3 Funky fashion prints and their origins

Ever wondered where your paisley print skirt comes from? What about your floral scarf? Prints on the clothes we wear come in all patterns, shapes and colours. Who doesn’t own at least one item of clothing that isn’t striped, polka-dotted, or animal printed?

Nowadays, prints are crowding high street shelves, but how did these trends all start? You might be surprised to know that a lot of the prints on our clothes these days have Eastern origins and were brought to us in Europe by traders hundreds of years ago.

Here are a few of the most famous fashion prints and where they came from.

Floral

Floral patterns literally come in a million colours, styles and textures – we simply can’t get enough. Flowers have always symbolised different things, but in Eastern cultures the “language of flowers” was a bit of an art.

India has a rich history of using gorgeous floral prints in textiles. And this is why European traders brought the colourfully rich fabrics with them from their trips as far back as the 1400s.

Paisley

In Ancient Babylon (present- day Iraq), paisley prints were all the rage. Other opinions say that the paisley print came from Iran and that it contained fertility symbols for Persians in the 2^nd century AD.

But it was really in the 1960s that paisley got big. When The Beatles went paisley mad and John Lennon painted his car with the pattern, paisley became the symbol of the 1960s hippy culture.

African prints

A.K.A. Dutch wax prints, have been on the fashion scene for a while. Adopted from the patterns of various tribes in Africa, these prints came to Europe through the Dutch.

The bright fabrics with their oversized patterns are still a huge part of African culture, especially in Eastern and South Africa, and the colour, design and pattern are adapted to the situation and status of the individual.

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