THE JOURNAL
Would you pay more for a red sweater than the exact same style in green? Of course not. While our modern minds can happily understand why a leather jacket costs more than a polyester one, the same logic no longer applies to colours. But we didn’t always think this way.
If you were a painter in the 15th century, you would know that not all pigments were created equal. Ultramarine made from lapis lazuli sourced from remote mines in Afghanistan was one of the priciest pigments, more expensive than gold, they say. It was often reserved by painters to create the brilliant blue tones of the Virgin Mary’s dress of the raiments of Christ and contracts between artists and painters stipulated specific amounts that would be used in their commissions, the historian Ms Kassia St Clair explains in her book The Secret Lives Of Colour. “Some patrons purchased the pigment themselves to control its use,” she says.
It was with good reason that the artist formerly known as Prince make royal purple his signature shade. When it was first used more than a thousand years ago, the rare dye was almost prohibitively expensive. According to St Clair, it was so costly that a Roman emperor once had to break the news to his wife that he could not afford a dress for her in the shade. Back then, so-called Tyrian purple was made from the ground-up shells and the carefully extracted mucus of a particular breed of sea snail, which wasn’t that easy to come by.
Then there were sumptuary laws, rules that governed “luxuries” and restricted who could and could not wear certain things. Even if he could rustle up the cash, a commoner couldn’t wear any shade he fancied.
“There were sumptuary laws... Even if he could rustle up the cash, a commoner couldn’t wear any shade he fancied”
The history books show us that certain colours were associated with wealth. It was partly to do with money, but it was unavoidably tied up in concepts of class, status and religion. Then, as now, what you wore spoke volumes about who you were.
The Victorian era shook things up for good when in 1856 an 18-year-old chemist accidentally invented the pigment mauveine. It turned out to be the catalyst for a nationwide explosion of cheap, synthetic dyes – and now the subject of an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design turns our sepia-tinged, smoke-shrouded picture of the industrial age on its head.
By the 1860s, the so-called chromatic turn, as the exhibition’s curator Mr Matthew Winterbottom explains, made colourful clothes affordable and accessible to everyone. Almost overnight, even a lowly baptist minister’s daughter could wear an electric purple gown – a shockingly modern dress on display in the exhibition – to church. “Some people were horrified,” Winterbottom says. “We include it with a beautiful ninth-century purple psalter to show an example of the preciousness of colour and then how suddenly everybody was getting it everywhere.” Previously, dyes had to be imported from far and wide, but as more pigments began to be synthesised from readily available, home-grown coal tar, everything from stockings to stamps coloured a new kaleidoscopic Britain.
For men’s wardrobes, though, the story is a little more complicated, Winterbottom says. At the same time that the naturalist Mr Charles Darwin was explaining that it was the males of the species that usually had the most adornment and brightest plumage in the natural world, businessmen and the new middle classes became known as men in black. “It’s rather ironic that [Darwin’s] theory was developed at a time when men’s clothing was the least colourful it had ever been,” Winterbottom says. “It was very subdued, very sombre.” Then again, as the exhibition’s display cases prove, these same men were perfectly happy to don richly coloured, synthetically dyed smoking jackets or slippers in their own homes.
A backlash was inevitable and it was the well-heeled who were most vocal about their new gaudy surrounds. Fashionable sorts, such as the writer and artist Ms Mary Eliza Haweis, began to pen diatribes questioning the tastefulness of bolder palettes and championing more refined, natural ones. “Within 10 or 15 years, there was a move away from bright colours to tertiary ones – much more toned-down russets and olives,” Winterbottom says. By then, though, these shades were also being synthetically produced.
The Pre-Raphaelites were not fans either. The textile designer Mr William Morris, the leader of the anti-industrialisation Arts & Crafts movement, encouraged the use of good old-fashioned (and much more expensive) vegetable dyes, arguing that they faded more gracefully than the “livid ugliness” of synthetic aniline dyes. His friend in the brotherhood, the painter Mr William Holman Hunt, gave a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts urging a return to natural pigments. “The sooner… this aniline dye is discarded… the better it will be for good taste,” he said.
A century or so on, are we, like the Victorians before us, witnessing a similar backlash to the more colourful decades that have gone before? We live in a world where a specific shade of beige paint – thanks, Farrow & Ball – on the walls of your living room broadcasts not just your level of taste, but your bank balance, too.
The rise of so-called stealth luxury – the return of quiet, unassuming and classic pieces with a hefty price tag – along with the recent rejection of maximalism would suggest so. As does a recent uptick in the number of men stepping out in head-to-toe neutrals, a look that, however subtle, screams of a huge dry-cleaning budget.
“Washed-out, natural tones are the new cream of the crop, a way of shunning the common synthetics worn by the hoi polloi”
If the increasing popularity of designers such as The Row, Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana are anything to go by, it seems that washed-out, natural tones are the new cream of the crop, a way of shunning the common synthetics worn by the hoi polloi. And as with a fridge full of organic groceries, cupboards stocked with glass storage containers and a medicine cabinet full of homeopathic wellness remedies, neutral, much like natural, does not come cheap.
“It’s a fashion thing and we are having a moment for it,” says the designer Mr Oliver Spencer, whose collections never stray far from organic shades. But there is another, related factor at play, he says. The preference for a more muted palette goes hand in hand with a newfound respect for natural fibres and materials. Once staple fabrics such as linen and cotton are now considered the height of luxury and sophistication.
Just as Messrs Morris and Hunt predicted, designers are starting to see the same thing with vegetable dyes. “They give great colour and there are lots of different ways of treating vegetable dyes in things like linen and cotton, which look absolutely wonderful,” Spencer says. “It’s a more natural shade of colour. It’s less intense, so it tends to be a little more faded.”
His latest collection includes a brown herringbone bomber jacket by the name of Linfield as well as trousers and a relaxed houndstooth tweedy suit. They are woven from 100 per cent virgin wool and use no dyes at all. The colour comes from the natural wool of the sheep, which varies from pure white to a deep rich chocolate brown. “I’ve been showing them in the collection for about the past seven or eight years, and they get more and more popular every year,” says Spencer. They are this season’s best-sellers.