Polka dots, floral and bright colors set the pace for the summer season. With winter’s arrival, prints shift into a different register. But beyond trends, what do this season’s motifs truly express? From nautical stripes to traditional tartan, from reinvented leopard to avant-garde checkerboard, here’s a look back at the cultural and aesthetic origins of the prints shaping the silhouettes of 2025.
When stripes tell centuries of history
We think of stripes as simple, almost self-evident. But they actually carry one of the most complex histories in the Western wardrobe.
In the Middle Ages, stripes served as a social marker: they set apart those on the margins: performers, prisoners, and itinerant musicians. A visual and immediate form of social distancing, even a kind of “textile stigmatization,” that would endure until the 20ᵗʰ century.
At the same time, stripes slowly moved toward everyday use. In France, in the second half of the 19ᵗʰ century, sailors began wearing striped pullovers. Legend has it that the pattern made it easier to spot a man who had fallen overboard; in reality, it also signaled hierarchy on board: it was worn by the lowest-ranking crew members.
In the 1910s, Coco Chanel embraced the now-iconic Breton top, and later, in the 1980s, Jean Paul Gaultier followed suit. Today, stripes are making a comeback in bright, joyful versions inspired by the 80s and 90s.
Checks in every color
Checks may be the most culturally loaded motif of the season.
Tartan, to begin with, tells a story that is as political as it is aesthetic: once an emblem of Scottish clans, it gradually broke away from its warrior codes to become a punk symbol in the 1970s, when it was embraced by Vivienne Westwood. Gingham, for its part, is tied to the rural imagination of the post-war era: it became iconic when Brigitte Bardot wore it in 1959. Houndstooth, finally, has asserted its diagonals since the 1930s, associated with a bourgeois elegance that has endured through the decades.
This Winter 2025, these motifs are returning in weathered, deliberately aged versions, as if fashion were seeking to reconnect with its own past. Checks become an anchor, a reassuring pattern in a landscape saturated with information.
Harlequin: exuberance as an answer to uniformity
Born from the Commedia dell’arte, the Harlequin character embodies cunning, lightness and freedom of expression, values that take on new meaning in our time. In contemporary fashion, this multicolored geometric motif evokes both the theatrical costume and a desire for eccentricity. In 2025, it aligns with the “circus-core” movement, which revives the world of the circus and with it, its exuberance.
But behind the trend lies a deeper desire: the urge to break away from uniformity. The Harlequin pattern brings color and storytelling back into clothing. It lends the silhouette an almost theatrical dimension, inviting us, in the process, to embrace our own uniqueness.
Leopard print: The revival of a classic
If any pattern has truly undergone a metamorphosis, it’s leopard print. Once a colonial symbol, later tied to glamour and a kind of femme-fatale allure, it carried long connotations of excess. Today, it is experiencing a second birth, and this revival is coming from sportswear.
Puma, Nike and other industry giants have now made it an everyday ally. Leopard print slips onto shoes, accessories, and sometimes even training gear.
Leopard is no longer an emblem of seduction: it has turned into a marker of confidence. An everyday print, effortless to wear.
Zebra print: The animal motif becoming rare
If leopard print has lost its monopoly on the “femme fatale,” zebra print seems determined to take its place.
The silhouettes from Balmain’s Fall–Winter 2025 collection make it clear: a powerful heroine perched atop XXL thigh-high boots, a maximalist profile, a fierce energy… yet free of clichés. Rarer than leopard, zebra print captures attention through its graphic contrast.
With winter’s arrival, layers multiply and with them, the opportunity to play with prints. Polka dots, stripes, checks and animal motifs reclaim their place in the wardrobe, overlapping and blending, each telling its own story. While every season brings its share of fleeting trends, the classics: stripes, tartans, leopard retain their timeless force. More than ever, wearing a patterned piece means wearing a fragment of history, a slice of culture and… a touch of exuberance.
