Peace comeback

Whether it’s LED tree-toppers on the shelf at Urban Outfitters or a psychedelic, water-wheel-sized installation on the sales floor at Barneys New York, the peace symbol has become the unofficial symbol of this holiday season.

Two long-running wars, a frenzied election cycle and the symbol’s 50th birthday this year have combined to push the hippie relic into the public eye in a way it hasn’t been for decades.

So this year you can have a cool yule with peace symbol ice cube trays, baby bibs and swimsuits. You can find it stitched into $250 cashmere throw pillows, enameled into $400 cuff links and hand-painted onto $2,000 purses.

And it was recently announced that Shawn Johnson, the plucky 16-year-old Olympian who back-flipped into our hearts in Beijing while sporting a dangly pair of peace sign earrings, soon is launching a line of peace-bedazzled leotards.

From the corner of Haight-Ashbury to the holiday window display at Barneys, what a long, strange trip it’s been for the emoticon of the ’60s counterculture – just three straight lines inside a circle.

According to photographer Ken Kolsbun, who has been chronicling the life and times of the symbol for four decades (his book with Michael S. Sweeney, “Peace: The Biography of a Symbol,” was published in April), the design was the creation of a British textile designer named Gerald Holtom.

Holtom hit on the now-indelible image by melding the semaphore signals for the letters “N” (both arms down stretched at 45-degree angles) and “D” (arms parallel, left arm down, right arm up) to represent the words “nuclear disarmament.” It made its public debut at a ban-the-bomb march in London’s Trafalgar Square on April 4, 1958.

“Ten days later, Life magazine ran a photo from that march, which was its first appearance in the U.S.,” Kolsbun said by phone.

It caught on stateside, he says, thanks to the antiwar movement, which he credits with broadening the symbol’s meaning beyond nuclear protest.

Now stores ranging from Target to Saks Fifth Avenue are looking for ways to twist the peace sign into a dollar sign. Few retailers have hopped on the peace train as enthusiastically as the Barneys chain.

Creative director Simon Doonan has tricked out the high-end retailer’s windows and sales floor with a hodgepodge of psychedelic grooviness dubbed “hippie holidays” – think quasi-water-pipe pottery, trippy paisleys and a platoon of peace signs knit into $68 socks, embroidered onto $110 diaper bags and painted onto a VW Beetle.

An 8-foot-tall mock-decoupaged version of the peace symbol stands sentinel inside the front door of the Beverly Hills store.

The irony of using hippie to hawk high-end isn’t lost on Doonan.

“I always thought it was kind of amusing,” he says. “But our core customer is a baby boomer who has inherited parental wealth – or maybe they’ve made their own money – but they still think of themselves as alternative, and the imagery of the counterculture still resonates with them.”

The focus today may be on terrorism and suitcase bombs, but Kolsbun doesn’t want anyone to lose sight of those nuclear arsenals that have yet to be dismantled.

“I think that’s the important thing: If Barneys is selling a $400 purse, it might be smart to put a little enclosure in there that talks about the fact there are 23,000 nukes sitting all over the world,” he says. “That story needs to get out there.”

To that end, Kolsbun has taken to wearing his peace sign upside down.

“In his will, Holtom asked that an upside-down peace symbol be carved on his gravestone because the semaphore letter ‘u’ was upside down from the letter ‘n,’ and he wanted it to symbolize ‘unilateral disarmament,’ ” he says. “That’s the purest, most ultimate form of peace.”

So if this holiday season finds you ordering up that custom Goyard bag, why not ask for the hand-painted peace sign upside down?

Sure, the bag may cost a cool $2,005. But being able to tell the world you’re a stylish, well-off, no-nukes baby boomer who’s one step ahead of the trends, without opening your mouth?

That’s priceless.