Octopus Dazzle Pack

This fall/winter, Octopus pays tribute to Norman Wilkinson's weird and wonderful idea with the Dazzle pack: four items – T-shirt, sweatshirt, down jacket, and hat - printed with the Octopus tentacles over the geometric Dazzle camouflage pattern so that our enemies can’t spot us.

Sometimes the craziest ideas are the best.

Take Dazzle Camo - it shouldn't even count as a camo print. Camo is supposed to hide things, while the Dazzle, well... it’s hard to argue that huge stripes, geometric swirls and other shapes reminiscent of cubist and abstract painting can go unnoticed. Yet the absurd thing is they actually do.

The story begins during the First World War, when the German submarine fleet was roaming the Atlantic Ocean and destroying British merchant ships. The British had no idea how to hide from submarines: on land, camo paint and prints could conceal men and vehicles from the enemy, but how could a cargo ship blend into the ocean? Then one day, Lieutenant Norman Wilkinson, who was a graphic designer and illustrator before the war, flipped the problem on its head. Instead of trying to hide the ships, why not make them stand out even more?

Wilkinson sounded crazy, sure, but he was dead right. German officers scanning the horizon through a periscope were confused by the irregular abstract shapes and struggled to understand the exact size, speed, distance and direction of the boat. The US Navy also adopted Dazzle Camo on thousands of ships between 1917 and 1918. Result: no combat ship painted in Dazzle camo was sunk by the German submarines.

The Dazzle pack is available now online.