{"id":74252,"date":"2022-09-20T01:00:21","date_gmt":"2022-09-20T05:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=74252"},"modified":"2022-09-19T09:02:11","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T13:02:11","slug":"qotd-why-purple-was-such-a-rare-colour-in-the-flags-of-the-pre-industrial-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/09\/20\/qotd-why-purple-was-such-a-rare-colour-in-the-flags-of-the-pre-industrial-era\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Why purple was such a rare colour in the flags of the pre-industrial era"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Today, we are used to the effectively infinite range of colors offered by synthetic dyes, but for pre-modern dye-workers, they were largely restricted to colors that could be produced from locally available or imported dyestuffs. If you wanted a given color of fabric, you needed to be able to find something in the natural world which, when broken down could give you a chemical pigment that you could transfer to your fabric in a durable way. That put real limits on the colors which could be dyed and the availability of those colors<\/strong>. Some colors simply couldn’t be produced this way \u2013 a good example were golden or metallic colors. If something in a dress was to be truly golden (and not merely yellow), the only<\/em> way to do that prior to synthetic dyes and paints was to use actual gold<\/em>, weaving small strands of ultra-thin gold wire into the cloth or embroidering designs with it. Needless to say, that<\/em> was something only done by the very wealthy. Alternately, if the dye for a given hue or color came from something rare or foreign or difficult to process (for instance, in all three cases, Tyrian or royal purple, which came from the murex<\/em> sea snails \u2013 if you have ever wondered why no country has purple as a national color this is why, before synthetic dyes, coloring your flags and uniforms purple would have been bonkers<\/em> expensive), then it was going to be expensive and rare and there just wasn’t much you could do about that.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2021-04-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, we are used to the effectively infinite range of colors offered by synthetic dyes, but for pre-modern dye-workers, they were largely restricted to colors that could be produced from locally available or imported dyestuffs. If you wanted a given color of fabric, you needed to be able to find something in the natural world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,41,16],"tags":[1457,872,618,377,315],"class_list":["post-74252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","category-science","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-chemistry","tag-clothing","tag-conspicuousconsumption","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jjC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74252"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76603,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74252\/revisions\/76603"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}