While much of the UK worries about energy bills, the bedroom tax and looming welfare cuts, residents of Kensington in west London have been up in arms about one of the issues that really matters: a stripy house. Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring painted her multimillion-pound townhouse to look like a beach hut after neighbours objected to her plans to knock it down and build a new £15m home to install a gym, cinema and indoor pool in her basement. As much as it sounds like a PG Wodehouse short story, this is a real-life event and deemed to be national news. But it isn’t the first time that stripes have caused discord.
Zara’s pyjamas
The high street retailer Zara waded headfirst into controversy last year with a striped pyjama top with a “sheriff” star on it. The children’s top bore an unfortunate resemblance to a Nazi concentration camp uniform with a yellow Star of David. The top was swiftly discontinued, with a grovelling apology from the company.
Louis Tomlinson v Zayn Malik: round one
This month’s Twitter feud between Louis Tomlinson and his former One Direction bandmate Zayn Malik wasn’t their first social media spat. In January 2012, Louis tweeted: “Zayn is wearing stripes!!! I feel like I’ve been cheated on!!” The beef was that stripes, apparently, are Louis’s signature pattern and he therefore expected monopoly over them. Three years on, the pair have matured to arguing about picture filters and telling each other to get a life.
Hoops and stripes
Last December, FC Barcelona fans were incensed by reports that Barca’s home kit would – for the first time in the club’s 115 years – feature horizontal stripes, or hoops (they had traditionally been vertical).
Last summer Southampton FC switched back to their traditional stripes after two seasons in plain red, and in advance of this year’s kit launch they have released a spoof video with “colour and pattern expert” Dr Barry Gale. This is complemented with a #ShowYourStripes campaign “calling for fans to celebrate the famous red and white stripes ahead of the launch of Southampton’s new kit”.
Colour confusion
The stripiest animal around, the zebra, has caused nothing but disagreements among scientists eager to explain its markings. Are the stripes for camouflage? Confusing predators? Identification? Keeping flies away? Cooling down? Another Escher-like scientific mystery is whether zebras are black with white stripes or white with black stripes.
But perhaps the most controversial stripes of recent times have been those on The Dress that back in February sent Twitter into overload as people debated whether they were blue and black, or white and gold, or blue and gold, and whether any of this mattered.
