Once known as “the devil’s cloth,” stripes retain a sense of subversion just beneath the surface. Historically associated with jesters and villains, they indicated deviation from conventional norms. Those who wore stripes were rebels and rogues, until the political revolutions of the Enlightenment flipped the symbolism. Adopted for the flags of new nations, stripes came to denote freedom. Treading the thin line between vice and virtue, Diavolo plays with established understandings of a classic pattern.