We are inextricably immersed in regular rhythms. Days and nights, beats of our hearts, regularly spaced telegraph poles, stripes on zebra crossings, not to mention the music, most of which today is heavily rhythmical.
Humans, and human photographers in particular, are virtual pattern recognition machines. What most people don’t understand, is that we don’t “see” with our eyes, but with our brains, that reconstruct “raw” images received through the retina, and give us an output that we make sense of. In a way, you tend to see, what you expect to see, thus rhythm and symmetry are two particularly important concepts that we use subconsciously to our advantage, in order to organize visual information.
The popularity of striped garments in fashion is relatively recent. In Medieval times, only prisoners clowns and prostitutes used to wear them, as the pattern was seen as being “evil”. Apparently it was Queen Victoria in 1846, who has broken the spell by clothing her 4 year old son, Albert Edward in a striped sailor shirt to board the Royal Yacht. The style has caught on, with sailor like uniforms for kids becoming widely popular, and subsequently got extended to bathing suits. In 1917 Coco Chanel has introduced stripes to fashion through her nautical collection, but she has been inspired directly by the Breton stripes.
I always am on a lookout for some visual order, and if anything, you need to be careful not to overdo it, because still perfection tends to get boring quickly. A good rule of thumb, is to combine the diversity of life with some underlying visual harmony for an additive effect.