Mechanical exfoliation is a widely used method to isolate high quality graphene layers from bulk graphite. In our recent experiments, some ordered microstructures, consisting of a periodic alternation of kinks and stripes, were observed in thin graphite flakes that were mechanically peeled from highly oriented pyrolytic graphite. In this paper, a theoretical model is presented to attribute the formation of such ordered structures to the alternation of two mechanical processes during the exfoliation： （1） peeling of a graphite flake and （2） mechanical buckling of the flake being sub- jected to bending. In this model, the width of the stripes L is determined by thickness h of the flakes, surface energy Y, and critical buckling strain ecr. Using some appropriate values of y and ecr that are within the ranges determined by other inde- pendent experiments and simulations, the predicted relations between the stripe width and the flake thickness agree reason- ably well with our experimental measurements. Conversely, measuring the L-h relations of the periodic microstructures in thin graphite flakes could help determine the critical mechan- ical buckling strain εcr and the interface energy γ.