which tells you something about how the story has been passed down. One is the wording of the decree itself, 21 white stripes against 20 or 21 blue. The other is the practical spec repeated by French sources describing the authentic shirt. That one puts 20 navy stripes on the front and back, each 10 millimeters wide and spaced 20 millimeters apart, with 14 on each sleeve at the same spacing. Very tall sailors got 21 on the body and 15 on the sleeves. The Wikipedia entry on the Breton shirt gives both versions, and its French counterpart notes that they don't quite agree with each other.

The collar was meant to sit close to the neck, and the sleeves could not be longer than the jacket worn over them. This was clothing written by people who expected it to be inspected.

The name comes from the crews. A large share of the Navy's sailors came from Brittany, so the striped knit became associated with the region, and the English label stuck to the region rather than the service.

Twenty-one victories, maybe

Ask about the stripes and someone will tell you there are 21 of them because Napoleon won 21 great victories. It is a good story and it shows up constantly, sometimes as fact. The best evidence suggests it is a legend. A 2011 newsletter from the Fondation Napoléon, which has every reason to like the idea, described the stripes as a supposed homage from Napoleon III to his uncle, then added that nothing is less certain and that the stripe count doesn't really line up. French Wikipedia also files it under legend and gives no source for it.

The other popular explanation is practical. Sailors' lore holds that stripes made a man easier to spot if he went over the side, or easier to see in fog and among the sails. That is tradition too, unsourced, and plausible enough that nobody has tried very hard to disprove it.

Wool from Normandy, cotton from Quimper

The two brands most people mean when they say a real Breton shirt both started on the coast, though only one of them is actually in Brittany.

Saint James is in Normandy, in a town of the same name in the Manche department, close to Mont-Saint-Michel. A spinning mill opened there in 1850 and made wool yarn for local haberdashers and hosiery shops. In 1889 the mill's director, Léon Legallais, turned it into a clothing maker for Norman and Breton sailors. Its first products were shirts in local wool, spun from sheep raised on farms near Mont-Saint-Michel, and they led to the heavy wool sailor's sweater. Cotton came surprisingly late. Saint James added cotton marinières to its wool range only in 1982. The Bonte family had bought the company in 1950, sold most of the shares to around 130 employees in 1990, and in 2013 the business was recognized as an Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant, a French state label for traditional craft.

Armor Lux is the Breton one. A Swiss businessman named Walter Hubacher founded it in Quimper in 1938 as La Bonneterie d'Armor, a hosiery and knitwear works, and it grew into a maker of clothing for sailors and fishermen. Two Bretons, Jean-Guy Le Floc'h and Michel Gueguen, bought it in 1993. By 2011 it was selling about 400,000 blue and white marinières a year, going head to head with Saint James.

Then, on October 19, 2012, Arnaud Montebourg, France's minister for productive recovery, appeared on the cover of Le Parisien Magazine wearing an Armor Lux marinière. His job was rebuilding French industry, and the picture did the brand's publicity and sales a lot of good. A third maker, Orcival, has produced its shirts in France since 1939, and in 2017 the Museum of Modern Art in New York chose an Orcival Breton top for its exhibition Is Fashion Modern?

Chanel, Picasso and the Left Bank

The shirt left the Navy through the beach. In 1913 Gabrielle Chanel opened a boutique in Deauville, the Normandy resort, selling casual clothes for leisure and sport. Among the hats, jackets and sweaters was the marinière, cut short and made in jersey, a cheap knit that had mostly been used for men's underwear. Chanel had watched the local sailors, and she sold their shirt back to the people on holiday.

From there it drifted into the wardrobes of people who were photographed often. Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau both posed in striped tops, and so did the mime Marcel Marceau and the actor Brigitte Bardot. The shirt suited artists because it was cheap and plain and still looked like a choice. In Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, released in 1960, Jean Seberg wore one, and Yves Saint Laurent worked the marinière into his early couture collections.

Gaultier makes it a signature

No designer has leaned on it harder than Jean Paul Gaultier. His 1983 collection, usually given as Boy Toy, relaunched the striped knit for men, and he has kept coming back to it in every material he can find. The stripes later turned up on the bottles of his men's fragrances, including Le Male, launched in 1995. For a generation of shoppers, Gaultier is the reason the shirt reads as Paris rather than the port of Brest.

It sits comfortably in the same plain wardrobe as the white T-shirt and the Oxford cloth button-down, other garments that started with a job and ended up as a uniform for people without one. Put it under a blue French chore coat and you have most of a working Frenchman's outfit from a century ago. Wear it around the Marais and you will see a dozen others doing the same.

For more, see menswear history, wardrobe essentials, heritage brands and the Quiet Menace Style section.

The best test of a real one is still the decree. Count the stripes. If the white bands are twice the width of the blue, someone was paying attention in 1858.