Enter The 'Green Zone': The Lore Behind The Dye

DPM or Disruptive Pattern Material has been used in some form by basically every British Commonwealth country & it's neighbors.

The camo's grandpa made it's unofficial debut during WW2 on the backs of airborne troops, with hand-painted "Brushstroke" pattern Denison Smocks.

Showing its effectiveness in Europe, it became a printed fabric pattern and spread the brushstroke look worldwide.

And since day one surplus DPM enjoyers were up to no good, too.

Woodland DPM was the predominant pattern, but as conflicts in the Middle East ramped up in the 90s and Noughties, the "If it ain't broke" of WW2 kit began to sound a lot more like "It's definitely broke now".

Desert DPM emerged as a sandy-tan camo used extensively in the sandy deserts of Kuwait & arid lands of Iraq.

Like other 2-3 color desert camos the MOD might have trusted it too blindly when Afghanistan became the next NATO occupation.

In the mountainous regions, infantry saw the shortcomings of bright tan and hastily DIY-dyed their uniforms to avoid sticking out like a sore thumb in the lush Helmand Province, dubbed the "Green Zone" for it's un-stereotypical greenery.

Considering 80% of the world's opium comes from this region, you can probably imagine how heavy the Taliban's defensive presence in the area was.

In short, DPM might as well have been called Deficient Pattern Material.

In response to this and other equipment needs, the Ministry of Defence (with a 'c' so you know it's British) started developing a replacement.

The P.E.C.O.C. Trials

The Personal Equipment and Common Operational Clothing (a VERY British acronym) trials set out to put the entire kit of the armed forces in a blender and keep iterating to see what would come out.

What resulted was a metric ton of DPMs. They just couldn't let the base pattern go...

The MOD would have to work with all of their uniform suppliers to make a billion new duds to play with and test. A ton of money, and a ton of development time.

The end result was "Multi Terrain Pattern" or just MTP — a copied-homework edition of Crye's Multicam with roots in the brit brushstroke blobs.

All that and they just re-did multicam? We'd be kinda mad, too. So, we broke out the dye and paid homage to the mad lads in the field in a way they'd appreciate.

We decided to take what we had and go Green.

After MTP was adopted by the MOD, exceptionally rare PECOC surplus & field dyed garments quietly showed up on the market.

The more time that goes on, the more patterns' collectors seem to find — they can't come to a strong consensus on how many iterations there were, and we can't either.

This mystery drew us in, and the cool factor of such an insane camo forced our hands to make these a reality. An ode to an era of experimentation, DPM's legacy, and the field modifications that push gear forward...