Jean Paul Gaultier’s Marinière: The Stripe That Sailed Around the World

The marinière is not a pattern; it is a passport. Horizontal navy-and-ivory stripes first appeared on French naval uniforms in 1858—27 stripes, one for each of Napoleon III’s victories. Jean Paul Gaultier, born in 1952, grew up watching his grandmother’s television screen flicker with sailors in those shirts. By 1983 he had stolen the stripes, stretched them across mesh, tattooed them onto skin-tone illusion, and turned a military regulation into the maison’s longest-running love affair. Forty-two years later the marinière is still the first thing you see when you walk into Antidote Style on Bishop Street, and the last thing you forget when you leave.

The boutique itself is built like a ship’s cabin—white oak floors, brass rails, porthole mirrors. A single marinière mesh top hangs in the window, back-lit so the stripes appear to float an inch above the torso. Step closer and the illusion collapses; the stripes are printed on ultra-fine polyamide so sheer it reads as naked skin from ten feet away. This is Gaultier’s oldest trick: make the wearer the optical centre of every room.

In the 1980s the marinière was cotton, hand-painted, and deliberately oversized—sailors’ shirts bought in surplus stores on the Marseille docks, then slashed and safety-pinned into evening gowns. Madonna wore one to the 1989 MTV Awards; the tabloids called it “underwear as outerwear.” By the 1990s the stripes had migrated to tattoo-print mesh—nude illusion fabric screen-printed with navy lines so precise they looked inked directly onto the body. Antidote Style keeps a 1995 version in a glass case beside its 2025 descendant: the Duran Lantink Marinière Knit, woven from recycled fishing-net yarn on a circular loom in Lyon. The new yarn is 30 % lighter, the stripes shift from indigo to petrol blue when you turn, and the hem is finished with a single row of micro-stitched anchors—Lantink’s wink to the garment’s naval DNA.

The maison never retired the marinière; it simply kept translating it. In 2003 it became a fragrance bottle—Le Male in a striped torso. In 2012 it wrapped the Eiffel Tower for the house’s 35th anniversary. In 2020, during lockdown, Gaultier livestreamed a virtual show where avatars wore marinières knitted from digital thread. And in September 2025, Duran Lantink closed Paris Ready-to-Wear with a bride whose veil was a 40-foot marinière flag—27 stripes, one for each of Napoleon’s victories, plus one extra for the victory of still being relevant at fifty.

At Antidote Style the stripe is not a print; it is a conversation. A rack runs the length of the store:

• 1984 surplus cotton, paint-splattered and safety-pinned
• 1995 tattoo mesh, still faintly scented with the original wearer’s perfume
• 2018 Y/Project collaboration, denim stripes melted into corsets
• 2025 Lantink knit, recycled yarn that changes colour under LED light

Customers are invited to stand in front of a three-way mirror and layer them—1984 over 2025, mesh over knit—until the stripes cancel each other out or explode into moiré. The boutique’s lighting rig is programmed to shift every thirty seconds, turning static cloth into kinetic art. This is Gaultier’s enduring gift: clothing that refuses to sit still.

Atlanta wears the marinière the way Paris never could. On a Saturday morning you’ll see a mesh tattoo top disappearing into the crowd at the BeltLine Eastside Trail, stripes shimmering against graffiti walls. By evening the same top reappears at the Fox Theatre, now tucked into a cone bra corset and paired with a recycled G-chain bag. The city’s drag queens have claimed the marinière as armour—Lantink’s 2025 version is cut long enough to double as a micro-dress, short enough to reveal fishnets underneath. SCAD students photograph it against the brutalist geometry of the High Museum, turning 19th-century naval regulation into 21st-century street sculpture.

The stripe’s genius is its democracy. It flatters every body because it distracts the eye—horizontal lines widen the shoulders, narrow the waist, and create the optical illusion of perpetual motion. Duran Lantink has pushed the illusion further: his marinière knit is knitted on a gradient tension loom so the stripes compress over the bust and expand over the hips, sculpting without a single dart. At Antidote Style fit specialists demonstrate the effect under a ring light, then hand you the garment and step back. The mirror does the selling.

Sustainability is woven into the new marinière the way rebellion was woven into the old. Every metre of Lantink’s recycled fishing-net yarn removes 12 grams of ocean plastic. The dye is plant-based indigo fermented in Burgundy vats older than the French Republic. Even the care label is printed on dissolvable rice paper—wash once and it disappears, leaving no trace except the stripes themselves.

Walk out of Antidote Style wearing any marinière and the city becomes your runway. The stripes catch the golden hour on the Jackson Street Bridge, flicker under the LED sculptures at Ponce City Market, and finally dissolve into the neon of Blake’s on the Park. Fifty years after a Parisian kid stole a sailor’s shirt, the marinière is still sailing—lighter, brighter, and more indestructible than ever. In Atlanta, the voyage never ends; it simply changes course every time a new customer steps through the door at 525 Bishop St NW.