Room 36

36.1
At the end of the eighteenth century, the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered a new green, made from copper arsenite. It became popularly known as Scheele’s green.

This compound produced a beautiful green colour but had a high arsenic content. Even so, this fashionable colour was used extensively in the nineteenth century for dresses, interiors, cakes and sweets.

The nineteenth century saw extensive experimentation with brightly coloured aniline dyes, such as mauve (1856) and fuchsine (1858).

The fashionable new bright colours came into their own in modern gaslight, more so than in traditional candlelight. For this reason, the couturier C. F. Worth established a salon de lumière, where his customers could see how beautifully his fabrics sparkled in gaslight.

36.2
For centuries, purple was an extremely costly and regal colour that was worn as a display of power or during mourning. In classical times, purple clothing, dyed with Tyrian purple, was as costly as silver or even worth its weight in gold.

Tyrian Purple was extracted from the mucus of certain sea snails, while the dyeing process involved a urine bath. The dye therefore had an unpleasant smell, which the writer Pliny described as somewhere between rotting crustaceans and garlic.

 36.3
In the late nineteenth century, purple became an ‘artistic’ colour, favoured by the Arts and Crafts movement and customers of Liberty’s of London.

At the end of the nineteenth century, purple was adopted as one of the colours of the women’s movement. The English suffragettes wore white for purity, purple for freedom and green for hope. Their American sisters chose the combination of white for purity, gold for hope, and purple for loyalty.

It is probably no coincidence that Kamala Harris wore a purple or plum-coloured pants suit when she accepted her nomination as Joe Biden’s running mate and her candidacy for American vice president.

36.4
Throughout the course of Western fashion history, striking colours have increasingly been reserved for holidays, parties and special occasions and not so much for everyday life.

Today, colour is much more an expression of our personalities. And for designers, colours are an expression of artistic freedom. Colour inspires, it gives us strength and offers us hope, especially in uncertain times.

Fashion designers such as Christopher John Rogers, Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, Bas Kosters, and Anifa Mvuemba of the Hanifa brand are well aware of this. The colours in their fashions speak for themselves and give us hope for the future. They are colours with a meaning after all.