16
Kate Irvin
Saturated cloth, inundated with vibrant and precious coloring agents, has for centuries served as a material expression of power and wealth across the globe. Such surfaces protect, deflect, and project, astounding onlookers with the riches and otherworldly hues infused in and bound to the fibers. But what becomes of such armor as it is used and worn, once the surface cracks and the color fades into a seemingly shallow pool that merely echoes its former depth?
A potent response to this question may be found in the close study of an early-twentieth-century Japanese worker’s garment made of, and patched with, layers of indigo blue cotton painstakingly colored with indigo dyestuff extracted from the leaves of the Indigofera tinctoria plant (Plate 16.1). This garment and others like it provide examples of the beauty and intimacy to be found in the well-worn blues of cotton workwear, as well as epitomize an aesthetic that has garnered increasing attention among artists and, most recently, in the world of avant-garde and sustainable fashion. Those of our contemporaries who are drawn to such pieces look to them expressly for the personal history that coats the surfaces bared of their formerly intense color, seeing in them a patina created by wear and repair that acts as another shield, this time warding off the chill of perfection. As bright sunlight, habitual movements, and repeated washings strip away brightness and stiffness, a bygone gloss is replaced by intimate narratives that can only be guessed at by most of us today.
In his painfully poetic film Blue of 1993, English filmmaker Derek Jarman has stated: “In the pandemonium of image/I present you with the universal Blue/Blue an open door to soul/An infinite possibility/Becoming tangible.”1 In this short text, I will explore that “open door to the soul” and some of the artists and designers it has beckoned to its threshold. From a close look at the fading of indigo-dyed cottons, I will move to the meanings they have taken on in contemporary art and fashion culture as narratives of wear and personal history, and end by investigating the new interpretations they have engendered.
First let us consider the garment illustrated in Plate 16.1, a piece that might well serve as an exemplar of Jarman’s tangible blue offering “infinite possibility.” A far cry from garments fashioned for an elite clientele, this indigo-dyed cotton worker’s jacket, or noragi, from rural Japan represents the height of meaningful production that has captured the imagination of the contemporary designers I will consider later in this text. In lieu of tales of wealth and privilege, the noragi, now in the collections of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, tells stories of hardship and labor at the same time that it expresses profound care, respect, and (we can only hope) love. It is an example of Japanese boro, literally translated as “ragged,” and now used to refer to utilitarian items, often of cotton dyed blue with natural indigo. Such garments show not only heavy wear (and resulting tear) but also a loving, sometimes desperate hand that has utilized every resource within reach, recycling used cloth and repairing tatters by patching and layering bits and pieces together to create a regenerated, strengthened whole.
This particular noragi features an arrhythmic patchwork of cotton fragments in various shades of formerly deep indigo blues that allude to a long and layered history of ceaseless use. As opposed to that of many museum objects, this history is one that came to the RISD Museum without specific names and provenance. We can only deduce a line of ownership underscored by economic want, but a want that has been ameliorated by the strengthening stitches of a stable hand. Reconstructive patches across the shoulder, hem, front, and back at close inspection show the value of even the smallest scraps that, when pieced together, form amorphous lakes of differing blue depths in a landscape of faded down-to-earth hues. Even the larger expanse of fabric that forms the main body of the garment shows at the center back seam the former concentrated blue that survived possibly due to its safe nestling in a previous life within the recesses of a seam that protected it from the light’s damaging rays.
Illustrative of Derek Jarman’s musings, in this well-loved noragi, “Blue stretches, yawns, and is awake.” Indeed, dyers across the world, from Mexico to Japan, consider indigo to be alive as they mix, stir, and coddle the dyeing vat to cajole from it a magical color that converts before one’s eyes from a pale yellow-green to blue as soon as it is exposed to oxygen, as soon as the cloth is pulled from the vat. This is merely the first cry that develops into deepening blues with successive dips into the dye bath, a layered process that ensures that the dyed cloth retains its hue no matter how old or faded it becomes (Balfour-Paul 2000: 117). Anthropologist Michael Taussig has observed of this process: “Color here will not stand. Indeed, it is not so much color that is changing here in the indigo vat, but change itself that is on the view” (Taussig 2009: 149). Though long removed from the vat, with most of the original dark indigo blues rubbed away, this noragi nonetheless comes to life even as we consider it off of the human body.
The indigo dye used in boro garments was readily available, and therefore plentiful enough to enable overdyeing to refresh the color if necessary. It was also considered by rural communities across Asia to have medicinal properties that, in rubbing off on the wearer’s skin, could offer protection from snakebites, among other potential threats in the field (Balfour-Paul 2000: 194–195). Given its cultural importance, as well as the intricacies involved in the preparation and dyeing processes, indigo growers and dyers to this day in Japan are classified as “national living treasures,” and in Japanese spoken language the word ai means both “indigo” and “love” (Balfour-Paul 2000: 9, 127–128).
Boro clothing such as the noragi, made out of precious scraps of cotton and showing the remains of rich blue indigo dye, is a product of necessity but also expresses a deep-seated Japanese cultural tradition termed mottainai, which stresses the value of everything on earth and the need to use our creations fully. Originally a Buddhist concept, mottainai translates as the admonition “do not waste,” as well as the act of being “thankful.” This perception of one’s place and actions in the world has deeper roots in ancient Shinto religious beliefs that consider all objects to have souls, a view that extends to the recognition that everything in our physical universe is interconnected (Durston 2011: 2, 58). Wabi-sabi, another Japanese aesthetic derived from Buddhism, supports and encourages the appreciation of such worn, tattered, and faded pieces as poignant models for the beauty to be found in the physical evidence of time passing, of change as a natural and inevitable part of an object’s life cycle. They remind us that “nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect” (Powell 2004: 19).
In 2013 Domaine de Boisbuchet, a country estate in southwestern France and site of summer design workshops organized by design curator and collector Alexander von Vegesack, mounted the exhibition Boro: The Fabric of Life in collaboration with Brooklyn-based curator and dealer Stephen Szczepanek. In this display, installed in the elegant yet ramshackle rooms of a nineteenth-century chateau, variegated indigo hues efflorescing within threadbare noragi and other boro pieces offered Boisbuchet’s design-conscious audience a lesson in the beauty of aged designs nurtured and revealed by daily use, attention, and preservation.2
In their state as exhibited relics of another culture and time period, the original functional purpose of the indigo-dyed pieces as workwear had very clearly come to a close, but they nonetheless pulsed with life within a sympathetic environment dedicated to “the relationship between culture, agriculture, and nature.”3 The journey of such pieces to the assuredly unexpected end of gallery display was prolonged, extended, and certainly enabled by the carefully hand-sewn patches (distinguished by their darker color) bolstering the rents that emerged with heavy use. In his memoir Passions and Impressions the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote:
It is worth one’s while, at certain hours of the day or night, to scrutinize useful objects in repose: wheels that have rolled across long dusty distances with their enormous loads of crops or ore, charcoal sacks, barrels, baskets, the hafts and handles of carpenter’s tools. The contact these objects have had with man and earth may serve as a valuable lesson to a tortured lyric poet. Worn surfaces, the wear inflicted by human hands, the sometimes tragic, always pathetic, emanations from these objects give reality a magnetism that should not be scorned. (Neruda 1983)4
The noragi and other boro garments, in their current state as objects on display, well serve the vision called forth by Neruda. They are now among the “useful objects in repose,” sighing under the weight of intense personal use, as well as layered cultural histories specific both to their origins in rural Japan and to the crisscrossing paths that brought the materials to their makers and wearers.
Despite the end of their functional life, the boro pieces resonate with a haunting beauty that is enlivened by the many different indigo hues drifting across their surfaces. Their magnetism remains precisely because of the ways in which the naturally faded blue fabrics provide seductive evidence of an intimate, though anonymous narrative arc of care and devotion. Allowing ourselves to contemplate the lives lived in such garments—to feel (even for a moment) such a relationship to the history embodied in the sea of blue patchwork comprising such heavily used objects—connects us to the broad concepts of mottainai and wabi sabi, and therefore to a universe much bigger than the material world we face on a daily basis.
Quite the same may be said about the quilts of patched-together denim workwear scraps made by members of the now-famed Gee’s Bend, Alabama, African American community, items that are among a group of pieces praised in a New York Times review as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced” (Kimmelman 2002). Many quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend in the mid-twentieth century comprised precious pieces of deconstructed denim (sometimes stitched together in memory of a deceased husband or other family member) that highlight the poetic undulations of indigo-dyed cotton twill worn during the lifetime of one’s beloved.5 Similar to the noragi, such quilts were born out of necessity and practicality. They were also made with a steady craftswoman’s hand and an artistic eye.
Like the remnants of denim trousers in the Gee’s Bend quilts, workwear around the globe is most often indigo dyed, from European sailors’ uniforms to the original Levi-Strauss overalls made for California goldminers. Such European and American utility wear is now regularly culled by vintage dealers and presented as honest and functional material rich with meaning and history. Toile de Chine is one of many such vintage design enterprises. The label was started by a former fashion designer who named the company after a specific and highly valued indigo-dyed sateen cloth imported from China to Europe in the seventeenth century and after. The garments for sale at Toile de Chine in fact show characteristics most similar to the more utilitarian product labelled jean fustian (a cotton twill-woven cloth made in Genoa, Italy, that has given us the English term “jeans”) and the slightly better quality serge de nimes (“serge from Nimes,” from which the English word “denim” derives). Both types of textile were employed for workwear across Europe for centuries due to its durability and wash-fast indigo dye (see Balfour-Paul 2007).
Three of the earliest surviving Levi Strauss & Co. jeans, dating between 1879 and about 1890, are now preserved in the American company’s archives and travel around the world as historical and aesthetic relics. When on display in 2011 at the brand’s Japanese Shibuya location in celebration of the launch of the “Overalls the Origin” initiative, these “artifacts” were literally given “white-glove” care by the exhibition curatorial staff. This event was designed to celebrate the re-working and re-release of three of Levi’s original styles, capitalizing on the deep history embedded in the surviving garments, and hence the Levis brand. More than their vintage silhouettes, one can only assume that the heavily guarded archive pieces resonate in the Japanese context, as well that of Europe and America, because of the essence of universal labor that can be read as radiating from the creases and scuffs of the chafed indigo cotton. Despite much wear and tear, the denim has survived with many stories to tell in both the areas where the blue has been rubbed away, as well as in the transitions to depths of blue closer to their original hue.
The Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, active in the first decades of the twentieth century, evidently shared in our contemporary desire to experience the power of working and dwelling within the folds of an indigo-dyed worker’s garment. Following in the footsteps of agricultural laborers throughout Europe, Klimt donned a deep blue cotton smock as he set out to labor over his canvasses, embarking on the imprinting of his own particular narrative in the billowing blue of his raiment. In this light, might we look at Klimt’s smock and the items mentioned above as examples of what Michael Taussig has termed “polymorphous magical substance,” defined as that which “affects all the senses, not just sight. It moves. It has depth and motion just as a stream has depth and motion, and it connects such that it changes whatever it comes into contact with. Or is it the other way around? That in changing, it connects?” (Taussig 2009: 40). I would argue that the ever-shifting indigo garments—whether worn and inhabited, as by Klimt, or admired from a distance—invite contemplation, emotional response, and, most importantly, an almost irrational bonding as they morph and slip from our grasp as stable material objects.
Certainly the Polish-French painter Balthus felt viscerally connected to the transformations taking place as he wore his indigo coat daily in his studio for over sixty years. According to Katerina Jebb, the artist who created an image of the garment by scanning the original coat and printing the image full-sized, this piece of clothing was “the central piece of his working life. He was obsessed by it, and it seemed to hold more for him than just an ordinary object of clothing” (Thawley 2013). Balthus got this so-called tablier at the American Hospital in Paris during the Second World War and wore it religiously when painting, asserting that “When I’m wearing this tablier, I’m really me” (Thawley 2013).
Instead of donning the artist smock herself, the American fiber artist Sheila Hicks chose to display worn and faded denim smocks as a challenge to the prevailing language of art in the 1970s. Hicks stated, “… this basic material has a profound echo. You can sense the presence; it is powerful … I found I could work with it and say meaningful, significant things about the world” (Hicks 2004). Imbued with the memories and hallmarks of use created by countless unnamed individuals, the smocks blossomed in the artist’s mind as, above all else, “objects of patience” (Hicks 2004). She saw them as items that were made to last, made to incorporate rather than defy the flow of time. Similarly, Ann Hamilton’s 1991 installation in Charleston, South Carolina, titled indigo blue, included as its focal point an enormous stack comprised of thousands of blue denim work pants and shirts. In the absence of the countless blue-collar workers’ voices left out of mainstream historical narratives, Hamilton’s installation sought to give the anonymous worker agency through the sweat and tears embedded in the lifespan and in the making of the heap of now-disembodied clothing (see Hamilton 2007: 333–336).
As one last example of the inspiration that fine artists have found in faded indigo, the work of Polish artist Agata Michalowska, a 2007 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design’s printmaking department, offers a more contemporary instance of the magnetism of the ebb and flow of indigo blue. Plate 16.2 shows a piece that Michalowska has evocatively titled: in that one moment I can see dust collect on my fingertips. The meaning of this title becomes beautifully clear as we contemplate the artist’s laborious process of handcrafting the paper rectangles, studiously rubbing them with indigo, and then burnishing them by hand to produce a surface that, like the boro workers’ garments, seems almost unfathomable. Time suddenly stands still as we view this artwork, allowing us the space to connect with the materiality of the piece and contemplate the labor involved in its making.6
Fashion designers, of course, have traditionally had little interest in slowing down time to the extent that dust might be perceived as collecting on one’s fingertips. Nor has fashion typically celebrated the patina of the old and ragged, beloved and well-used garment. But in her book Fashion at the Edge, fashion historian Caroline Evans has mined and highlighted the atypical, in stating: “When designers fetishized craft techniques, emphasizing the beauty of the flaw and the value of the mark of the hand, they performed a kind of alchemy.” I posit that the fashion examples that follow attempt such alchemy, expressly through their focus on the magical storytelling possibilities enabled by the surface inconstancies and mysteries of faded blue denim. These are qualities that foster deeply personal connections and awaken in us an appreciation for the beauty of imperfection and the vagaries of time.
The designs of Maison Martin Margiela, one of Evans’s exemplars of fashionable dereliction, have for decades quoted from the rag-picker’s aesthetic lauded by Charles Baudelaire. In particular, several designs from the Spring 2009 Artisanal line employed strips of second-hand, torn denim strips reassembled into a new moving canvas of dark to light ombré coloration. Here the Margiela tropes of faceless model and collective designer credit cleave with the anonymous workaday connotations of frayed and worn denim and its spectrum of eroded, bleached hues. Yohji Yamamoto has likewise long incorporated an “aesthetic of poverty” in his designs as he has looked to August Sander’s early twentieth-century portraits of anonymous workers, as well as to the wabi sabi aesthetic of his native Japan. In his menswear collection of S/S 2015, workwear became prominent once again and was eloquently expressed in layers of blue shades pooling together in a variety of ensembles referencing diverse indigo traditions.
Junya Watanabe has taken many dips into the world of indigo workwear, giving emphasis to the rise and fall of color in the folds, creases, and complex patchwork of his creations. Themes of worldwide textile traditions, artisanship, and utility are suggested by his incorporation of traditional indigo-dyed cottons and pointed quotations of reinforcement techniques used in boro (Figure 16.1). Now trademarks of the designer’s aesthetic, these citations have reverberated in his womenswear collections since the deconstructed denim pieces that featured in his Spring 2002 collection, and they have increasingly cropped up in his menswear collections since Spring 2012. Given that the designer tends to be tight-lipped in regard to his conceptual process, his uncharacteristically emotional statement in a 2009 interview that, “I love workwear and the American tradition,”7 reveals the profound inspiration he finds in the “universal blue” of the world’s laborers.
Figure 16.1 Woman's jacket, spring/summer 2002. Pieced cotton twill weave. Junya Watanabe, design label. Junya Watanabe, designer, Japanese. Collection of the RISD Museum, Gift of John W. Smith 2015.34.
Founded in 1991 in Osaka, the Japanese designer jean label Evisu (first named Evis in homage to the famous company but without the “L”) was at the forefront of the Japanese craze for replicating vintage Levi’s and Lee jeans, introducing its first sub-label in 1995 aptly called “Labor.” The brand’s “Dirty Dozen plus one” reworked denim project (2007–2009) was conceived in collaboration with the online community Supertalk as a collective action designed to produce a special edition collection as follows: “Worn for one month by thirteen devoted volunteers from all over the world, each dedicated wearer of a pair of EVISU jeans lends a helping hand—well, lower body—in the breaking-down and wearing-in of the fabric, ensuring that the result is a one-of-a-kind customization, and all kinds of badassness.”8 Individuals from New York to Berlin to Singapore and back (with many points between) made their mark on the pair, adding layers of global narrative and meaning usually accumulated over decades. Here time races forward in celebration of slow and steady labor and artisanship.
In designs for his fashion label Visvim, Hiroki Nakamura also mines the heritage of Japanese indigo-dyed workwear while freely incorporating the feel of 1960s countercultural jeans-wearing youth. As a teenager, the designer travelled the United States looking for vintage Levi’s to wear back in his native Tokyo. Nakamura’s recent travelling pop-up project, the Indigo Camping Trailer, was offered as an antidote to what he sees as the increasingly corporate urban shopping experience. As one review put it: “Nakamura began the show in Sendai where he set up his ‘40s era trailer filled with an eclectic array of indigo goods much of which are exclusive to the project. Much of the team was on hand to man the flea market wearing some of the products, including patchwork paisley quilted jackets, noragis, and rugged chore coats” (Trotman 2013). Apropos of this context, Visvim’s denim line is named “Social Sculpture,” after Joseph Beuys’s concept of art-making as a conscious, collective act of creation, transformation, and recreation.9
As a guest member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the Chinese fashion designer Ma Ke presented her conceptual Wuyong (translated as “Useless”) collection in the gardens of the Palais Royal during the 2008 Paris haute couture collection shows. A cotton spinner, indigo dyer, and weaver worked alongside performers wearing naturally dyed and hand-woven garments inspired by the clothing of Chinese peasants. In this presentation, the indigo garments among the earth tones of the other collection pieces might be read as expressing the balance of the celestial and the earthly in the natural world. In an ensuing Ma Ke installation that was part of the 2010 “Taking a Stance” exhibition in Shanghai, garments of sturdy cotton in natural shades, including indigo, were displayed as if they were in archaeological grave sites, mottled and wrinkled yet carefully laid out on a bed of dirt. In the words of Ma Ke: “Genuine Fashion today should not follow the glamor of trends. It should instead uncover the extraordinary in the ordinary, for I believe that the ultimate luxury is not the price of the clothing, but its spirit.”10
One last example, in an admittedly fast romp through some of contemporary fashion’s more studied responses to lived-in indigo garments, is the work of the Los Angeles-based label Dosa, in particular its thirty year anniversary “reissue” collection (Plate 16.3). Of this collection, Cristina Kim, the label’s founder, says that she wanted to “capture a sense of returning home. For weeks, I reviewed and studied thirty years of archives—mesmerizing color palettes and textiles chronicling all the places I traveled and artisans I met. With every piece of Dosa clothing, there is an imprint of me that is passed along, becoming a part of someone else’s story.” Over the years, Kim used traditional natural indigo fabrics made in Mexico and India, as well as by Yoruba, Tuareg, and Miao artisans for her designs with the express purpose that they will last long, grow old, transform, and, as such, meld with the wearer to add at least one more layer to an already rich history of making and creativity. Part of this anniversary collection, a coat made of a deep blue glazed cotton handmade by Miao women from the Guizhou Province of China comes accompanied with the reminder: “Because the travel coat is dyed naturally, the indigo color may bleed or rub off while wearing.” Hardly a deterrent, this statement reads more as an invitation to record one’s life, love, and labor in the structure of the coat.
In the presence of indigo-dyed workwear such as the noragi discussed at the beginning of this text, I conclude that it is hard not to be intimately, perhaps inexplicably touched by a foreign object, one that is drained of its formerly saturated blues and sensitively patched and repaired, but whose color, in Michael Taussig’s words, is nonetheless “bigger than the biggest ocean” (Taussig 2009: 152). With pools of color that are hardly shallow, such pieces offer much for contemplation and appreciation, inviting us to become archaeologists of sorts in a world of consumer goods that is most often moving much too fast for the accumulation of deep meaning. Made to last, the indigo blue of sturdy cottons may recede and morph with use and time, but such changes mark an intensified meaning that animates the garment and binds it to us with memory and emotion. Such well-used, well-loved, and well-maintained pieces have inspired many contemporary designers, who in turn ask us to find meaning and beauty in not only the ravages of time but in the care and attention that guided such pieces into the present and into our collective vision. It is now our turn to inscribe our history, our narrative, our care and repair.
Notes
1 Text quoted from the web site evanizer.com (http://www.evanizer.com/articles/blue/index.html [accessed October 14, 2014]).
2 See also the exhibitions “Ragged Beauty: Repair and Reuse, Past and Present,” guest curated by Yoshiko Wada at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco (2004); and “Boro: Threads of Life” at Somerset House in London (2014).
3 See http://www.boisbuchet.org/category/exhibitions/ (accessed August 27, 2015).
4 Thanks to Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things,” in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999) for this reference.
5 See, for example, Annie Mae Young’s 1976 work clothes quilt now in the collection of the Tinwood Alliance. This piece was reportedly the first Gee’s Bend quilt to catch the eye of the collector William Arnett, whose collection served as the basis for the Gee’s Bend quilt exhibitions that travelled around the United States for several years.
6 E-mail correspondence with the artist, 2014.
7 “Sentimental Journey,” Interview, published February 27, 2009. See http://www.interviewmagazine.com/fashion/junya-watanabe/# (accessed November 26, 2015).
8 This information comes from the Facebook page for “Evisu Project—Dirty Dozen + 1”: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150739859051974.467727.72958496973&type=1&comment_id=23246903&offset=0&total_comments=12 (accessed August 31, 2015).
9 Beuys’s statement in regard to his own art is equally applicable to the themes laid out in this essay: “That is why the nature of my sculpture is not fixed and finished, processes continue in most of them: chemical reactions, fermentations, color changes, decay, drying up. Everything is in a state of change.” Quoted in Carin Kuoni, ed., Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 19.
10 “Ma Ke and Wuyong, Chinese Designer,” Tarde o Temprano, March 22, 2010. See http://www.tardeotemprano.net/ma-ke-wuyong-chinese-designer/ (accessed November 26, 2015).
References
Balfour-Paul, Jenny (2000), Indigo, Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
Balfour-Paul, Jenny (2007), Indigo, London: Archetype Books.
Blue (1993), [Film] Dir. Derek Jarman, London.
Durston, Diane (2011), Mottainai: The Fabric of Life: Lessons in Frugality from Traditional Japan, Portland, OR: Gallery Kei and Sri at Portland Japanese Garden.
Hamilton, Ann (2007), “From Indigo Blue,” in The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production, Joan Livingstone and John Ploof (eds), Chicago, IL and Cambridge, MA: School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press and The MIT Press.
Hicks, Sheila (2004), Oral History Interview, February 3, 2004–2011 to March 2004, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Kimmelman, Michael (2002), “Art Review: Jazzy Geometry, Cool Quilters,” New York Times, 29 November.
Neruda, Pablo (1983), Passions and Impressions, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
Powell, Richard R. (2004), Wabi Sabi Simple: Create Beauty, Value Imperfection, Live Deeply, Avon, MA: Adams Media.
Taussig, Michael (2009), What Color Is the Sacred?, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
Thawley, Dan (2013), “Katerina Jebb Scans Balthus at DSM New York,” Interview Magazine, 23 December. Available from: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/katerina-jebb-scans-balthus-at-dsm-new-york/ (accessed November 26, 2015).
Trotman, Samuel (2013), “Visvim’s Indigo Camping Trailer,” WGSN Insider, 21 November. Available from: http://www.wgsn.com/blogs/visvims-indigo-camping-trailer/(accessed November 26, 2015).
Plate 1.1 Entry alcove of Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair. These three garments represent the themes of the exhibition—Vision (Stephen Burrows, right), Innovation (Tillman Grawe, middle), and Power (Yves Saint Laurent, left). © Photograph by and courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.
Plate 1.2 Garment grouping entitled “The Power of Color.” © Photograph by and courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.
Plate 1.3 Garment grouping entitled “Fashion in Orbit.” © Photograph by and courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.
Plate 2.1 Louise Jacobs “The Appeal of Womanhood,” Suffrage Atelier 1912. © Museum of London.
Plate 3.1 Egbejoda, a cloth worn by members of a male club or association. © Photograph by Gbemi Areo. Ijebu Ode 2014.
Plate 3.2 Typical Egbejoda, a cloth worn by members of a female club or association. © Photograph by Gbemi Areo. Ijebu Ode 2014.
Plate 3.3 “Aso-Ebi, family cloth worn at a funeral by sons of the deceased.” © Photograph by Gbemi Areo. Ile-Ife. 2006.
Plate 4.1 Back cover of Marie Claire magazine 30/8/1941, evidencing the use of the tricolor flag. Author’s image.
Plate 4.2 Front cover of Marie Claire magazine 1/8/1943 model wearing a tricolor ensemble by active collaborator Jaques Fath. Author’s image.
Plate 4.3 Front cover of Marie Claire magazine 30/8/1941 in tricolor palette. Author’s image.
Plate 5.1a–g Auspicious colors, Sunday to Saturday. © Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles.
Plate 5.2 Afternoon dress of silk georgette designed by Pierre Balmain, 1960. © Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles.
Plate 5.3 The color blue is associated with Her Majesty Queen Sirikit as she was born on Friday, August 12, 1932. © Office of Her Majesty Queen Sirikit’s Private Secretary, Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles.
Plate 6.1 Blouse belonging to Queen Alexandra, 1860s, L2011.13.31. Courtesy of Pat Kalayjian & Jane Gincig.
Plate 6.2 Evening dress by Douillet, c.1910. © Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset Council.
Plate 6.3 Spotted silk and machine lace bodice by Mme Fromont, 1894 © Historic Royal Palaces.
Plate 7.1 George Florance Irby, 6th Baron Boston. William Orpen, oil on canvas, c.1910. Reproduced with kind permission of Lord Boston.
Plate 7.2 Full-dress Royal Household uniform worn by Lord Boston. Henry Poole & Co., wool, 1885. © Historic Royal Palaces. Photo: Robin Forster.
Plate 7.3 Full-dress Royal Household uniform worn by Lord Boston (detail). Henry Poole & Co., wool, 1885. © Historic Royal Palaces. Photo: Robin Forster.
Plate 8.1 Judas seated on the left in yellow in The Last Supper by Philippe de Champaigne, oil on canvas, 1648. © Photo: REX/Shutterstock
Plate 8.2 Satirical cartoon ‘The Meeting of the Cranks,’ published in The Judge January 1, 1882, New York. The cartoon depicts Oscar Wilde caricatured as an effete aesthete dressed in yellow with a large sunflower in his button hole meeting Charles J Guiteau, who famously pleaded insanity after assassinating President John Garfield. 1882 was the year of Wilde’s first lecture tour of America and in June of that year Guiteau’s plea was rejected and he was executed. © Photo: Robana/REX/Shutterstock.
Plate 8.3 Catherine Duchess of Cambridge wearing a yellow dress designed by Roksanda Ilincic on the occasion of her visit to Sydney, Australia, April 16, 2014. © Photo: Tim Rooke/REX/Shutterstock.
Plate 9.1 Frame shots taken from hand-colored film Annabelle and Her Serpentine Dance Dir.: W. K. L. Dickson and William Heise. Edison Mfg. Co, US, 1895.
Plate 9.2 Georges Lepape “Les choses de Paul Poiret,” Paris, France, 1911. Musee de la mode et costume. (Photo by Photo12/UIG/Getty Images).
Plate 10.1 “Red Carpet,” Viktor & Rolf, Autumn/Winter 2014, Haute Couture Runway Collection, Paris. © Photo: firstVIEW.
Plate 10.2 “Bluescreen (Long Live the Immaterial!)” Viktor & Rolf, Autumn/Winter 2002, Ready-to-Wear Runway Collection, Paris. © Photo: firstVIEW.
Plate 10.3 “Bluescreen (Long Live the Immaterial!)” Viktor & Rolf, Autumn/Winter 2002, Ready-to-Wear Runway Collection, Paris. © Photo: firstVIEW.
Plate 11.1a Arsenical wreaths from the Maison Tilmans, Paris, Les Modes Parisiennes, January 24, 1863, Author’s collection.
Plate 11.1b Chromolithograph showing the effect of arsenic used in artificial flower making on professional workers’ hands, from Maxime Vernois, 1859. © Wellcome Library, London.
Plate 11.2 Arsenical green silk 3-piece day dress with train and overskirt, c.1868–1870. © Ryerson Fashion Research Collection 2014.07.406 A+B+C, Gift of Suddon-Cleaver Collection. Photo credit: Suzanne Petersen.
Plate 11.3 Potentially arsenical gauze wreath with fruit and flowers, French, 1850s. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Plate 12.1 Page from F.H. Goodchild’s dye book. © Liberty Fabric Ltd.
Plate 12.2 Page from F.H. Goodchild’s dye book showing Liberty print samples. © Liberty Fabric Ltd.
Plate 12.3 Page from Joyce Clissold’s dye book. © Museum and Study Collection, Central St Martins.
Plate 13.1 Margaine Lacroix, dress in “vert égyptien,” Les Modes (Paris), December 1908 facing p33. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Plate 13.2 Paul Iribe, evening coats by Paul Poiret, pochoir print, Les Robes de Paul Poiret, racontées par Paul Iribe (Paris: Poiret, 1908) Plate 9. © Getty Research Institute.
Plate 13.3 Léon Bakst, “Dioné—dessin de Bakst réalisé par Paquin,” pochoir print, Journal des dames et des modes (Paris), no34, 1 mai 1913, plate 73. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Plate 15.1 Radama I (1793–1828), the first Merina monarch to adopt European dress forms, clothed in a red jacket likely of broadcloth. Oil painting, from life, by Andre Copalle, 1826. Courtesy of the Ministère de la Culture et de l’Artisanat, Antananarivo.
Plate 15.2 A dress having belonged to Queen Rasoaherina (1814–1868), made of red broadcloth and embellished with silk embroidered floral forms and gold braid. Former collections of the Queen’s Palace Museum destroyed by fire in 1995. Courtesy of the Ministère de la Culture et de l’Artisanat, Antananarivo.
Plate 16.1 Noragi (work coat), early twentieth century. Indigo-dyed cotton. Japanese maker. Collection of the RISD Museum, Elizabeth T. and Dorothy N. Casey Fund 2012.21.1.
Plate 16.2 in that one moment I can see dust collect on my fingertips, 2007. Abaca paper, indigo ink (natural indigo, linseed oil). Indigo ink was mulled by hand, applied to zinc plates and printed on an etching press onto handmade abaca paper. Agata Michalowska, Polish. © Agata Michalowska. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Plate 16.3 Travel Coat, 2014 traveller collection. Traditional Miao indigo textile. Dosa, design label. Christina Kim, designer, American. Photo © Christina Kim.