Half the people on the street are dressed to kill. Every second woman on the avenue and every second man on the town and every other kid on the jungle gym has his or her back clad in army green. Challenging the ubiquity of black outerwear in the cities and lending a flavor of the PX to the suburban shopping center, the color has conquered the national wardrobe. The history of getting dressed is in large part a story of borrowing combat garb — cravat and cardigan, bomber jacket and pea coat — but the proliferation of the army green jacket is different in kind and in degree.

The most symbolically resonant of this year’s models evoke the M-65 field jacket worn by United States troops in Vietnam. The ideal color — the one approved by the Army — is “Olive Green 107,” but a variety of hues and cuts speak in the same idiom, likewise breathing military jargon into the general American vocabulary of dress.

Proving immune to the seasonal cycles of designer fashion, retaining currency with elites despite its presence in bargain bins, losing no prestige with youth even as their elders try the same look, the army soldier’s green jacket has developed a status on par with that of the gold miner’s bluejeans with which it pairs so well.

The green now regarded as a quintessentially American tradition emerged only recently. In the early 1800s, imperial armies kitted themselves out in similar shades, like the rifle green of the British and the Russian green of the czar, but Gen. George Washington had preferred the blue coat and buff breeches ordained by one of his old Virginia military companies and immortalized in the Charles Willson Peale portrait. Though Washington ordered the Continental Army into dark blue coats in 1779, the color did not become official nationwide until 1821. Nonetheless, the uniform’s details changed to suit new styles worn by European cavalry and on the streets of the new republic. In contrast to the rigidity of the French or the British or, for that matter, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army maintained a uniform tradition that was ad hoc and improvisatory — haphazard at worst but dashingly Whitmanesque at its finest.