Catching the Past "Colours" Part 2

In my next release, A Heart to Treasure, the heroine's father is a draper. So, I've been busy poring over books on fashion and fabrics and colours in particular. The fabrics about did my head in with all their talk about wefts and this and that, but the colours of the fabrics I found fascinating. So, I thought I'd share about them with you!

Creating deep and lasting colours had long been a tedious and sometimes impossible process, but in the Georgian Era, innovations with dyes took off. Opening up a world of colours on fabrics previously never seen. If you missed my last post which covered the colours white, black, blue, and other sombre shades, you can read it here.

Today, we are talking about Red, Pink, Green, and Yellow!

Red

We are starting with red because it's my favourite colour. :)

One thing foreigners often remarked on when they came to England was the volume of red cloaks one would see dotting the countryside. Red was by far the most popular colour for cloaks in the countryside, and it spanned all social classes. Austen once wrote that her maid had got a red cloak and was very happy to have it too. (FYI, Austen frequently wrote about their servants, and she once nursed her maid back to health. I just thought that was interesting to note. Now, back to red...)

The best and brightest scarlet fabrics were dyed with cochineal, derived from a scale insect. It was the Indigo of reds and highly favoured

The duller reds came from a plant root called madder. It was cheaper, and like the Prussian Blue we talked about last month, madder was the colour to use if you wanted a variety of shades in red including orange, brown, purple, and even black (depending on the mordant used.). Unfortunately, the plant didn't take to the English weather and had to be imported from Netherlands and France.

"Turkey Red" was a long and noxious method of making madder dye just as bright as the more favoured cochineal. Although, it was still cheaper than cochineal. This was used in Britain by the 1780s.

Before we leave red, I've a fact any squeamish tummies might want to skip over. So, considered yourself warned. Cochineal powder (from insects) was also used to colour foods red. I leaned this when I studied Regency Ices (you can read about ices here and the ice creams here). Recipes from the time actually listed cochineal as a food dye. That's when I first looked it up and discovered how it's made. Yuck...

Although, depending on your age and your country's food regulations, you might have eaten cochineal yourself! It's apparently still legal in Australia and for certain products in America. The EU and the UK only banned it in 2019. So, there you go. Let's move on to green, shall we?

Green

There wasn't a lot said about green in my resource books, but I've still a few interesting bits to note.

Green is apparently one of Mrs. Jane Bingley's favourite colours. In May 1813, Jane Austen writes a letter to her sister about visiting Pall Mall to view a collection of Sir Joshua Reynold's paintings. There she found a portrait of Mrs. Bingley,

"dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments... I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her."

(You'll have to keep reading to find out Mrs. Darcy's favourite colour.)

Austen mentions owning a green pair of shoes in her letters. One presumes she must have had a gown to match it. And while this next bit of info isn't about the green pair of shoes specifically, we learn from Austen's letters that Cassandra and Jane apparently shared the same shoe size. Cassandra would try on readymade shoes when she was in Town and then send them to Jane when Jane "commissioned" her to get some.

In another letter to Cassandra, Jane mentions a Sally Benham as having gotten a new green gown. That in itself isn't very interesting, but Jane wrote the whole letter backwards! It was thankfully a very short letter. Although I did still have a bit of a headache at the end after trying to read it. The original mention (if I've copied it correctly) went like this... "Yllas Mahneb sah tog a wen neerg nwog." That sounds like something my sisters and I would have pulled on each other! LOL

Last but not least, Hilary in Dressing the Georgians gave this dire warning about green:

If you mixed yellow and blue to make green, one MUST protect the garment from light. Because all yellow dyes faded upon exposed to light, and your garment would revert to blue.

At least blue was a fashionable shade huh? But I imagine you'd still be pretty annoyed if your green gown turned blue because of a careless maid or because your sister borrowed it to wear on an outdoor excursion.

Pink silk gown

Pink

The colour pink is especially associated with the rococo period (1720s-1780s), and during the 1770s and 1780s, pink was a popular colour for wedding dresses.

It was also considered very flattering for the complexion and was often worn by men and boys of any age. However, because it carried the association of fertility, it was inappropriate for a girl to wear pink until she reached adolescence, and she had to stop wearing pink when she reached middle age (which FYI was around 30... ouch).

How annoying that men could wear pink whenever they pleased, and that apparently, I've well and truly passed middle age by Regency standards. How rude!

Furthermore, did you know that pink wasn't used as a colour adjective until 1733?

Anna Reynolds in Style and Society 'Dressing the Georgians' said that Pink was the common name for the flower Dianthus, and the common colour of the Dianthus was often pink. So, in time, the common name for the flower came to mean the common colour of the flower, and we got the colour adjective pink. :)

Once pink finally became a word to describe a colour, it meant all the shades from dusty rose to palest pink.

Another use for the word pink was as a name for the decorative perforations in fabric. Anyone got an idea how pink had anything to do with that???

In any case, Jane Austen once wrote to her sister that,

'all my money is spent in buying white gloves and pink persian.' Jan. 10th, 1796.

Persian was a type of lightweight, soft fabric with a slight shine and a tendency towards translucency. It was a common fabric and relatively cheap. So exactly how much had Austen bought if she'd spent all her money on gloves and pink persian???

We also know from her letters that Austen had a pair of pink shoes which she didn't think were beautiful, but at least they fit her quite well. I, myself, am all about comfort, so I vote for the pink shoes which fit comfortably! :)

Yellow

Yellow dyes came from a variety of plants including the Chinese foxglove (the forbidden Chinese imperial shade) or the imported quercitron made from American black oak trees (anyone else think it interesting that a shade of yellow comes from a tree which has black in its name?), or turmeric from India and Asia.

But no matter what dye you used, all of them faded on exposure to light. So, if you had a yellow garment, you had to zealously protect it from light.

Which, by the way, is a possible reason for seeing so many yellow gowns in museums. People had to preserve the gown carefully, and that ended up leaving us with a well-cared for garment!

In the mid-18th Century, the distinctive 'egg yolk' yellow was a popular shade. Possibly because 'chinoiserie' was directly associated with the emperor of China and restricted from general use in China. Of course, since they were in England they could wear the 'royal' colour. I mean, who doesn't want to dress like royalty? (Okay, I walked into that one. I don't. It's way too stifling, and me no looky good in yellow...)

Someone who did like yellow was Austen! In 1801, she writes, "I am come home from Mr. Lysons as yellow as I went;--You cannot like your yellow gown half so well as I do, nor a quarter neither." Trust me, that cheeky tone is all through Austen's letters! Which actually makes them a lot of fun to read.

But not only does Austen rather like her yellow gown...

Yellow was the colour Jane Austen said Mrs Darcy loved.

Of course, if you paid attention to the part about yellow fading in light, Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy would NOT be wearing yellow on one of her famous walks. This would be an indoor/evening gown.

Another reason for the popularity of yellow in the Georgian Era could be that a very precious metal shares the same shade. GOLD!

And once upon a time, one made yellow fabric by weaving actual metal threads of gold into it. Ouch! That would have been expensive. (FYI, this also led to the Regency fad of drizzling where one removed those precious metals from the fabric and sold them for money.) A dye would have been a lot cheaper and lighter in weight, and at least no one would pick your dress apart. Just uhm, make sure you keep it away from light. :)

Some things to note:

Which fabrics could be dyed best?

Historically and in general, wool, silk, or animal fabrics took to dyes better. Cotton and linen (plant-based fabric) refused to be dyed until the First Industrial Revolution which began roughly in 1760. That's when people could finally start dying cotton. Although, dyed cotton still had a tendency to fade. But despite all the innovations, linen remained stubborn and more often than not was left in its natural or bleached state.

What is a mordant?

Mordant is the technical term for the product which helps the colours stick to the fabric and what determines the shade of the colour you're going to get. Unfortunately, the mordant could sometimes rot the fabric, which was especially true for silk.

Getting mordants could often be an unsanitary and very smelly process. Hence leading to the industrial town's unpleasant reputations and poor working on conditions.

Redyeing

Redyeing old and faded gowns helped to revive a tired wardrobe on a budget, but it was not recommended for silk gowns (see mordants above). Redyeing was also especially useful to quickly updated one's wardrobe for mourning. Jane Austen wrote her sister several times about redyeing their gowns including for cases of mourning. But there was the risk that at some point the fabric might rot, so redye with caution!

Where did I get my information?

Most of this information is compiled from Anne Reynolds's Style and Society "Dressing the Georgians" and two of Hilary Davison's books, Jane Austen's Wardrobe and Dress and Style in Jane Austen's Age. I've also thrown in a few examples from Jane Austen's Letters, the fourth edition, collected and edited by Deirdre Le Faye. And the images came from Wikimedia Commons.

Finishing up:

Well, I think I've discussed all the colours for now (unless I stumble upon something I simply must share!). I hope you enjoyed them.

Stay tuned over the next few months. I'll be back with a blog on when the Regency fashions started, and next month, I'm going to share what fashions Jane Austen wore when she was 18!

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Before you go, why not check out my next release?

The vicar’s son and the draper’s daughter have fought against all odds to be together, and with just days until their wedding, both are ignoring the cracks in their relationship. But a storm is coming. One that will shatter everything.

In this Broader Regency, reverse rags-to-riches, interclass romance novella, you'll find faith, a clean and wholesome romance, and a happy ending. While this book does not feature Jane Austen, it is set the year she turned 19. Ever wonder what England was like when Austen was a teen? Read a Heart to Treasure to find out!

Read more about "A Heart to Treasure" here