Jonathan Faiers and Mary Westerman Bulgarella
Any history of colour is, above all, a social history. Indeed, for the historian—as for the sociologist and the anthropologist—colour is a social phenomenon. It is society that “makes” colour, defines it, gives it its meaning, constructs its codes and values, establishes its uses, and determines whether it is acceptable or not.
(PASTOUREAU 2001: 10)
In what is arguably one of the most succinct and yet insightful definitions of the importance of color, Michel Pastoureau the eminent medieval historian, expert on heraldry and holder of the Chair of the History of Western Symbolism at the Sorbonne in Paris, emphasizes color’s social construction alongside its essentially mutable status. It is not surprising that it requires the author of over thirty books on subjects including the histories of pigs, bears, and unicorns, the Knights of the Round Table, coins, seals (the sort attached to documents rather than the mammal), the seminal The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric, as well as his work on color with individual books on Black, Blue, and Green, our childhood memories of color, and its utilization in contemporary photographic practice, to describe color so perceptively. This all-embracing approach to visual symbolism and its importance to cultural formation is also essential to the understanding of color in this volume.
The texts gathered together in Colors in Fashion interrogate and discuss how color, via its manifestation through fashionable dress, has played a significant historical role in the formation of society and continues to do so today. Fashion is understood in the context of this book to encompass not only the popularly accepted meaning of the term as typically rapid and cyclical manufacturing and design-led changes in the clothes people wear, but Colors in Fashion also asks the reader to consider the term as representing variation and development in established forms of dressing that might be considered remote from the Western concept of fashion. Indeed, fashion is understood both as change and making: that is to “fashion” and how color has been implicated in processes of fabrication that encompass identity formation, colonial expansion, and societal demarcation.
Color is vital to our very existence, since colorlessness is, after all, equated to lifelessness, sterility, and death. We understand being “in the pink” as a state of good health, of passing difficult challenges “with flying colors,” and who isn’t happy to receive the “red carpet treatment?” However, for every positive chromatic idiom, there are many more that ascribe negative connotations to every color under the sun. We regularly turn “green with envy,” “feel blue,” are “caught red handed,” and might even be named a “yellowbelly.” This indeterminacy is temporally, economically, linguistically, and geographically dependent and what was once a desirable hue might rapidly become abhorrent according to where a color is experienced. So to a non-Western viewer, the list of colorful phrases discussed previously might be nonsensical or generate diametrically opposite interpretations. This slippery metaphorical shading becomes even more problematic when color becomes tangible in the form of dress and textiles, so the multiple meanings constructed when color is worn is due, as Philippe Perrot the dress historian suggests, because:
“Clothing, like language, always happens somewhere in geographical and social space. In its form, colour, material, construction, and function—and because of the behaviour it implies—clothing displays obvious signs, attenuated markings or residual traces of struggles, cross-cultural contacts, borrowings, exchanges between economic regions or cultural areas as well as among groups within a single society” (Perrot 1994: 7).
It is this complexity that the Colors in Fashion contributors explore and celebrate. The color of fashionable, ceremonial, and occupational dress is the most immediately apparent evidence of its “struggles,” “borrowings,” and “exchanges.” Redolent of the oppressive histories of marginalization and demarcation, the physical signs of wear and age as well as the accelerated and quixotic condition of fashion, color, like Elizabeth Wilson’s noteworthy reference to the work of Thomas Carlyle, is understood as “unspeakably meaningful” (Wilson 2003: 3). Colors in Fashion is an attempt to speak the unspeakable language of color, to begin to account for its unceasing polysemy—an objective that demands a diversity of discourses that together, it is hoped, provide a set of potential guides through the chromatic complexities of dress.
The origin of these texts is similarly steeped in color, the color of a city—Florence, Italy—the home of the Costume Colloquium. The fourth meeting held in 2014 with a synonymous title to this present volume, was the catalyst for this book. It is entirely fitting that Florence provided the venue for such a richness of chromatic research. It is a city that literally wears its colors on its sleeve, from the bands of green marble decorating the facades of its most illustrious architecture to the rainbow of colors on display in the windows of some of the world’s most luxurious retailers. Historically, Florence was the city that provided the setting for color’s shift from medieval allegorical symbolism to a more human-centered appreciation of color ushered in with the Renaissance with which the city is indelibly associated. Florence is so steeped in fashion that it is befitting as the location of the Costume Colloquium conferences.
From its simple, yet meaningful inaugural 2008 meeting A Tribute to Janet Arnold, dedicated to the renowned dress historian, Costume Colloquium has developed into one of the most successful and unique gatherings of international, interdisciplinary, and intercultural like-minded people focused on themes related to dress and fashion in all of its vicissitudes. Clothing, dress, costume, fashion, however it is called is, after all, our second skin. It is what we first see when we encounter another human being, often before noticing physical characteristics and certainly before we hear someone speak and therefore it becomes a text that demands interpretation, a statement which says something about who we are and what we think, for as Umberto Eco famously and directly expressed it: “I speak through my clothes” (Eco 1972: 61).
Costume Colloquium is dedicated to understanding, interpreting, and delighting in this language in all of its many and varied forms. The meetings unite those who make, wear, design, recycle, study, analyze, conserve, and preserve dress. Together, attendees discuss how fashion runs our economies, determines our social rituals, and influences our psychological and emotional states. By understanding the global centrality of dress and how throughout history it has played a crucial role in cultural and political formations, and continues to do so today, we can move closer toward a global understanding and tolerance of difference, a difference manifested through the clothes each of us choose to wear. To date, the biennial Costume Colloquium conferences have explored such themes as Dress for Dance (2010), Past Dress-Future Fashion (2012), Colors in Fashion (2014), as well as the most recent edition, Excess and Restraint in Fashion and Dress (2016), which auspiciously coincides with the launching of this present volume.
With such a tempting palette of chromatic scholarship to choose from, it has been necessary to select work that initiates a dialogue both with specific formulations of color in fashion and with the other texts included in this volume, and it has been one of the greatest surprises and rewards received as editors of this volume to understand just how communicative color can be. It is hoped, therefore, that the reader will discover for themselves not only new and stimulating research into color by leading scholars but also how so many of the themes discussed individually speak a similar language that transcends historical, cultural, and economic specificities.
The book has been divided into four broad subject areas: “Color and Solidarity,” “Color and Power,” “Color and Technology,” and “Color and Desire.” In these sections, color is analyzed as an agent for social change, stratification, and indeed consolidation. Its chromatically unifying function is discussed via its use in uniforms, military wear, court dress (both Western and non-Western), and also as a subversive agent allowing its wearers to gather under the banner of a specific hue to express political solidarity and visual opposition to the status quo. The important role that technology has had to play in the development of new dyes, ways of applying and experiencing color, and indeed subliminally registering it demonstrates that color in fashion historically has always been an agent for technical innovation and continues to inspire designers, artists, and performers today. The texts gathered together in this volume can be understood as a distillation of the multifaceted and indeed multi-colored contribution to Costume Colloquium IV, a representative selection from the rainbow of research presented and enjoyed that reflects the Colloquium’s abiding goal of maintaining the highest standard of academic research, which Janet Arnold had promoted and achieved throughout her career.
Section One: “Color and Solidarity”
Color and the creation of belonging, support, and solidarity through dress and its specific coloring is the subject of this section. Texts in this section discuss color as an assertion of cultural celebration, as protest and opposition. Color is often understood as expressive of a specific political ideology or as simple resistance, but color in dress is never straightforward and as the texts in this section demonstrate it is as mutable, nuanced, and varied as color itself. Commencing with “Color as Theme in the Ebony Fashion Fair” by Joy Bivins, the recent exhibtion held at the Chicago History Musuem devoted to the Ebony Fashion Fair is central to her discussion of how color was understood as culturally determined among African American consumers in the second half of the twentieth century. Questions concerning the increased access to fashionable color, how color was expressive of a specfic cultural bias, and the “education” in color promoted to audiences in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean by Ebony magazine and the Johnson Publishing Company’s groundbreaking fashion show are indicative of color’s cultural cohesion.
Following the vibrant presentations of the Ebony Fashion Fair, Kimberly Wahl’s “Purity and Parity: The White Dress of the Suffrage Movement in Early Twentieth Century Britain” discusses the importance of the “non-color” white to the British Suffrage Movement in the early twentieth century. White’s symbolic resonance of purity, spirituality, and as an evocation of Classical antiquity is understood within the context of an Edwardian artistic and fashionable sensibility. The pioneering feminists of the Women’s Social and Political Union and their choice of predominantly white dress are understood in Wahl’s text as simultaneously highly symbolic, knowingly fashionable, and viusally expressive of a specific political ideology. As with the other texts in this section, Wahl’s interrogation of tonally uniform, consistent color’s ability to form optically cohesive fields is exploited for its spectacular effect, a chromatic manifestation of solidarity.
Moving from Edwardian Britain to contemporary Nigeria, Margaret Olugbemisola Areo and Adebowale Biodun Areo’s exploration of the Aso-Ebi cloth tradition in their text “Birds of the Same “Color” Flock Together: Color as Expression of Identity and Solidarity in Aso-Ebi Cloth of the Yoruba” demonstrates the fundamental role color plays in ceremonial dress. Originating as a practice referring to the wearing of the same color and pattern of cloth as an expression of familial group identity, Aso-Ebi has extended its original limitations to encompass a broader demonstration of group identification. Allegiance through color is now an essential component of contemporary Yoruba culture with the Aso-Ebi fashion practice indicative of solidarity, unity, cohesion, support, and identification.
Section One closes with Emmanuelle Dirix’s “Contradictory Colors: Tricolor in Vichy France’s Fashion Culture,” which reveals the essential instability and shifting sociopolitical resonance of color. Problematizing a straightforward reading of the tricolor’s familiar red, white, and blue in occupied France, the text discusses how our perception of ideological color choices is never straightforward and further complicated when institutionalized in the form of historical exhibitions. Dirix’s text shares a concern with other texts in this volume that discuss the disjuncture between the written and mediated descriptions of color and their optical reality, providing in this instance fascinating evidence that the choice of red, white, and blue was not always a political gesture, but an economic expediency.
Section Two: “Color and Power”
Color is powerful. Used throughout history to express privilege, wealth, and dynastic rule, color has been incorporated into visual narratives of nationalism and enduring tradition. The texts comprising this section explore the exercise of power through color, both within established ceremonial and ritual traditions and as expressions of individual assertions of power. Color that can be “read” by both the advantaged and disadvantaged has meant that understandably color has played a central role in court life and the maintenance of social hierarchies. Color has also been used to devalue and detract, and at specific periods of history and in particular locations certain colors have become indelibly associated with the “other,” the undesirable and the feared.
The fascinating imbrication between color, fortune, and the calendar is explored in Piyanan Petcharaburanin and Alisa Saisavetvaree’s account of “Dress and Color at the Thai Court.” The ancient Thai tradition of wearing specific colors on each day of the week is positioned within the cultural and religious traditions of Thai court life and illuminated by accounts provided by nineteenth-century travellers. What might be understood as an ancient tradition that would inevitably lose its significance and power with the onset of modernism in the twentieth century is seen, conversely, as an example of color’s continuing effectiveness as a conduit for dynastic continuity, with the tradition transposed to Parisian couture by the remarkable Queen Sirikit during her royal tours.
Kate Strasdin’s “‘Gold and Silver by Night’. Queen Alexandra: A Life in Color” also discusses color as a means of communicating royal power and as an effective form of sartorial public relations. Alexandra directly influenced public opinion and augmented her increasing popularity in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain by her astute fashion and color choices. Commencing with a detailed description of how she began to assert her independence from Queen Victoria’s dominance of court dress etiquette, Strasdin moves on to explore how Alexandra, once Queen, increasingly deployed color as an effective means of establishing herself as a more subtle and diplomatic monarch, but also fascinatingly how color came to her aid later in life as a form of protection, or armor deflecting unwarranted attention when at her most vulnerable.
Individual prestige and the psychological influence of ceremonial color are the central themes of Deirdre Murphy’s account of “Lord Boston’s Court Uniform: A Story of Color, Politics and the Psychology of Belonging.” Through the detailed analysis of this establishment figure’s relationship to his court uniform, its centrality to his own construction of self-worth, and the implication of color in the loss of esteem when prohibited from wearing it, we understand how color has the power to produce trauma and anxiety. As in Wahl’s and Areo’s texts, color here is discussed as facilitating a sense of belonging, representative of not so much a sense of solidarity and unification, but as an all too fleeting badge of acceptance of admission to the ranks of power, which just as easily vanishes once those colors are no longer able to be worn. Drawing on extensive archival research including first-hand accounts, tailor’s bills, and a meticulous study of the uniform itself, her text provides access to color’s pivotal position in identification and projection, here demonstrating perfectly the resonance of the simple phrase “you are what you wear.”
Proscription, marginality, and mutability are the primary concerns of Jonathan Faiers’s study of yellow. In his “Yellow Is the New Red, or Clothing the Recession and How the Shade of Shame Became Chic,” the reader understands how one particular color, in this instance yellow, can shift its ideological position according to the culture which views or wears it. For a considerable period in the West, yellow is discussed as the shade of shame—the color of the outcast and the enforced hue of the undesirable—while in the East it is celebrated as noble, powerful, and held in the highest esteem. This seemingly entrenched notion, however, is finally proven to be unstable and the text ends with a consideration of its recent reappraisal in the context of global recession, revisiting again a recurring motif of this volume, which is color’s essentially transforming and transformative nature.
Section Three: “Color and Innovation”
Throughout history, developments in color have been at the forefront of technical transformations and have generated equal amounts of creative inspiration and admiration when promoted as fashion. From the synthetic dye revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, developments in early color photographic and cinematic processes and today’s contemporary digital revolution have all influenced, and indeed been inspired by, color’s infinite possibilities for the demonstration of technical modernisation. Color’s relationship to light has been central to so much of this experimentation, a chromatic revelation that continues to grow with each successive wave of technological invention.
Michelle Finnamore’s “Color before Technicolor: Colorized Fashion Films of the Silent Era” skilfully combines many of the interrelated subjects of this section in her exploration of the early processes used for coloring silent film. How those same processes often mirrored scientific processes employed in the dissemination of the fashion image itself and advances in textile printing demonstrate clearly the connectedness of color, fashion, and innovation. Most fascinatingly, she reveals how in the primarily black-and-white world of pioneering popular cinema, color was reserved for its representation of the world of fashion, emphasizing the indissolubility of our understanding of fashion as color and of the new as colorful.
The continuing relationship between new technology, fashion, and color is brought up to date with Michal Lynn Shumate’s exploration of the Dutch design duo Viktor & Rolf’s deployment of blue screen technology in “Color as Concept: From International Klein Blue to Viktor & Rolf’s ‘Bluescreen.’” Her initial account of this pioneering fashion show then leads Shumate on an exciting voyage of discovery of the importance of the color blue in both fashion and artistic innovation, ranging in subject matter from the Renaissance painter Giotto’s innovative use of blue to Yves Klein’s championing of the color in the twentieth century. Drawing on a rich palette of literary and critical references, including Derek Jarman’s film Blue (an inspirational work that also features in the final essay in this volume by Kate Irvin), she returns to fashion proposing that through Viktor & Rolf’s often monotone collections the primacy of color over line approaches fashionable color as an ultimately sensate experience, a condition of being in, literally, a state of pure physical color.
Alison Matthews David considers an earlier period of chromatic innovation, namely the development of artificial dyes, in particular the craze for vivid synthetic greens in the nineteenth century. In her text “Tainted Love: Oscar Wilde’s Toxic Green Carnation, Queerness, and Chromophobia,” she explores how novelty equating to fashionability soon turned to condemnation and fear due to the new dye’s harmful physical effects. This physical danger was then transformed into moral danger and became a symbol of society’s degenerescence once the color was favored by members of the Aesthetic Movement of the later nineteenth century. This disapprobation crystallized around the figure of Oscar Wilde and his notorious green carnation. Sharing a similarity with Faiers’s discussion of yellow as the shade of shame, Matthews David deploys her study of green to understand not only the mutability of a color’s reception but also, crucially for this section, how swiftly the desire for colorful technical innovation is transfigured into a fear of the strange and the unknown.
The section concludes with “Starlit Skies Blue versus Durindone Blue” by Anna Buruma, an insightful and fascinating case study of two contrasting dye books from leading textile colorists of the early twentieth century. This beguiling research into innovative textile color printing employs the close reading of these important records of color experimentation to assess again the complex relationship between fashion, innovation, and color and how the demand for color in the early to mid-twentieth century drove creativity. The contrast between the two working methods is skillfully revealed in Buruma’s discussion of the processes themselves recorded in the dye books, but also by an assessment of their physical appearance, and crucially their semantic classification of color. This last concern, the literal naming of color, reoccurs throughout this volume as of vital importance and how the ever-present distance between the optical experience of color and its lexicon was negotiated.
Section Four: “Color and Desire”
The constant desire engendered by color in consumer and producer alike has presaged social change, behavior, and indeed emotional responses throughout history and across groups united often only by their chromatic desires. Ranging from eighteenth-century Ghana to postwar Paris, the desire for color has been the catalyst for cultural transformation and is examined in detail in the texts included in this final section. The authors understandably articulate a number of issues that have been signaled in some of the earlier texts, desire, after all, has always been a catalyst for, and indeed symptom of, solidarity, power, and innovation. Commencing with Clare Rose’s “Rough Wolves in the Sheepcote: The Meanings of Fashionable Color 1900–1914,” a sudden shift in fashionable color from pastels and delicate shades to a richer more vibrant palette is seen as being implicated within a wider nexus of cultural, artistic, and political changes in society. Essential to Rose’s text is the fluidity between the physical presence of color and its “idea,” and the allusive vocabulary adopted by fashion writing at this time to record this chromatic shift. The close relationship between fashionable color and art history prefigures that explored by Shumate and is also a topic refocused in the final text in this section by Kate Irwin. The geopolitical consideration of color and its naming discussed by Rose also provides a link to other politicized dress of the same period such as that of the Suffrage Movement encountered in Wahl’s text and Dirix’s account of the ideological opposition foregrounded in fashion’s use of the French tricolor.
Paris postwar is the setting for Beatrice Behlen’s erudite exploration of the desire for that other “non-color” black. In “Le noir étant la dominante de notre vêture …: The Many Meanings of the Color Black in Post-War Paris,” Behlen brilliantly situates the emerging fashion for black within a complex literary, philosophical, and artistic discourse, mediated through specific personalities that came to prominence in Paris immediately after the Second World War. Running contrary to prevailing fashions of the time, and flouting gender conventions, the devotees of Parisian postwar black demonstrated the full weight of color as a signifying system. With black popularly understood as nihilistic and emptied of meaning in this context, the text redresses this misconception and reveals that, conversely, it is to paraphrase Wilson again “unspeakably meaningful.”
Desire resides at the very heart of Sarah Fee’s text “British Scarlet Broadcloth, The Perfect Red in Eastern Africa, c. 1820–1885,” which powerfully interrogates the demand for British red broadcloth in West Africa during the nineteenth century. This consumer demand for a specific shade and quality of cloth is embedded within, and symptomatic of, the dominant colonial and economic histories of the area. However, as with Petcharaburanin’s discussion of the specific cosmology of the Thai Royal color codes and also Areo’s understanding of the unifying ability of color in the Aso-Ebi tradition, Fee’s discussion of scarlet broadcloth is evidence of color’s ability to assume multicultural influences and its constantly shifting status. Most importantly in this text, fashion, especially the fashion for certain colors, is seen as a global construct rather than the traditionally understood Western system and further proof of the desirability of color unfettered by cultural and geographical boundaries.
The final text in this volume, Kate Irvin’s “Lives Lived: An Archaeology of Faded Indigo,” returns us to the physical experience of color, in this case blue, and the specific ability of indigo when used in work wear to act as a direct sensory conduit to past experiences. Like Shumate, she too calls upon Derek Jarman and a number of fine artists to take us on a journey into the tonal complexities to be found in indigo-dyed clothing. Irvin’s text is not to be understood as a mere nostalgic encounter, instead it is an engagement with color that interrogates fashion’s relationship to utilitarian wear, color as a philosophy, and color as a narrative form. For Irvin, the intensity, the fading, and the transference of color are symptomatic of its protean composition—a grounding in the physicality of color that provides a suitable climax to this volume’s chromatic voyage. The question David Batchelor asks in his seminal Chromophobia seems especially pertinent to all of the texts that comprise Colors in Fashion.
Colour is in everything, but it is also independent of everything. Or it promises or threatens independence. Or is it the case that the more we treat colour as independent, the more we become aware of its dependence on materials and surfaces; the more we treat colour in combination with actual materials and surfaces, the more its distinctiveness becomes apparent? (Batchelor 2000: 95)
Color’s independence yet its intrinsic reliance on its incorporation into forms of dress to fully appreciate its objectivity is the subject of the new research gathered together here. It is through forms of dress, whether ceremonial, fashionable, or occupational, that color can be most clearly understood as representative of national identity, of subjugation and resistance. The relationship between color and dress highlights the often violent and uncomfortable histories that provide the background to what might otherwise seem entirely arbitrary or purely fashionable and economic decisions concerning what colors are made available, who produces and wears them. Who has been prohibited to wear certain colors, broken with social convention to wear certain colors, or been forced to wear certain colors is a complex and fascinating story that the texts in this volume reveal. In addition, each understands and takes into account the powerful visual attraction (and sometimes repulsion) that color has exerted throughout history and across geographic, economic, and cultural boundaries. Color’s developmental history and dissemination have been shaped by legal battles concerning who has access to color, who has the right to manufacture and apply color, and who can name color, so that underlying our contemporary, apparently relaxed attitude to color lies a chromatic complexity that speaks of wars, economic ascendancies and declines, migrations, and meetings.
It is our sincere hope that the scholarship represented by this compendium of colorful thought will inspire further research into color’s centrality to our understanding, appreciation, and experience of clothing. Recalling again the origin of this present volume, we are reminded of the closing remarks to Costume Colloquium IV: Colors in Fashion given by Alexandra Palmer who related the story of how when asking her son which was his favorite color he responded “rainbow,” and it is this inclusivity and sense of wonder that we hope is also present in Colors in Fashion.
References
Batchelor, D. (2000), Chromophobia, London: Reaktion.
Eco, E. (1972), “Social Life as a Sign System,” in D. Robey (ed.), Structuralism: An Introduction: The Wolfson College Lectures, 57–72, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pastoureau, M. (2001), Blue: The History of a Color, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Perrot, P. (1994), Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, E. (2003), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: I.B. Tauris