THE COLOR OF QUEENS

Purple was always a tough color to wear. Unless you’re a royal.
Not tough in the sense of how it looks on you, although color experts will tell you it is difficult to find the right undertone.
Tough in this sense: until the last couple of centuries, almost nobody could afford the dyes.
There’s a lot going on with purple.
It all started in Tyre.
The Phoenicians found out that the ink from a particular kind of shellfish could be used to color cloth a vivid purple shade, which became known as Tyrian purple. That was the good part. But it was quite a task to make. One ancient source says it took ten thousand mollusks just to get enough dye for the hem of a garment. Another says a pound of purple-dyed wool was worth a pound of gold.
No surprise, then, that for most of history, it was a color for elites and royals: Roman generals at their triumph, Byzantine Emperors, medieval queens and kings. Only a very small number of people could afford purple robes, and depending on where you were, an even smaller number could be allowed to wear it.
For hundreds of years, there were “sumptuary laws,” restrictions on what sort of people could wear some kinds of finery. Even if you somehow made enough money to buy a purple robe, you probably couldn’t wear it.
Tyrian purple was special, but – as anyone who knows the color wheel can guess -- there were other ways to get purple, especially once indigo became more available. Cloth could be dyed twice: first blue, then red or vice versa. But that didn’t mean it was cheap and easy: double the dye meant double the cost.
So, for centuries, purple was rare, special, and very expensive.
Until the Industrial Revolution.
In 1856, a British student named William Henry Perkin was looking for a way to make quinine, the desperately-needed malaria treatment, when he stumbled on a brilliant purple dye.
Soon, aniline dyes, with vivid shades of purple and mauve, were everywhere.
In the 1860s, both Queen Victoria and Empress Eugenie of France wore it for important occasions. But unlike the earlier royal purples, this one was affordable, so women could run right out and get something in the same shade as their monarch.
And they did.
It wasn’t just clothes.
Much like the earlier vogue for the (potentially deadly) arsenic green, aniline purples were soon everywhere and in everything. Unlike arsenic green, they weren’t flagrantly dangerous, and there are no lurid tales of poor clothing factory workers suffering horrific, and vividly purple, deaths.
They still weren’t great; later research would associate the dyes with cancer, and they were ultimately mostly banned from food use. But they were also associated with treating illnesses. Artificial dyes made by Perkin helped with the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus in 1908.
By then, though, fashion had moved on.
Edwardian ladies preferred sweet pastels like lilac and eau de nil, the barely-green shade named for the waters of the Nile.
Well, except for one very important occasion.
When Edward VII and his queen Alexandra were crowned, they were swathed in, what else, yards upon yards of purple velvet.
The more things change…

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