I was chatting with my Dad over dinner the other night, and the conversation moved onto dyeing textiles and whether poor people were able to afford coloured cloth before the advent of synthetic dyes in the 19th century, given the cost and difficulty of dyeing with vegetable dyes (I was not able to answer him). From there we got talking about the different colours and what plants they came from, and it gave me the idea of blogging for a while about different colours, their history and significance. Today we are looking at the colour Blue.
Blue, one of the three primary colours, has been an important colour in art and decoration for since ancient times. In the context of dyeing fabrics, until the 19th century, blue came from two plant sources – woad and indigo. Woad (Isatis tinctoria) is a yellow flowered plant from the Brassica family – it is related to mustard, and has always been used both medicinally and for dyeing fabrics. The colour is extracted not from its flowers, but from its leaves. For a long time, this was the source of blue dye for northern Europe. The other plant that produces the blue dye, interestingly exactly the same chemical make up, is Indigo (Indigofera tinctoria). The oldest known fabric dyed indigo dates to 60000 years ago, and was discovered in Peru and many Asian countries, India, China, Japan have used indigo as a dye. However, India was the earliest major centre for cultivation and was a primary supplier to Europe as early as the Greco-Roman era, which is why we associate indigo with India – the Greek word for the dye was indikon meaning Indian. The Romans latinised the term to indicum, which eventually passed into English as the word indigo.
Indigo remained a rare commodity in Europe until the late 15th century, when Vasco da Gama discoverd the sea route to India, which meant that importers could avoid the heavy duties imposed by the Persian, Levantine and Greek middlemen, not to mention the long and dangerous land routes. Consequently there was a significant rise in the import to Europe of indigo. Subesequently indigo crops were set up in the New World, with much of the labour being provided by enslaved people. In the 16th century, Germany and France outlawed imported indigo in order to protect the local woad industry, but this attempt failed and woad was largely replaced by indigo for dyeing. Because of its high value as a trading commodity, indigo was often known as ‘blue gold’. By the 19th century, the demand for indigo was such that, for example the amount of land in India under indigo cultivation was more than 2,700 square miles.
Everything changed, however, when the German chemist, Adolf von Baeyer managed to describe the synthesis of indigo, and by 1890 Dr Flimm of Germany discovered a simple way of synthesising indigo using caustic potash. By 1897 an economically viable synthesising process had been created which replaced natural plant production. At that time, 19000 tonnes of indigo were being produced from plant sources. By 1914, this had dropped to 1,000 tonnes and it continued to contract. Now more than 50,000 tonnes of synthetic indigo is produced world wide and the both the woad and indigo cultivation industries have gone.
The issue with synthetic dyes is that they are heavily dependent on fossil fuel use. There is some work being done now on trying to go back to using plant based dyes for dyeing textiles. I was recently approached by a company called Oxford Bio Colours which looks interesting and I am considering stocking some of their yarns later in the year.
As to my father’s question about whether poor people wore colours – I am not much closer to being able to answer. My reading did show me that blue was widely worn for centuries – in Egypt Christians were obliged to wear blue turbans for example, and blue was the colour of mourning. In Japan, indigo became especially important during the Edo period, partly due to a growing textiles industry and partly because commoners had been banned from wearing silk leading to an increasing cultivation of cotton and consequently indigo which was one of the few substances that could dye it. Throughout West Africa indigo was used for centuries. From the Tuareg nomads to the Cameroon, clothes dyed with indigo signified wealth. The Tuareg are sometimes called the ‘Blue People’ because the indigo pigment in their traditional robes and turbans stained their skin dark blue. Of course we have tales in England of the Celts dyeing their skin with woad to terrify their enemies.
Blue is still known to be a favourite colour for people to wear as well, although oddly enough this is not reflected here in the shop, where cream in all its varieties, that is natural wool, remains our best selling colour! This does not apply to me to the extent that when I first opened the shop, I forgot to stock blue coloured yarns until a customer plaintively asked me whether I would be getting some in. I learned my lesson and now we have a range of blues in all the brands we stock, as well as in our hand dyed yarns.
