Mauve

by Simon Garfield

  But Courtaulds discovered that there was a problem when it came to dyeing.

  Tencel fibrillates like crazy – little pieces of the fibre stick out from the main body like hairs on an arm – and that is what gives its peach-fuzz appeal. If the fibrillation is not controlled very carefully as it goes around a dye jet in a metal drum it can get hairy and pilled and matted. Don Vidler says that it has taken a while for people to realise that if they want the true Tencel peach-touch it’s a little bit more involved and costly than dyeing other fibres, but the results should be worth it. He takes out three indigo swatches, one Tencel, one cotton, one rayon, all placed in the same indigo dyebath, the first more lustrous than the others.

  In November 1999, several leading fashion designers came in to Don Vidler’s office to look at colour trends for Fall/Winter 2000 and Spring/Summer 2001. Tencel was nothing without the latest colours, but what would they be? And how would anyone know?

  ‘We invited in all the stylists from Liz Claiborne, Donna Karan, really everyone in designer names,’ Vidler explained. ‘Also the next level down – the people that knock off the big names. Also the buyers for the big stores like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. They came in, and Sandy MacLennan flew in from his office in London and did his talk about colours and trends and what’s going to happen.’

  Sandy MacLennan brought with him some beautifully designed card brochures, each displaying a range of colours for the fashion seasons a year or eighteen months away. The colours did not actually have names, but they had moods. There was Trace, which ranged from beige to brown, and was described as ‘warming … barely there … neutrals with pedigree … functional and exquisite’. Then there was Merge, which went from black to crimson, in which ‘contrasts combine … dark and glimmering … deep, ravishing blends’. Next was Push, ‘soft brights … solar glow … a surge of optimism … contemporary mix’ (the colours were terracotta to grey). And finally Filter, from blue to grey again, ‘casual and rational … shadowed mid-tones … modern and transitional’.

  ‘I never know which comes first,’ said Don Vidler, once MacLennan had gone. ‘Does a colour become the hot thing because a colour expert says so, or is it because enough people told him about it first?

  ‘There are clearly some key influences who go around the world, and I think Sandy is one of them. In my previous job I worked with a woman who was really considered the dean of the American colour experts. She would say that avocado will be the hot new colour next year, and because she said it, it was. She would do the colours for the automotive guys. They were looking five years ahead, and so she could say to the apparel people, “Ford are going to be making purple cars in two years,” and so the apparel people played off that.’

  Vidler paused for a minute, and conceded that some of this colour prediction thing was funny. ‘I mean how many different names can you come up with for red? There’s flame red, orange red – they’ll play-off music – there’s disco red, hip-hop red. And God forbid that Calvin’s red looked like Donna’s red or Ralph’s red. Once a designer gave me the tip of a matchstick and said, “That’s the red I want for this sweater.”’

  There is another thing that amuses Vidler about colour. He remembers that on every single day of his presentations, Sandy MacLennan wore a black T-shirt or turtleneck and black trousers. ‘If you looked in his audience I guarantee you it would be the same. The New York uniform for women is black skirt or pants and a black Banana Republic spandex top and a black jacket. You go on the streets and you don’t see a lot of flashes of colour. That kills me: you have these gurus saying, “These are going to be the hot new colours,” but God forbid if they’re caught in them. They’re always going to let someone else wear their magenta and fuchsia.’

  7

  THE TERRIBLE GLARE

  You want things just right when you’re paying all that money, don’t you? The Queen certainly does: as we discovered this week, she issues a list of royal demands before arriving at foreign hotels. She doesn’t want the management to think she’s fussy, you understand, but could they please make sure that any flower arrangements do not contain anything mauve (or carnations of any colour) …

  A six-page Buckingham Palace memo reaches the press.

  From the London Evening Standard, November 1999

  In 1860 it was an exciting time to be a scientist. Many scientific societies had begun to publish journals, and their size increased each month. There appeared to be a theory for everything and a solution to as much. At every place where scientists gathered they liked nothing more than to suggest that science had got the better of nature, and nowhere did this belief carry more conviction than in the field of colour. In France, the leading dye firms were swiftly redefining the processes they had maintained for 300 years, believing that skilful atomic juggling would produce many more. In Germany, Liebig’s students were ordering nitrobenzene and aniline by the kilo to make tests of their own.

  But in London, not everyone had yet grasped coal-tar’s full potential. In 1858, August Hofmann informed the Royal Society that he had produced ‘a crimson colouring principle’ as a by-product of an experiment combining aniline and carbon tetrachloride. Yet he failed to exploit it, or even test whether it might be suitable as a dye. It appeared that the aniline he had requested from Perkin was not to make colour at all, rather for a purpose he still regarded as having a more justifiable claim on his time. But three years later his opinion had shifted so radically that by the time the British Association met in 1861, it was Hofmann, rather than Perkin, who was hailed as the hero of tinctorial science.

  How did this come to be? Partly, it was down to public relations. Even after the discovery of mauve, Perkin remained a modest and diffident man. His speeches at scientific gatherings were formal and confined to precise technical matters. He did not seek publicity in the newspapers, and the pressures of his factory and the growing competition from France ensured that he had no time for self-exposure. Besides, he had recently become a husband and a father. In 1859 he married his first cousin Jemima Lissett, and they moved to rented accommodation in the Harrow Road in Sudbury. Their first son, also called William Henry Perkin, was born a year later, and their second son, Arthur George, one year after that. Then they moved to their own house, also in the Harrow Road, where Perkin again set up a small laboratory and restructured a large garden and play area for his children. This was not the time to consider claims upon posterity.

  August Hofmann, however, had other motives. He had been responsible for inspiring Perkin’s initial interest in aniline, and had taught most of the young English chemists who were just now entering dye works in London, Manchester and Leeds in an attempt to find new colours of their own. Though he never equated the pursuit of a colour with a scientific career, he would not have mistaken the growing prosperity that rewarded their inventors from 1860 onwards; even then, his main aim was to advance his academic reputation further than his bank account.

  Hofmann was a more engaging orator than Perkin, and liked to talk on a grand and visionary scale. With no factory to run, he could attend all the scientific gatherings, and in the early 1860s he began to write passionate reports about the industry he had unwittingly set in motion. ‘There are several [glass] cases which appear to excite in a more than ordinary degree the interest and admiration of the public,’ he wrote of one chemical exhibition. ‘In these cases is displayed a series of most attractive and beautiful objects, set in sharp contrast with a substance particularly ugly and offensive … gas tar.’

  He wrote more like a travelling salesman than the country’s leading professor. At the same exhibition he noted that the crystalline specimen of one dye reminded him of ‘the sparkling wings of a rose-beetle’. A collection of silks, cashmeres, and ostrich plumes were ‘the most superb and brilliant that ever delighted the human eye. Language, indeed, fails adequately to describe the beauty of these splendid tints. Conspicuous among them are crimsons of the most gorgeous intensity, purples of more than Tyrian mag
nificence, and blues ranging from light azure to the deepest cobalt. Contrasted with these are the most delicate roseate hues, shading by imperceptible gradations to the softest tints of violet and mauve.’

  Hofmann attended the British Association meeting in Manchester in 1861, where its new chairman Professor Fairbairn presented the usual twelve-month catalogue of achievement. Chemistry was having ‘a most direct bearing on the comforts and enjoyments of life’. The nutritional value of many foods could now be measured. Water was being analysed and purified as never before. The treatment of disease was improving rapidly through our comprehension of atomic theory. Fairbairn noted, however, that the greatest chemical developments of chemistry had been in connection with the ‘useful arts’.

  By this, the professor meant practical industry. ‘What would now be the condition of calico-printing, bleaching, dyeing and even agriculture itself if they had been deprived of the aid of theoretic chemistry?’ he asked. ‘For example, aniline – first discovered in coal-tar by Dr Hofmann, who has so admirably developed its properties – is now most extensively used as the basis of red, blue, violet and green dyes. This important discovery will probably in a few years render this country independent of the world for dyestuffs. And it is more than probable that England, instead of drawing her dyestuffs from foreign countries, may herself become the centre from which all the world will be supplied.’

  Such optimism would be undone within a decade. Indeed there were warning signs visible only a year later, when London hosted the International Exhibition of 1862. August Hofmann, writing his Report to the Juries, noted how far his science had progressed since the last Great Exhibition of 1851, and concluded with a further prophesy of continued English dominance. England would soon become the greatest colour-producing country in the world, he noted, and, ‘by the strangest of revolutions, she may ere long send her coal-derived blues to indigo-growing India, her tar-distilled crimson to cochineal-producing Mexico, and her fossil substitutes for quercitron and safflower to China and Japan …’

  Visitors to the exhibition were most excited by the first demonstrations of the safety match (‘a match which could not be ignited by friction alone’). They were also impressed with the South East Gallery, in which several rows of cabinets held the latest samples of dyed cloth from Alfred Sidebottom of Crown Street, Camberwell, from Henry Monteith & Co. of Glasgow, and from John Botterill of Leeds. Robert Pullar of Perth displayed his latest umbrella cloths and dyed cotton. And in the middle of the hall was a large glass case labelled ‘William Perkin and Sons’, containing a pillar of solid mauve dye the size of a stove-pipe hat. The block was the product of about 2,000 tons of coal-tar, sufficient to print 100 miles of calico. One contemporary writer described it as ‘being worth £1,000, the quantity of colour it contains being enough to dye the heavens with purple’.

  Not all visitors were so impressed. The French historian Hippolyte Taine visited London for the exhibition and found both the exhibits and the visitors who gazed upon them to be gaudy and unrefined. ‘The exaggeration of the dresses of the ladies or young girls belonging to the wealthy middle class is offensive … gowns of violet silk with dazzling reflections, or of starched tulle upon an expanse of petticoats stiff with embroidery …’ Walking on a Sunday in Hyde Park, he saw more bright colours than he had ever seen gathered in one place. ‘The glare,’ he observed, ‘is terrible.’

  Perkin’s success with mauve had brought twenty-eight other dye-making firms to the International Exhibition. There were eight other companies from the United Kingdom, twelve from France, seven from Germany and Austria and one from Switzerland. Several of them showed hues that appeared to be exactly the same as those of their competitors; but the names were novel, and their brilliance and claims on fastness would have been unimaginable even five years before.

  The chronology of the new colours began in 1859 with a former French schoolteacher. Emmanuel Verguin had worked for a while as the director of a factory which made yellow from picric acid, and he knew that a new colour was a valuable commodity. In January 1858 he joined another firm, Renard Frères & Franc, one of whose workers had recently visited Perkin and Sons in the hope of obtaining trade secrets about aniline. Despite his previous experience, Verguin appears to have signed a highly restrictive contract with his new employers, guaranteeing them the rights to any new colour he might discover in return for one-fifth of any profits. Within weeks of joining, his researches into aniline had produced a rich crimson red, probably a very similar shade to that discovered by Hofmann. He called the colour fuchsine, after the flowering shrub fuchsia, and by the end of the year the colour was in demand from Cherbourg to Marseilles.

  Fuchsine was produced in far greater quantities than mauve, being used first for military uniforms and then widely as the latest crush in fashion. In Britain it became known as solferino and then magenta, taking the names from the Franco-Piedmontese war against Austria and Garibaldi’s victory in North Italy, where the dye matched the colour of the soldiers’ tunics. The demand for the colour was such that it was produced not only in Lyons, but soon, with the slightest manipulations of molecular formulae sufficient to bewilder any patent office, in Mulhouse, Basle, London, Coventry and Glasgow. In Britain it was first used on a large scale in Bradford by Ripley and Son, who recorded with pride how they were first offered the dye by Renard Frères in February 1860 at £5 per gallon, but just a month later had struck a deal for £3 per gallon. In time, Renard Frères set up its own manufacturing base in Brentford, Middlesex.

  In east London, magenta made fortunes for the firm Simpson, Maule and Nicholson, a company that had only recently transformed itself from producing chemical supplies such as aniline and materials for photography into a fully scaled-up dye works. Edward Nicholson, yet another of Hofmann’s former pupils, formed an informal partnership with his old tutor, providing him with some magenta crystals. Hofmann then set about analysing the new dye’s molecular composition. He changed its name once more – this time to rosaniline – and his work unlocked the hidden constitution of almost all the new aniline dyes.

  From this applied approach any number of new colours could be constructed. Within months, industrial chemists were able to produce quite a pattern book: tiny structural tweaks turned the magenta to aniline yellow, then to bleu de Lyon, bleu de Paris, and Nicholson’s blue. A little later there would be aldehyde green. Hofmann himself produced two new shades of violet.

  Such developments had not gone unnoticed at Greenford Green. Perkin observed the gradual decline of his original mauve with some disdain, and set about making improvements. Thus he made dahlia, an intermediate between mauve and magenta, and the first industrial supply of aminoazonaphthalene, the colour he had first produced with his friend Arthur Church while still at the Royal College and which he could now dilute from scarlet to orange; for reasons of nomenclature alone, this last was not an easily marketable item. Perkin discussed these new colours before the Royal Society, and the contrast with Hofmann’s excited prose could not have been more stark. Perkin, still only twenty-three, remarked later that perhaps his greatest success in these talks was the fact that they had been attended by Michael Faraday.

  Perkin was aware that he was losing his early lead in aniline dyes, and appeared to care little. He contributed a steady stream of articles to the journal of the Chemical Society, many on subjects other than dyestuffs. In September 1860 he obtained great satisfaction from a letter sent by the director of scientific studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In this he was informed that the contents of a small glass phial he had supplied had been analysed as pure paratartaric acid, then regarded as a novel and important synthesis. The letter continued: ‘I should be very grateful if you could send me a portion of the succinic acid which you used to prepare the paratartaric acid. I am very keen to investigate whether, by any chance, it might be endowed with the action for polarised light.’ Perkin’s correspondent was Louis Pasteur. ‘Please forgive my indiscretion,’ Pasteur wro
te. ‘All this is so important from the point of view of our ideas on molecular mechanics that I cannot contain my impatience to know. I am also very happy that this occasion has provided me with the pleasure of entering into relations with one of our best chemists.’

  As the decade wore on, Perkin’s newer colours enjoyed more success. Britannia violets, made by heating a solution of magenta with turpentine, produced deep bluish shades. There was also Perkin’s green, popular for a while in calico printing, and aniline pink, and Perkin’s own form of magenta, involving the use of mercuric nitrate, which soon had to be curtailed due to the harmful effect of the mercury on his workmen. Perkin also made the salts and copper compounds necessary for aniline black, and greatly improved the methods of dyeing wallpaper. Regulars at the Black Horse pub near the Perkin factory would observe how the Grand Junction Canal turned a different colour every week.

  The new colours had predictable effects – an increase in the British, German and French balances of trade, and many tingles of excitement in the fashion world. Some effects were clearly detrimental to the traditional trade of natural dyestuffs. In 1862 August Hofmann observed a stark difference in the price and demand for cochineal, safflower, indigo and madder from that just three years earlier. Imports of scarlet cochineal, for example, had increased by more than 50 per cent in weight between 1847 and 1850, but all had changed with the advent of aniline dyes. From a peak of 15 francs per kilo in 1858, the price had fallen to 8 francs. Within two years the price of safflower had fallen from 45 francs to 25, and picric acid had all but curtailed the supply of natural yellow dyewoods. Even indigo, which had not yet been synthesised, was no longer used in silk dyeing, replaced by the artificial blues and violets. ‘Thus,’ one contemporary French writer regretted, ‘of three dyeing materials hitherto considered indestructible elements of the commercial prosperity of tropical countries, we find indigo diminished in its applications, and cochineal and safflower very notably depreciated, solely and exclusively by the work of the chemist.’