Colors in Fashion

Color speaks a powerful cultural language, displaying political, sexual, and economic messages that, throughout history, have shown how we relate to ourselves and our world. This ground-breaking collection is the first to interrogate how color's manifestation through fashionable and ceremonial dress has played a significant role in the formation of society, performing dialogues of social acceptance and exclusion, convention and subversion.

From the use of white in pioneering feminism and the French postwar penchant for black, to mystical scarlet broadcloth and the transformation of arsenic-laden green from consumer favorite to sexual deviant, this book shows that color in dress is never straightforward and is as mutable, nuanced, and varied as color itself. Divided into four thematic parts – solidarity, power, innovation, and desire – each section highlights the often violent, emotional, and complex histories of color in dress across geographical, temporal and cultural boundaries. In this ground-breaking publication, color is analyzed as an agent for social change, stratification, and consolidation, and shows that underlying our contemporary relaxed attitude to color lays a chromatic complexity that speaks of wars, migrations, economic ascendancy, and decline.

While acknowledging the important role that technology has had to play in the development of new dyes, this collection explores color as an agent for technical innovation that continues to inspire designers, artists, and performers today as it did in the past. Bringing together cutting-edge contributions from leading scholars, it is essential reading for students and researchers of fashion, textiles, design, cultural studies, art history, and material culture.

Jonathan Faiers is Reader in Fashion Theory and Co-Director of the Winchester Luxury Research Group at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK and editor of the journal Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption.

Mary Westerman Bulgarella is a consultant on the conservation, research and display of textiles and historic dress and the Advisory Committee Coordinator of Costume Colloquium, based in the USA.

Introduction
Jonathan Faiers (Winchester School of Art, UK) and Mary Westerman Bulgarella (Independent Consultant, Italy)
Part 1: Color and Solidarity
1. Color as Theme in the Ebony Fashion Fair
Joy Bivins (Chicago History Museum, USA)
2. Purity and Parity: The White Dress of the Suffrage Movement in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
Kimberly Wahl (Ryerson University, Canada)
3. Birds of the Same “Color” Flock Together: Color as Expression of Identity and Solidarity in Aso-Ebi Cloth of the Yoruba
Margaret Olugbemisola Areo (Ladoke Akintola University, Nigeria) and Adebowale Biodun Areo (National Museum, Nigeria)
4. Contradictory Colors: Tricolor in Vichy France's Fashion Culture
Emmanuelle Dirix (Chelsea College of Art & Design, UK and Antwerp Fashion Academy, Beligum)
Part 2: Color and Power
5. Dress and Color at the Thai Court
Piyanan Petcharaburanin and Alisa Saisavetvaree (Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, Thailand)
6. 'Gold and Silver by Night': Queen Alexandra: A Life in Color
Kate Strasdin (Falmouth University, UK)
7. Lord Boston's Court Uniform: A Story of Color, Politics and the Psychology of Belonging
Deirdre Murphy (Historic Royal Palaces, UK)
8. Yellow is the New Red, or Clothing the Recession and How the Shade of Shame Became Chic
Jonathan Faiers (Winchester School of Art, UK)
Part 3: Color and Innovation
9. Color Before Technicolor: Colorized Fashion Films of the Silent Era
Michelle Finamore (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA)
10. Color as Concept: From International Klein Blue to Viktor & Rolf's "Bluescreen"
Michal Lynn Shumate (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA)
11. Tainted Love: Oscar Wilde's Toxic Green Carnation, Queerness and Chromophobia
Alison Matthews David (Ryerson University, Canada)
12. Starlit Skies Blue versus Durindone Blue
Anna Buruma (Liberty and Central Saint Martins, UK)
Part 4: Color and Desire
13.Rough Wolves in the Sheepcote: The Meanings of Fashionable Color 1909-1914
Claire Rose (Royal School of Needlework, UK)
14. 'Le noir étant la dominante de notre vêture …': The Many Meanings of Black in Post-War Paris
Beatrice Behlen (Museum of London, UK)
15. British Scarlet Broadcloth: The Perfect Red in Eastern Africa, c.1820 - 1885
Sarah Fee (Royal Ontario Museum, Canada)
16. Lives Lived: Archaeology of Faded Indigo
Kate Irvin (Rhode Island School of Design, USA)

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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