Inevitably, Punch did its best to deflate the new trend. The magazine had a particular distrust of most things fashionable and all things French, and managed to spear them both in a column entitled ‘Imperatrice de la France et de la mode’. The world was indebted to the wife of Louis Napoleon for ‘the endowment of that sumptuous and becoming colour which modistes and Mantallinis delight in calling mauve … We ask the ladies, the most impartial judges in the difficult art of personal adornment, if they can point their little finger to any other Empress whose edicts are more cheerfully followed by her millions upon millions of her admiring subjects.’
Initially, the mauve mania benefited William Perkin very little. The colour originated not from his aniline paste but from French supplies of murexide and purple dyes derived from various species of lichens. The lichen dye was of a brilliant colour, and like Perkin’s purple, was capable of being produced in several strengths and shades. Writing in his Manual of the Art of Dyeing, published in Glasgow in 1853, James Napier noted that ‘could this colour be obtained of a permanent character, and fixed upon cotton, its value would be inestimable’.
The lichen purple was produced primarily in Lyons by the firm of Guinon, Marnas et Bonnet, the company that had previously produced a strong yellow from picric acid. Initially it was applied only to silks and wool, but by 1857 a cotton mordant had been found, and the demand for the dye by far outweighed the firm’s ability to supply it. This fact was not lost on Guinon’s rivals, and in January 1858 representatives from the dye works Renard Frères and from several other competing firms travelled from Lyons to the London patent office in the hope of discovering the method of Perkin’s aniline process. They also went to meet Perkin in Greenford Green, where they received a frosty reception.
In an attempt to maintain his monopoly, Perkin hurriedly prepared an application for the French patent office, and journeyed to Paris in April 1858 to finalise the process. It was here he was told that his application could not proceed, as he had waited more than 20 months since registering it in London, and the rules permitted a maximum of six. Unusually, this would soon work to Perkin’s advantage.
Dr Crace-Calvert, the professor of chemistry at the Manchester Royal Institution, had already placed much of the process of making aniline coal-tar dyes in the public domain when he spoke at the Society of Arts in London in February 1858. When his speech was published, several French dye works seized on it and began aniline experiments of their own. While previously unable to produce purple by the same method as Guinon, Marnas et Bonnet (the firm which patented their process both in France and England), other companies turned by necessity to synthetic methods. And they found, after solving many of the problems that had hampered Perkin and Sons, that the colour they produced was brighter and more resistant to light and water than anything that had gone before. By the middle of 1859, Alexandre Franc et Cie and Monnet et Dury were both producing a magnificent and very popular purple. It is ironic that their colour was often called Perkin’s purple or aniline purple or harmaline, and that Perkin and Sons would soon adopt the French name of mauve for their own shade. In Germany the colour was called aniline violet. In his contributions to the science journals, Perkin called his colour ‘mauveine’.
Partly, William Perkin liked the name mauve because of its connotations with Parisian haute couture. As he wrote to his colleague Raphael Meldola, ‘English and Scotch calico printers did not show any interest in it until it appeared in French patterns.’ Thus the demand for Perkin’s mauve was stimulated by his competitors abroad, but his British patent ensured that if a passion for it took hold in England his own rewards would be great.
Yet his success was not yet certain. Just as his colour was stirring hearts across the Channel, Perkin spent much of his time journeying to print works in Glasgow, Bradford, Leeds, Manchester and Huddersfield. Even those printers impressed with its fastness and intensity had to be instructed how best to use it. ‘The dyers in those days had only been used to work with vegetable colouring matters and did not know how to apply basic colouring matters like the mauve … I had to become a dyer and calico printer to some extent,’ Perkin explained. Thus at the age of twenty-one, Perkin left his factory and laboratory for weeks at a time to provide one of the earliest examples of ‘technical service’ – and he became an on-site expert and troubleshooter in a giant industry that had so recently been a mystery to him.
In this way he solved some of the last remaining dilemmas surrounding mauve – how best to apply it to calico and paper. He established new fixatives that would benefit the entire industry. When silk and cotton printers complained about the unevenness of his colour on their cloth, Perkin presented them with a new method of producing level dyeings by using dyebaths containing lead soap – and in this way soap baths gradually became another standard dyeing procedure throughout Europe. By the middle of 1859 his dye paste and concentrated mauve solution had been shipped in vast quantities not only to Thomas Keith in Bethnal Green, but also to the Scottish calico printer James Black and Co. in Dalmonach, Dumbartonshire; soon after, it would be in great demand in Leeds, Manchester and Bradford. In Perkin’s phrase, ‘They were clamorous for it.’
The traditional Glaswegian dyer who had doubted if anything would ever take the place of natural madder would then ask Robert Pullar, ‘How did you come to think the thing was good?’
Pullar replied: ‘I tested it and I felt convinced it was a good thing.’
‘Eh,’ the dyer said, ‘ye must a’ thought me a great fool that day.’
Soon after, the success of mauve was the subject of satire. At a Drury Lane pantomime a character remarked how now even the policemen told people to ‘get a mauve on’ (Victorians generally pronounced the colour ‘morv’). Some amusement was had from the unhappy phrasing of a newspaper notice in July 1859: ‘Found, on the 30th ult., a handsome Lady’s Parasol, left there by two ladies, of mauve colour, lined inside with white, which may be had at Arthur’s Stationery Warehouse …’ It was the first time the word had appeared in The Times.
The following month, Punch wrote of a London in the grip of the Mauve Measles, an affliction ‘spreading to so serious an extent that it is high time to consider by what means it may be checked’. The magazine suggested that doctors were arguing about symptoms and origin. ‘There are many who regard it as purely English growth, and from the effect which it produces on the mind contend it must be treated as a form of mild insanity. Other learned men, however, including Dr Punch, are disposed rather to view it as a kind of epidemic, and to ascribe its origin entirely to the French. Although the mind is certainly affected by the malady, it is chiefly on the body that its effects are noticeable.’
Punch described the disease as infectious, beginning with the eruption of ‘a measly rash of ribbons’ and ending with the whole body covered in mauve. It detected that it was mostly women who were afflicted, for any symptoms in men could usually be treated ‘with one good dose of ridicule’.
The most complete, and affectionate, account of what a colour could do appeared in September 1859 in All the Year Round, a new weekly journal. This publication was ‘conducted’ by Charles Dickens, and partially written by him; the journal, a successor to his weekly Household Words, contained the serialisation of A Tale of Two Cities. The author of an article called ‘Perkins’s Purple’, in which the chemist gained an extra’s’ throughout, is uncredited, but he certainly possessed a classical education.
‘Let other men sing the praise of Hector and of Agamemnon, be it for me to sing the praise of Perkins, the inventor of the new purple.’ The colour, ‘which tradesmen foolishly call Mauve’, made Tyrian purple look ‘tame, dull and earthy indeed’. And Perkin’s purple was so much better than the French variety which ‘in waistcoats stained your shirts; in gloves, it gave you dyer’s hands’.
The author believed that modern chemistry had several aims, including research for medical improvements, but by far the most significant was surely trade, ‘and of the discove
ries of our commercial chemistry Mr Perkins’s discovery is one of the greatest and most brilliant … Alchemists of old spent their days and nights searching for gold, and never found the magic Proteus, though they chased him through all gases and all metals. If they had, indeed, we doubt much if the discovery had been as useful as this of Perkins’s purple … A discovery that benefits trade is better for a man than finding a gold mine. It is, in fact, like this Perkins’s purple, the key to other men’s gold mines.’
Perkin, it was noted, was not like other inventors, in that he should soon became wealthy. With others, the author observed, ‘fame comes, but when the money should flow in, there is a hitch, a frost, a blight.’ But Perkin maintained the English patent, and thus the new colour had to be purchased from him directly. ‘The Persian king, who offered a large reward to the discoverer of a new pleasure, by which he did not necessarily mean a new sin, would have buried Mr Perkins in a well full of diamonds. He would have pelted him to death with gold pieces, or have erected to his honour golden statues.’
The extent of mauve mania was documented in every detail; it was difficult to step into wealthy London without thinking there was something wrong with your eyes.
One would think that London was suffering from an election, and that those purple ribbons were synonymous with ‘Perkins for hever!’ and ‘Perkins and the English Constitootion!’ The Oxford-street windows are tapestried with running rolls of that luminous extract from coal tar … O Mr Perkins, thanks to thee for fishing out of the coal-hole those precious veins and stripes and bands of purple on summer gowns that, wafting gales of Frangipanni, charm us in the West-end streets, luring on foolish bachelors to sudden proposals and dreams of love and a cottage loaf.
As I look out of my window, the apotheosis of Perkins’s purple seems at hand – purple hands wave from open carriages – purple hands shake each other at street doors – purple hands threaten each other from opposite sides of the street; purple-striped gowns cram barouches, jam up cabs, throng steamers, fill railway stations: all flying countryward, like so many migrating birds of purple Paradise.
Mauve was the rage until 1861, and its prevalence was sustained by the other dominant craze of the day – the crinoline. The crinoline, the voluminous hooped iron cage that first swept down London and Parisian streets towards the end of 1856, represented the perfect advertisement for any new colour: you just couldn’t miss it.
At least some of the credit for its success must go to the most prominent English couturier of the day, Charles Worth. Worth was born in Lincolnshire, worked for a while at Swan and Edgar, and then moved to Paris in the 1840s. His designs for the leading fashion house of Gagelin and Opigez, and later for his own firm of Worth and Bobergh, brought him into contact with several royal families, including Empress Eugénie. It was said that Eugénie had herself invented the crinoline to hide her pregnancy, but more likely it was Worth who developed the dress with the help of an English colleague. The crinoline has been described as the first application of the machine-age to women’s dress; the massive steel structure reflected the glories of the Crystal Palace and monumental new bridges, and a great many were done up on newly imported American sewing machines. In 1859, it was said that Sheffield was producing steel wire for half a million crinolines each week.
Worth elevated dressmaking into dress designing, combining the new mathematical approach to tailoring with a flair for the ludicrous; he now wrapped women in the epitome of Victorian flash. The huge bird-cage structure of the crinoline eliminated the need for the many horsehair petticoats that had bulked out the ever-larger dresses from the start of the decade. Uniquely for a popular dress, the crinoline also caused many deaths. It was comfortable to wear – women liked to think of themselves as floating like a cloud – but it was dramatically cumbersome, not least in a period of increasing social mobility and popular rail travel. Madame Carette, a member of Empress Eugénie’s court, wrote caustically of the dress that, when sitting, ‘it was a pure matter of art to prevent the steel hoops getting out of place … To travel, to lie down, to play with the children, or indeed merely to shake hands or take a walk with them – these were problems which called for great fondness and much good will for their solution. It was about this time that it gradually went out of fashion for a man to offer his arm to a lady when he wished to accompany her.’
There were reports of women being engulfed by flames after catching their dress by an open hearth, and the Princess Royal burnt her arm after brushing past a candle. The worst incident occurred in a cathedral in Santiago, when up to two thousand women were burnt when a fire in the hanging drapes spread to their dresses. The dress inevitably invited other health scares: the journal Once a Week included an article called ‘Dress and Its Victims’, in which it warned that women would be at severe risk from the climate. ‘Any medical man in good practice can tell of the spread of rheumatism since women ceased to wear their clothing about their limbs, and stuck it off with frames and hoops …’
In 1859, Empress Eugénie famously announced that she had given up the crinoline, but the news had little effect on its popularity, which declined only steadily over the next five years. Significantly for William Perkin and the textile trade, the dress appealed across all classes, and soon found itself to be not just a simple layer of silk or tulle, but elaborately sculpted from a great many tiered layers of additional flounces and ruches. In 1859, when the dress reached its largest circumference and consisted of perhaps four skirts and many trimmings, hundreds of yards of dyed material were needed for its construction. Dyemakers couldn’t believe their luck: their order books swelled not just from the huge demand for dress material, but from the knock-on effects of newly-exposed ankles and the subsequent desire for coloured stockings and new petticoats.
By 1860, Perkin and Sons was meeting large export orders from Stuttgart, Amsterdam and Hong Kong. Initially the prices were high – Perkin obtained £6 for each litre of the mauve solution that was then diluted tenfold – and Perkin swiftly became rich. He began receiving medals from abroad in honour of his work. In 1859, he was sent a certificate from the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, a region that once believed it alone led the world in new dyes. Accompanying the certificate was a silver medal and a letter from Dr Daniel Dollfus, the secretary of the society, praising the shade that had already given rise to so many applications ‘and seems to promise even more’.
What it promised was a new way of looking at the world. A few months later, Perkin discovered that his method of making mauve was being copied throughout Europe, and was being used to make other colours to meet new demands for the latest fashion trends, particularly the new lines of walking dresses and women’s sports costumes for croquet and tennis. Mauve, and the other aniline dyes it inspired, combined with new directions in fashion in ways that even the most ambitious dyemaker could never have imagined. No wonder Punch and traditionalists disapproved: for they were witnessing an early show of the female independent consumer.
Within two years of Perkin’s invention it seemed that everyone was having a go at dyemaking. Industry had shown Victorian chemists what was possible, and now nothing seemed beyond achievement; an eighteen-year-old had created a new shade for a woman’s shawl, and the full force of chemical ambition was unleashed. And of course there was much money to be made, and many fortunes to be lost, and a great amount of litigation.
Only two years after mauve had been the rage of Paris and London, its creator acknowledged that its best days were probably over. What people really wanted now was Verguin’s fuchsine, Manchester brown, Bismarck brown, Martius yellow, Magdala red, Nicholson’s blue and Hofmann’s violets.
*
There are great views from Don Vidler’s midtown Manhattan office, but its occupant has grown familiar with them. In the middle of November 1999 he was more excited by the prospect of salesmanship. Vidler, a friendly man in his early forties, picked out a small pink T-shirt from a rack by his desk. ‘This is from Banana Republic,’ he
said. ‘Brand-new and just in the stores, a completely machine-wash/dry garment. Banana Republic has it, and Liz Claiborne, Next in the UK, Diesel, Dockers and Marks and Spencer takes a lot. If you go to the main store in Oxford Street they’ve got a ton of it in there and they usually promote the hell out of it.’
Vidler is talking about Tencel, the first new textile fibre developed for thirty years. He likes this product so much that he wears it himself – a grey Tencel polo shirt and brown Tencel cords. Vidler’s clothes are really made from wood pulp.
Vidler works as the sales director for the fibre company Acordis, a company that spun off from Courtaulds, and is primarily responsible for the future of Tencel as a brand name. His job is to sell to the American mills, to persuade them to use the fibre in their woven and knitted fabrics.
Tencel has been in commercial production for seven years. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ Vidler said. ‘It’s not yet on a level with DuPont’s Lycra, but people are just starting to ask for Tencel by name.’ The product is most successful with high-end women’s sportswear, but it’s big too in indigo denim. ‘If you buy your pair of Levi jeans, you beat them up and wash them for a year and then they get soft the way you like them. Tencel is like that literally out of the box. What sells Tencel is the performance and a real soft hand [a peach-skin fuzz, soft to the touch].’
The story of the product begins in England, in Coventry, about twenty years ago. Courtaulds, the company that made a lot of its early money from a black dye (and sold it as being the blackest black you could buy), was making large quantities of rayon. But rayon production is a messy operation, with a lot of chemicals and much effluent. In an attempt to come up with a better rayon, the researchers at Courtaulds came up with something else.
Lyocell is produced from wood pulp through a solvent spinning process: the pulp is dissolved in an amine oxide and the result is forced into a water bath through fine jets. The solvent is washed out, and the fibre forms into fine filaments from which the staple Lyocell product is made. Rayon takes about 24–36 hours from wood pulp to fibre, but Tencel – a TENacity CELlulosic – takes only 2–3 hours, and 99 per cent of the solvent is recycled.
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