Leopard print: The pattern that drives us wild

Leopard print, if you hadn’t noticed, is having a moment. US senator [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rented a luxe version]( rendered in sequins, for a recent television appearance. [Adele wore a leopard-print dress]( to Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s post-Oscars party. The big cat’s camouflage has been everywhere, and not just on women. While designers have [layered it on]( in women’s coats, tops, skirts, and shoes, labels such as Celine, Sacai, and Comme des Garçons—in technicolor variations—have lately woven it through their men’s collections, too. These days it’s a fabric for anyone, provided you’re bold enough to wear it. This wasn’t always the case. At various times in history it’s been the preserve of the royal, the society lady, and the pinup model, but not necessarily the girl (or boy) next door. In part that’s because, until relatively recently in the history of clothes-wearing, the best place to get leopard print was the leopard itself. It required technological advances to print the intricate coat of Panthera pardus onto a fabric accessible to the general population. Now that we’ve done it, we can’t seem to get enough. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( [Quartz Daily Obsession] Leopard print February 24, 2020 Spot on --------------------------------------------------------------- Leopard print, if you hadn’t noticed, is having a moment. US senator [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rented a luxe version]( rendered in sequins, for a recent television appearance. [Adele wore a leopard-print dress]( to Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s post-Oscars party. The big cat’s camouflage has been everywhere, and not just on women. While designers have [layered it on]( in women’s coats, tops, skirts, and shoes, labels such as Celine, Sacai, and Comme des Garçons—in technicolor variations—have lately woven it through their men’s collections, too. These days it’s a fabric for anyone, provided you’re bold enough to wear it. This wasn’t always the case. At various times in history it’s been the preserve of the royal, the society lady, and the pinup model, but not necessarily the girl (or boy) next door. In part that’s because, until relatively recently in the history of clothes-wearing, the best place to get leopard print was the leopard itself. It required technological advances to print the intricate coat of Panthera pardus onto a fabric accessible to the general population. Now that we’ve done it, we can’t seem to get enough. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( By the Digits [160%:]( Growth in sales of leopard-print fashion recorded by payment-services company Square from 2018 to 2019 [250,000:]( Leopards whose deaths designer Oleg Cassini blamed himself for by dressing Jacqueline Kennedy in a leopard-fur coat that popularized the look [9:]( Subspecies of leopard [50 ft (15 m):]( Distance a snow leopard can leap in one bound [100:]( Approximate number of Amur leopards remaining in their natural habitat along the Russian-Chinese border [$4,500:]( Cost of the leopard-print maxi dress in a wool-polyamide blend from Gucci’s spring 2019 collection Getty Images Origin story Fashion, but make it ancient --------------------------------------------------------------- In ancient Egypt, the source and rarity of leopard skin gave it power. [Priests wore leopard skins]( slung across their chests. A leopard cloak was [among the items]( found buried with King Tutankhamun. One can imagine the life-threatening difficulty in obtaining it. “Of course, everywhere big cats have been known, wearing their pelts and patterns has had meaning, and those meanings always relate to the characteristics of the animals themselves,” writes author and burlesque expert Jo Weldon in Fierce: The History of Leopard Print. Beside the pyramids in Giza is the tomb of Nefertiabet, sister or daughter of Khufu, the Egyptian king who commanded the Great Pyramid be built. A stone relief from the tomb, dating to roughly [4,600 years ago]( depicts Nefertiabet sitting serenely before her food for the afterlife, wearing a one-shoulder leopard dress. It looks like something you might find in a store today. Quotable “To wear leopard you must have a kind of femininity which is a little bit sophisticated. If you are fair and sweet, don’t wear it.” —Christian Dior, The Little Dictionary of Fashion Marc Bain GIF break In the wild, a leopard’s coat helps it disappear into its surroundings. On humans, it’s a way to stand out. There’s a reason movies and music videos love leopard. The way we 🐆 now A timeless print --------------------------------------------------------------- By the 18th century, European fashion, full of fantasies about the leopard’s natural habitats in Africa and Asia, adopted leopard fur for its beauty and perceived exoticism, ultimately remaking it in fabric through painstaking embroidery or brocade. But it wasn’t until the 20th century, after the rise of industrial textile manufacturing, that it became widely accessible. Weldon describes a faux leopard coat on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal in 1914. At the end of the 1920s, she writes, leopard fabrics were gaining ground, no leopard required. In 1947, Christian Dior introduced his “new look,” a lavish, romantic direction for fashion that left behind the war years. Inspired by his muse, Mitzah Bricard, who often accessorized with leopard, Dior worked with a silk manufacturer to develop the [“Jungle” print]( on three of his exquisite dresses. Most women at the time saw leopard as a fabric for casual daytime wear, but Dior would elevate it into the realm of European high fashion. “The print on fabric finally became as haute as the fur,” Weldon wrote. “It immediately became the print of the world’s most sophisticated women.” Real leopard hung on a while longer. US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy is said to have set off a craze for it in the early 1960s when she appeared in a leopard coat. Finally, in 1975, the international trade of furs from species like leopards was outlawed. By then, of course, mass-produced fashion had made a facsimile easily available. Through the 1950s and 1960s, it was sexed up in lingerie and swimwear—think pinup model Bettie Page in a leopard bikini. In the 1970s, it became outrageous. Director John Waters put his star Divine in gold-and-blue leopard for his campy 1974 classic Female Trouble. Punk absorbed it, and 1980s pop stars like Madonna would pick it up. On the low end it became tacky, while on the high end designers such as Patrick Kelly, Azzedine Alaïa, and Gianni Versace continued to prize it. Now it’s everywhere. Jenna Lyons, former creative director of American prep staple J.Crew, has even been credited for promoting leopard print as a neutral. Axel Tschentscher Fun Fact! A leopard’s marks aren’t really spots. They’re rosettes—basically a broken black circle, vaguely resembling a rose viewed from overhead, with a dark tawny center. Have a friend who would enjoy our Obsession with Leopard print? [ [Forward link to a friend](mailto:?subject=Thought you'd enjoy.&body=Read this Quartz Daily Obsession email – to the email – Giphy pop quiz Which designer based his debut collection as creative director of Yves Saint Laurent on a leopard-print dress Saint Laurent himself showed in 1982? Anthony VaccarelloTom FordHedi SlimaneStefano Pilati Correct. Vaccarello, who is currently the creative chief of Saint Laurent, was two years old when Saint Laurent showed the dress that inspired him. Incorrect. If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email. This one weird trick! Spot check --------------------------------------------------------------- British mathematician Alan Turing is best known for breaking the German Enigma code during World War II and laying part of the foundation for modern computer science, but he also published a theory on how animals such as leopards develop their markings. His 1952 paper, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” offered a mathematical model to describe the way chemical substances called “morphogens” (meaning “shape-formers”) could interact to produce elaborate patterns. He didn’t specify what morphogens were. They could be genes or hormones; biology still had to figure that out. His focus was on how they work. The general idea was that you have two morphogens: One is an activator, capable of switching on a biological mechanism that produces more activator. But it also produces another morphogen, an inhibitor that counters the activator. As these morphogens diffuse through tissue at different speeds, they react against each other and turn what was previously a field of identical cells into chemically differentiated groups in distinct patterns. These came to be known as Turing patterns. Though biologists largely ignored Turing’s idea for decades, they’ve more recently put it to the test. In 2006, for instance, two researchers using a computer model found by tweaking Turing’s model they [could explain]( how a leopard’s spots changed as it grew from infancy to adulthood. In 2014—60 years after Turing’s death—researchers at Brandeis University and the University of Pittsburgh said they produced the [first experimental evidence]( to validate Turing’s theory. Another group at King’s College London found the ridges on the roof of a mouse’s mouth [form just as Turing described](. watch this! Bob Dylan’s song, “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” off the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde is a bit of an enigma. Said to have been inspired by the model and [New York City scenester Edie Sedgwick]( it has also been read as a critique of trend-seeking consumerism, a reference to Jackie Kennedy, and a sly nod to changing social attitudes toward sex and birth control. The album came out at a time when Dylan was shifting his focus as an artist from folk music and activism toward rock-and-roll, adding electric guitars to his sets, and audiences hated the look on him. Watch him get heckled before performing “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” in Dublin, Ireland in 1966. Take me down this 🐰 hole! What’s the difference between a leopard, a jaguar, and a panther? It can be easy to mix them up, but if you want to get all felinological about it, leopards and jaguars are distinct in [numerous ways]( including their coats, size, and habitats. If you’re talking about a panther as in a black panther, well that’s not even a separate species. It’s an umbrella term for [any big cat with a black coat]( like say a black jaguar or black leopard. What about the Florida panther? That’s a [subspecies of puma]( or cougar, or mountain lion, depending what you want to call it. Giphy poll Do you wear leopard print? [Click here to vote]( All the time! It’s a bold neutral in my book.It’s the tackiest.I love it on other people, but it’s too much for me. 💬 let's talk! In last week’s poll about [Navier-Stokes equations]( 44% of you said that after reading our Obsession on them you now realize that they’re the key to pretty much everything. 📧 Kshitij wrote in to say: “A small error in the Quotable section. It mentions 2 physicists, Horace Lamb and Walter Heisenberg. The correct name for the second is Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist and one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. I believe we got mixed up with Walter White and his drug dealing alter ego Heisenberg from Breaking Bad. 😂” We stand, hilariously, corrected. 🤔 [What did you think of today’s email?](mailto:obsession%2Bfeedback@qz.com?cc=&subject=Thoughts%20about%20leopard%20print%20&body=) 💡 [What should we obsess over next?](mailto:obsession%2Bideas@qz.com?cc=&subject=Obsess%20over%20this%20next.&body=) [🎲]( [Show me a random Obsession]( Today’s email was written by [Marc Bain]( edited by [Annaliese Griffin]( and produced by [Tori Smith](. [facebook]( The correct answer to the quiz is Anthony Vaccarello. Enjoying the Quartz Daily Obsession? [Send this link]( to a friend! Want to advertise in the Quartz Daily Obsession? Send us an email at ads@qz.com. Not enjoying it? No worries. [Click here]( to unsubscribe. Quartz | 675 Avenue of the Americas, 4th Fl | New York, NY 10011 | United States