Chicago Pride Flag (Rainbow Stripes, Purple Stars)

Overview

Transit Tees' product copy states the design's purpose: combining 'the familiar colors of the Pride flag' with 'the stripes and stars of the flag of Chicago', the design 'does double duty in establishing your identity as a Proud Chicagoan'. ^[1][2]

Chicago's municipal flag was designed by poet and lecturer Wallace Rice, who wrote the rules for the city's 1915–1917 flag competition and then won it himself; the City Council adopted his design on 4 April 1917 with two stars, a third was added in 1933, and the flag reached its current four-star form in December 1939. ^[4][5] The Municipal Code sets the civic flag's four red, six-pointed stars 'side by side, close together, next to the staff' in the middle third of the flag, and designates them, from the hoist outwards, for Fort Dearborn, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Century of Progress of 1933. ^[6] This design substitutes a full five-stripe rainbow field (red, orange, yellow, green, blue) for the municipal flag's white field and two light-blue bars, recolors the four stars purple, a hue the five-stripe field omits, and respaces them evenly across the full width of the enlarged yellow centre stripe. It is sold by Transit Tees, which claims the design (see Creators). ^[1][2]

Identity & Context

Represented Identity

LGBTQ community

Subcommunity

Chicago LGBTQ community

Movement

Civic pride, hometown pride, LGBTQ visibility

National Context

United States; Chicago

Chicago has a distinctive culture of civic flag pride: the four-star municipal flag appears on tattoos, storefronts, and apparel far more than most American city flags, having made what WBEZ called "a leap from city buildings and police cars to pubs, storefronts, apartments, t-shirts, underwear, guitars, tattoos, soap". ^[7] The flag was little known as late as the 1950s; interest grew after Mayor Richard J. Daley sent flags to Chicago soldiers in Vietnam in the late 1960s, and Chicago police began wearing flag patches on their uniforms in 1971, a patch punk musicians later carried onto secondhand police jackets. ^[5] At a distance, this full-field rainbow variant registers first as a generic rainbow pride flag, with the four purple stars doing the work of marking it specifically Chicagoan.

Creators

Origin

Country

United States

Region / state

Illinois

City

Chicago

Specific Place

Wicker Park

Place Type

design and production studio

Origin Type

organizational design and production location

Physical Origin Status

Seller-stated design location.

Associated with Chicago, Illinois, on the traditional homeland of the Council of the Three Fires (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi), also historically home to the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and Sac and Fox peoples. ^[10][11]

Indigenous land context

Council of the Three Fires (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) — traditional and historical homeland (Indigenous name: Niswi-mishkodewinan). The 1833 Treaty of Chicago forced the Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe from Illinois onto land west of the Mississippi River, and Chicago later became a major destination for Native people relocated under the federal Indian Relocation Act of 1956. ^[12] The city's name derives from the Miami-Illinois word šikaakwa ('wild onion/garlic'), rendered in Potawatomi as zhegagoynak and in Ojibwe as zhigaagong. ^{[13] [10][11][14]}

Colonial / settler context

Chicago was incorporated as a U.S. city in 1837, four years after the Treaty of Chicago. ^{[12] [12]}

Transit Tees states the design was made at its Wicker Park studio: 'Designed by Transit Tees in our Chicago Wicker Park creative studio.' ^[1] No independent account of the design's creation has been located.

Dates & Chronology

Earliest store-asset evidence (file metadata)

June 25, 2019

Documented

Documented by 25 June 2019 through first-party store assets; in production as pin and magnets as of August 2026

Creation Bounds

No creation date is published for the design. The earliest located evidence is machine metadata in Transit Tees' own store assets: the enamel pin's product photograph carries a stored-file server date of 25 June 2019, and the square magnet's photograph 24 September 2019 by both its filename token and server date; the 3-by-2-inch magnet's photograph carries an embedded Photoshop save date of 8 June 2021. ^[1][2][3] These are file dates, not stated dates. The numeric tokens in the store's image addresses record when an image record was last modified rather than when a product first went on sale: the pin photographs' token has changed twice, in September 2021 and March 2022, while the underlying 2019 photograph stayed the same. ^[15] The line '©2017 Transit Tees, Inc.' printed on the pin's backing card dates the studio's generic pin packaging, which its standard Chicago-flag pin also ships on, and is not evidence for this design. ^[1] The white-field Chicago Stars design sold by PrideFlags.com is documented from June 2016 (see the sibling entry, Chicago Stars Pride Flag); which of the two designs came first is not documented.

Transit Tees sells the composition in three formats: a 1-inch soft-enamel pin, 'cast in black metal', a 3-by-2-inch printed magnet, and a square magnet. ^[1][2][3] The studio also sold the pin through its own Etsy shop, where archived captures preserve buyer reviews from August 2023 onward. ^[8] The pin is stocked by the Field Museum store, which describes its maker as 'a LGBTQ+ owned company', and the magnet by the souvenir shop Souvenir City Chicago, which reproduces Transit Tees' description and credit line. ^[9][16] No flag-format product of the composition has been located; other retailers' 'Chicago Pride Flag' products are different designs (see Discourse).

This entry documents the full-field, purple-star style as a distinct design from the white-field, banded-bars-and-multicolor-stars Chicago Stars Pride Flag sold by PrideFlags.com (see the sibling entry, chicago-pride-flag). The two circulate under the same generic name.

Lineage

Direct predecessors

Rainbow Pride Flag

Indirect influences

Original Rainbow Flag (1978)

Related flags

Chicago Stars Pride Flag, Chicago Trans Pride Flag

Sibling flags

Alberta Gay Flag, Straight Ally Pride Flag, Anarcha-Queer Flag (rainbow variant), Argentina Gay Flag, Australia Gay Flag, Brazil Gay Flag

+ 44 more

British Columbia Gay Flag, Canadian Pride Flag, Chile Gay Flag, Dominican Republic Gay Flag, Egypt Gay Flag, European Union Gay Flag, France Gay Flag, Gay Pride Flag of Pakistan, Heteroflexible Pride Flag, Heterosexual / Straight Pride Flag, Homoflexible Pride Flag, India Gay Flag, Italy Gay Flag, Japan Gay Flag, Jewish Gay Pride Flag, Manitoba Gay Flag, Mexico Gay Flag, Netherlands Gay Flag, New Brunswick Gay Flag, Newfoundland Gay Flag, Northwest Territories Gay Flag, Nova Scotia Gay Flag, Nunavut Gay Flag, Ontario Gay Flag, Palestinian Gay Pride Flag, Panama Gay Flag, Philadelphia Pride Flag, Prince Edward Island Gay Flag, Quebec Gay Flag, Rainbow Flag with White Triangle (Sapporo), Rainbow Israel Flag, Rainbow Polish Flag (2014, Angela Getler), Russia Gay Flag, Saskatchewan Gay Flag, Social Justice Pride Flag, South African Gay Pride Flag, Switzerland Gay Flag, Tanzania Gay Flag, Texas Rainbow Flag, Turkish Gay Pride Flag, Two-Spirit Pride Flag (2005, Zoccole), Two-Spirit Pride Flag (2016 Tumblr documentation), Victory Over AIDS Flag (1980s, designer unknown), Yukon Territory Gay Flag

A two-parent mashup: the City of Chicago's municipal flag (Wallace Rice, 1917; four stars by 1939) supplies the four six-pointed stars and the middle-third band they sit in ^[6][5], while the rainbow pride flag supplies the five field stripes and the purple used to recolor the stars. The white-field Chicago Stars Pride Flag is a separate mashup of the same two parents, documented from June 2016, while this composition's earliest located evidence dates from June 2019; no derivation between the two designs is documented in either direction.

Lineage tree

Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 4 records across 4 generations.

Ancestors -3

Original Rainbow Flag (1978)

Ancestors -2

Seven-Stripe Rainbow Flag (1978)

Ancestor

Rainbow Pride Flag

This record

Chicago Pride Flag (Rainbow Stripes, Purple Stars)

Colors & Symbolism

The flag registers as a rainbow pride flag first, with the four purple Chicago stars added as the specific marker of civic identity, the inverse emphasis of its white-field sibling design, which keeps Chicago's civic flag as the dominant visual. Purple, absent from the five field stripes, appears only in the stars; Transit Tees describes the design solely as the Pride flag's colors overlaid on the Chicago flag's stripes and stars, and publishes no meaning for the choice. ^[1][2]

Encycloflaggia reconstruction value (the hero artwork); not a manufacturer value

This flag has no official digital palette. Color values shown are approximate.

Four purple six-pointed stars

Adapted from the City of Chicago's municipal flag, whose four red stars are designated in the Municipal Code, from the hoist outwards, for Fort Dearborn, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Century of Progress of 1933. ^[6][5] Transit Tees' copy describes the design only as the Pride flag's colors overlaid on 'the stripes and stars of the flag of Chicago', assigning the recolored stars no separate meanings of their own, and no star-by-star mapping is documented for this design. ^[1]

Transit Tees publishes no stripe-by-stripe meanings for this design. The conventional meanings of the six-stripe rainbow flag's hues are documented on the rainbow pride flag entries and are not restated here as this design's own. Unlike the sibling entry's individually multicolor stars, this version recolors all four stars a single purple.

Transit Tees publishes no digital color values. The hex values in this table are the archive's reconstruction values, the colors of the hero artwork, and are not measurements of the products. Measured from the seller's own photographs, the three product formats agree only qualitatively: a deep crimson top stripe, a vermillion red-orange second stripe, a golden yellow centre field, deep green, medium blue, and muted violet stars. Glare, enamel gloss and print substrate shift the numbers from photograph to photograph, so no measured palette is stated. ^[1][2][3]

Design

Aspect Ratio

Not specified; documented products use different proportions

Ratio Notes

No flag ratio is documented; the design is confirmed only in non-flag formats whose proportions differ: a 3-by-2-inch magnet, a 1-by-3/8-inch pin, and a square magnet, as their seller states or its photographs show. ^[1][2][3] The hero image is drawn on the archive's 3:5 height-to-width reconstruction canvas; that proportion belongs to the reconstruction only, not to any documented product.

Orientation

horizontal

Stripe Count

5

Layout

horizontal_stripes_with_stars

Stripes (Top → Bottom)

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue

Center Symbol

Four purple six-pointed stars, evenly spaced, centered across the yellow stripe

The hero image is a vector reconstruction built from Transit Tees' 3-by-2-inch magnet product photograph (see Source Images). Measured from that photograph, the magnet's five stripes run close to 1:1:2:1:1, the enlarged yellow centre stripe filling the middle third of the height as the municipal flag's star band does ^[6]; the four stars, about a fifth of the design's height tall, are evenly spaced across the full width. These are measured product proportions, not a published specification, and they vary by format: on the square magnet the yellow band takes just under twice the other stripes' height, and on the enamel pin the yellow field is proportionally larger still, roughly two and a half times the other bands. ^[1][3]

Five horizontal stripes, red, orange, yellow, green and blue, replace the municipal flag's white field and two light-blue bars entirely; the yellow stripe, double the height of the others on the 3-by-2-inch magnet, occupies the middle third. Four purple six-pointed stars sit evenly spaced across the full width of the yellow stripe, where the Municipal Code sets the civic flag's stars 'side by side, close together, next to the staff'. ^[6] On the enamel-pin version, thin black metal keylines separate the stripes and outline the stars. ^[1]

Five horizontal field stripes, red, orange, yellow, green and blue, with an enlarged yellow centre stripe carrying four purple six-pointed Chicago stars. The flag image shown is a reconstruction from Transit Tees' magnet product photograph; no flag-format product of the composition has been located, and physical flag manufacture remains undocumented. ^[2]

Usage & Adoption

Geographic Usage

Chicago, Illinois

Current Status

In production as pin and magnets; on sale as of August 2026

The composition is documented in production and on sale: Transit Tees' enamel pin, 3-by-2-inch magnet and square magnet, the pin also at the Field Museum store and formerly through Transit Tees' own Etsy shop, and the magnet also at Souvenir City Chicago. ^{[1][2][3][9][8][16]} Photographed display of the design at a named event or place has not been located, and no flag-format product is documented.

Discourse & Debates

Common misidentifications

• Distinct from the white-field, banded-bars-and-multicolor-stars Chicago Stars Pride Flag sold by PrideFlags.com under the same 'Chicago Pride Flag' name, documented separately in this archive.
• Distinct from RAYGUN's 'Chicago Pride Flag' enamel pin, which keeps the municipal white field and light-blue bars and fills the four stars with rainbow stripes. ^[17]
• Distinct from REP CHI's 'Pride Flag', a six-stripe full-field rainbow with a Progress-style hoist chevron and four white, red-outlined stars. ^[18]

'Chicago Pride Flag' is used across retailers for several visually distinct Chicago-flag-plus-rainbow mashups: this five-stripe purple-star design sold by Transit Tees ^[1], PrideFlags.com's white-field banded design, Flags For Good's white-field design with segmented Progress-palette bars and red stars ^[19], and RAYGUN's pin with rainbow-striped stars on the municipal layout ^[17]. This entry documents the Transit Tees composition.

Footnotes & Citations

Image Sources

Rendering

five-stripe-rainbow-chicago-purple-stars