From the January 15 Wall Street Journal

Designer Jacqueline Krafka was surprised recently when a navy-and-white striped dress from her T-Los Angeles spring collection became an overnight best seller. In order to meet the demand for the $120 dress, she moved up her delivery schedule.

Seeing Stripes

A look at stars, past and present, who have worn the mariniere shirt.

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Audrey Hepburn sports the look in the 1950s

It's just one of the signs that we are in for a very striped spring. "We love stripes!" says Colleen Sherin, women's fashion director for Saks Fifth Avenue, whose stores will be awash in striped styles in February: tanks, T-shirts, mini-dresses, tunics—"really, just stripes galore," she says.

Fashion lines from Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci to Esprit and Comptoir des Cotonniers are bringing out the nautically inspired stripes for spring women's wear, and menswear designers including Michael Bastian and Burberry Brit are also going with the look. It's based on the boat-necked French marine pullover, which is traditionally worn by low-ranking sailors as they swabbed the decks and hence known in France as a marinière, or sailor-style, shirt.

For all the pondering and pontificating that goes into creating fashion, the reasons why a style takes off are often mysterious. Sometimes, trends evolve slowly from the runways where high-fashion designers strive to introduce new concepts. The plaid that's everywhere this winter emerged from the fall 2007 runways, where Jean Paul Gaultier showed a vividly plaid Scottish collection.

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Designer Jean Paul Gaultier features stripes in spring fashions.

In the case of Ms. Krafka's stripes, though, the source lies more in the streets and movie theaters. A popular film and several recent books about Coco Chanel have everything to do with the marinière revival. When the French-language film "Coco Before Chanel" debuted in April 2009, it helped ignite new interest in the designer's 60-year career and habit of adapting menswear to her own devices. The marinière is so closely connected with Ms. Chanel that its use in fashion is often attributed to her. The actress Audrey Tautou wore a marinière in her role as Ms. Chanel.

American Vogue showed striped nautical shirts from Marni and Proenza Schouler in May 2009, hitting the streets around the same time as the film. About that time, actress Gwyneth Paltrow put a photo of herself in a Saint James marinière on her Web site, Goop.com, writing, "The classic French T-shirt always looks right in spring year after year." In the following months, the shirts made appearances in magazines from "Elle" to Japan's "Child" magazine.

During Paris fashion week this fall—right when store buyers were placing spring orders and magazines were figuring out what to show on their spring pages—the streets of Paris were full of young men and women wearing marinières. They were everywhere—so numerous that I began snapping photos with my BlackBerry—in one case capturing the backs of four young people walking abreast, all in nautical-striped shirts tossed over slouchy pants or skirts.

Sailor stripes seem perfectly attuned to the current zeitgeist. For men, they offer a sense of tradition, honest labor and virility. That's the stuff so many longed for when the boom economy went bust. What kind of man is sexy when bankers aren't? A hearty working stiff, a hunky deck swab. For women, the marinière offers clean unisex simplicity. And despite the adage about horizontal stripes being fattening, their clean, crisp lines are actually flattering.

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The marinière shirt gained new impetus from the 2009 movie "Coco Before Chanel," featuring Audrey Tautou.

"We've been very much more ornamented in recent years," says Julie Gilhart, fashion director for Barneys New York. After stocking winter clothes covered with sequins and other embellishments, it has ordered a quantity of stripes for spring. "Now our customer wants to go back to something more simple."

Sailor uniforms have come in and out of fashion for more than a century. Often, the looks were based on the officers' double-breasted coats or the dressier uniforms that have a broad collar with a V-shaped front and a flap across the back. The striped sailor's work shirt is decidedly more casual. It's such a steady muse for Mr. Gaultier that he dresses his press assistants in them for his shows each season. Last year, France's Musée National de la Marine thanked Mr. Gaultier for "exceptional" help in producing its book "Les Marins Font La Mode," or "Sailors Make Fashion."

This cyclical interest has long been a boon to Saint James, the French company that has made marinière shirts and sweaters since roughly 1850. It makes a variety of styles for men, women and kids today, but the traditional men's sweaters come in two versions: The trim one known as the "matelot" is priced at $170. The "binic" is more generously cut "for if you enjoy life—if you are a little fat," explains the French Manhattan store manager, Brian Lebretton. It's priced at $215.

My only advice, if you catch this bug and go for the authentic Saint James marinière, is to get it in cotton. The wool version is so authentic—i.e., scratchy—that I'm even more in awe of the sailors who wore them.

—Contact me at christina.binkley@wsj.com or twitter.com/BinkleyOnStyle.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W3