Fashion Victims

Boy, this past month (and a bit) has flown by...  I'll have more on this and some thoughts for going forward later, but I wanted to share one of the things I've done in this time.

Last weekend (June 3-6) I went up to Hamilton and Toronto, Ontario to visit friends, but the catalyst was to see the Fashion Victims exhibit at the Bata Shoe Museum.  I don't know where I first heard of this exhibit.  I know I found out about the book, written by one of the people who curated the exhibit, last year some time before it came out in October.  With exchanges I had to do of Christmas gifts, I was able to get the book.

Whenever it was I found out about the exhibit, I knew I had to figure out a way to go.  When I looked at the website, it showed that it was at the museum through June 2016 (it's now been extended through January 2017).  So I brought up to my friends in the Toronto area that I was going to try to come and see that, and we should all meet up, etc.  So after planning where I was going to stay, and when I was coming, I went.  And I'm really glad I did.  (All following photos are ones I took at the museum.)

The exhibit was set up to look like a salon, where everything was on display, and you could pick out things you wanted.  I loved how it was set up.  The black and white floor, the wood (-looking) walls, the alcoves of items... It was gorgeous.  Then you actually start looking at the items...

Mauve shoes.  Ties in to my post inspired by mauve. :)

Arsenical green shoes.  Also ties into the earlier post.  I found out what those

weird shaped boots (bottom left), that I think are ugly..., are called: Adelaide boots.
The middle pair has actual gold embroidery.

Arsenical green dress.  

Lacquered embroidery box.  The sap from the lacquer tree is related to poison oak

and so would cause rashes on the people that created it.

A pair of Queen Victoria's mourning slippers, from towards the end of her life.  These have a butterfly embroidered on the top.  She gave these to a housekeeper.

Highly feminized, boudoir slippers.

More mauve shoes.

Button hooks.  I love the thistle-looking one.

A crinoline.  Crinolines were dangerous because they trapped air under them, and if a woman brushed too close to a fire, the air trapped inside would ignite, and engulf her.

Those middle shoes were one of the first pairs to have elasticized gussets.

Deerskin slipper uppers, with moose hair embroidery.  (Yay, Canada. ;) )

Mercury coated, beaver fur top hat.

I wish I had taken pictures of more of the panels in the exhibit - I don't remember why some things were "deadly" or created "fashion victims".  I wish I had taken more pictures in general.  There was a gorgeous Regency gown at the start of the exhibit that was deadly because the light, airy fabric easily caught fire.  There was also a pair of shoes and gloves that belonged to Empress Sissi, that were just unbelievably tiny.

If you're in the Toronto area, or can get there by January, I highly recommend seeing this exhibit.  I need to get back to reading the book!  Next week I’ll have some other pictures from the museum.

Mulready Stationery

            I’m back with a real post this week!  Yay!

            Last night I finished reading The Brontë Cabinet by Deborah Lutz, which I highly recommend.  It’s a joint biography of the Brontës through nine items.  One of the items was a letter Charlotte had written which had been torn apart and sewn back together.  The chapter about letters discussed them more broadly; the torn one was just a small part of the chapter.  In talking about letters, Lutz went briefly into the history of the postal system and different types of items that were used by the Brontës.  One of the items mentioned was Mulready stationery.

            This is probably going to be a shorter post since Mulreadys didn’t last long, so a bit of background on what was going on with postage at the time.  Before 1840 (when postal reforms went into effect), in England, postage was paid by the sheet of paper, with the envelope counting as a piece of paper; was paid by the mileage the item had to travel; and was paid by the recipient of the mail.

            In 1840, postal reform took place.  Both stamps and letter sheets were introduced.  Stamps were what you think they are, a small square you could stick on any item going through the mail, as long as it had enough postage.  Letter sheets were preprinted and prepaid sheets of paper that would be folded up to create the letter and the envelope in one.  If you’ve ever used or seen air mail sheets, the letter sheets were like that.

            William Mulready was the person who came up with the design that was printed on the letter sheets.  Mulready was a well-known Irish artist, living in London at this time.  He was commissioned to create the illustrations for the letter sheets.  His illustrations had Britannia at the top and center; on either side were symbols of Asia and North America, showing the reach of the British Empire.  The illustration also showed that the mail was prepaid, with different colors of ink being used for different postage: black for one penny, blue for two penny.  Because they were just blue or black inked images, a lot of people hand-colored them in.

            Rowland Hill was a postal officer and one of the men who helped with postal reform.  He was sure that stamps would be a folly and that Mulready stationery would take over.  However, almost immediately it became apparent that people preferred stamps.  Mulready’s design was overly complex and was mocked and caricatured almost immediately.  Stationery creators and sellers also didn’t like it because then they couldn’t sell their product, whereas stamps could be used on anything.  People thought the government was trying to control the supply of envelopes by developing the letter sheets, too.

            Mulready stationery went on sale May 1, and was valid in the mail starting on May 6.  By May 12, Hill realized it wasn’t going well, and within two months the stationery was being replaced by more and different stamps.  The supply of Mulreadys that were in shops were used until they were gone, but distributors weren’t distributing them anymore.  What was left of the Mulreadys were destroyed, eventually having the middles punched out so the part without printing could be reused.  These middles were sold as waste paper or were recycled.

            So that’s it about Mulready stationery.  They only lasted from May to November 1840.  They’re such an interesting part of postal reform and history; I’m surprised I haven’t come across them before.

Victorian Fabric Dyes

            Despite my main interest being the period between World Wars One and Two, I’ve been getting increasingly interested in the Victorian Era.  There’s always been a bit: I love watching adaptations of Dickens, Gaskell, Burnett; The Forsyte Sage is one of my favorite miniseries and books (not written in the period, but the first two parts take place during it); I loved The Young Victoria.  After Christmas I picked up three or four books on Victoria and the Era, and I’m working through one of them currently.  In the book, the author takes you through a day in the life of a Victorian, covering different classes and different years in the period.  There is a lengthy discussion of changes in fashion and the new colors that were created at this time due to the discovery of chemical dyes.

            Dyeing clothes has been around for millennia.  Dyes were made from plants and animals.  The first popular fabric dye was a purple made from crushed mollusk shells; it was the most expensive dye ever, literally costing its weight in gold.  By about the year 300, instead of things that actually made purple, people were using blue and red to make purple; this was more affordable, and, well, the mollusk had gone extinct.  Late in the fourth century, the Emperor of Byzantium issued a decree that only the imperial family could wear purple.  You could be killed if you went against the decree.

            The next popular dye was red.  In Europe, madder root was used to make red.  In South America, Brazilwood was used for a brighter red.  In Central America, cochineal, an insect, was used.  In the fifteenth century, “Cardinal’s Purple” was used for the clergy, but was actually a crimson red made from a different insect related to cochineal; cochineal was brought back to Europe around 1519.  In the seventeenth century, it was found that adding tin to this made for a deeper, more intense red; this was used for the British Army’s coats and for those bright red hunting jackets you see.

            Now we’re finally caught up to where dyes were at coming into the Victorian Era.

            In the 1850s, William Henry Perkins was trying to cure malaria by creating artificial quinine.  In the process, Perkins discovered aniline dyes.  Aniline dyes were “a byproduct created from distilling tar left from coal that was ‘cooked’ to produce gas for commercial use” (1).  Perkins created the “first mass produced chemical dye” (2) – mauveine.  At first Perkins called it Tyrian Purple after the Roman purple, but since this was a real thing, that name was dropped.  Next the color was called mauve, after a flower, but personally Perkins called it mauveine.  (This mauveine is a different shade than modern mauves, so that’s why that name is still used. (3))

            Mauveine wasn’t the first aniline dye - the first dyes from coal tar were blues and reds - but Perkins was the first to really pursue aniline dyes.  There were issues at the beginning: the earliest mauveine dyes weren’t very colorfast, fading in the sun; they couldn’t dye cotton - the most popular fabric at the time - only wool and silk; creating aniline dyes was incredibly expensive.  Perkins experimented though and found that tannins (the same things found in wines and whatnot) helped the dye work on cotton.  He also found a way to produce the dyes much more cheaply; he found his own dyer and built his own factory. (4)

            Around this same time, the Empress Eugenie decided she really loved wearing purple.  In 1858, Queen Victoria wore a pale purple to her daughter’s wedding.  Purples, of all shades, were on the rise.  In 1859, Punch magazine was joking about the “mauve measles”.  After mauve went out of fashion, there were reds, browns, other purples, yellows, blues, and greens.  Perkins kept up with the changing fashions, coming up with new colors: dahlia, Britania violet (a deep blue), Perkin’s green, aniline black, and others (5).

            Aniline dyes were very popular.  Many of the colors were bright (though not all were; aniline blacks were incredibly popular) and the new dyes didn’t fade in the sun or rinse out in the wash.  Natural dyes were more pale, and would fade or wash out over time; the market for natural dyes just collapsed.

Aniline dyes also were safer than some of the older dyes.  As mentioned with purples, greens could only be made by mixing blues and yellows until the late 1700s.  In 1775 Carl Wilhelm Scheele created a bright, colorfast green by mixing copper and arsenic.  Scheele’s Green was used for everything from wallpaper and paintings to clothing.  It looked good in natural light and the new gas lighting.  It was used for the fake flowers that were so popular.  It was everywhere.  It could also be dangerous; it did have arsenic in it after all.  Aniline greens took over from the arsenic dyed greens in the 1870s.

(Honestly though, these arsenic dyes weren’t as dangerous as they’ve been made out to be - especially not the greens.  The most dangerous arsenic dyes were red and black, and possibly blue.  Green got the bad rap probably mostly from the fake flowers it was used on.  Unless you had very sensitive skin, or allergies to the metals in them, fabric dyes probably wouldn’t really hurt you.  The people that suffered the most from arsenic dyes were the people that created the dyes and the dyed items.  The worries about arsenic dyes were more likely about “Victorian morality and condemnation of fashion and female vanity” than anything else (6).)

By the late nineteenth century nearly all colors could be created with aniline dyes.  Not everyone approved of chemical dyes though.  By 1900, the Shah of Persia had even banned the dyes from being used in making rugs.  If someone did make a rug with chemical dyes, the carpets were taken and the guilty party was fined at double the value and possibly even burned in public.  Aniline dyes helped pave the way for modern dyes.

            So that’s a brief telling of the evolution of fabric dyes, and Victorian chemical dyes.  I didn’t find quite as much as I would have liked (I do have a whole book about the creation of mauve, but I haven’t read it yet, and that’s still limited in scope), but I found it pretty interesting.  Besides, those pretty, crazy colors!

1 - Fabric Dye: Dyeing to be Fashionable

2, 3, 4, 5 - Terminology: What are aniline dyes? (or, thehistory of mauve and mauveine)

6 - Drop Dead Gorgeous: A TL;DR Tale of Arsenic in VictorianLife