Camouflage once meant blotchy green uniforms in the woods. Now it shows up on parkas and baby carriers. In Wired, Avery Trufelman traces how one design—MultiCam, created by Brooklyn art-school grads for Crye Precision—went from a Navy Yard warehouse experiment to the near-default look of modern militaries and law enforcement around the world, before spilling into civilian life. Built after 9/11 as a "good enough almost anywhere" pattern, it was designed to solve a basic problem: soldiers wearing mismatched gear that made them stand out instead of blend in. As co-creator Gregg Thompson puts it, "When guys deploy, they're wearing desert uniforms with woodland body armor."
That practicality helped MultiCam spread quickly through US Special Operations Forces, whose gear choices often ripple outward. While the Army initially chose a pixelated alternative that drew criticism, it eventually pivoted back toward a near-identical version of MultiCam that spread across regular troops. Its appeal was flexibility—colors and gradients designed to work across environments without constant uniform changes. That same adaptability made it easy to adopt beyond the battlefield, turning a military solution into something that could exist almost anywhere. As Thompson describes it, the goal was a "75 percent solution to environments in general."
Versions of the pattern are now worn by police and militaries worldwide, but also by civilians, celebrities, and fashion designers. In 2020, Drake and Virgil Abloh sat front row at New York Fashion Week in matching MultiCam rain shells originally made for military use. The look has since filtered into everyday wardrobes through the rise of "gorpcore," where outdoor and tactical gear doubles as streetwear. "People are gravitating to those tactically adjacent products and using them as fashion in their 'gorpcore' wardrobe," says Katarzyna Schoewe of Outdoor Research. "Tactical gear feels like it's at the root of the gorpcore trend." Read the full story at Wired.
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