Vexillary signed permutations revisited

We study the combinatorial properties of vexillary signed permutations, which are signed analogues of the vexillary permutations first considered by Lascoux and Sch\"utzenberger. We give several equivalent characterizations of vexillary signed permutations, including descriptions in terms of essential sets and pattern avoidance, and we relate them to the vexillary elements introduced by Billey and Lam.