I saw this post from Victoria Finlay, author of the wonderful book Colour, A Natural History of the Palette, and figured I would share. If you haven’t seen her book, it is so worthwhile.
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The furore around whether this dress, aka #TheDress is blue and black or white and gold (I say it’s white and gold. Obviously!) and the delicious vox pop videos the BBC and others are making of when they ask people about it (“you’re winding me up!??? Are you turning my spanner???”) makes me wonder what would have happened if there had been twitter and video in 1820s Paris.
That year the Gobelins Royal tapestry workshop in Paris had a problem. They were using the same bright dyes that they’d been using since the 1660s, and which they were famous for, and for which they were charging a fortune. The trouble was the coloured threads started coming up grey on the tapestry.
A dress manufacturer could just change the production line but these guys only managed about a square metre in a year (tapestries were about 12 feet high and longer across…
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But she was wrong about the color… 😀 Actually, scrolling down your post here was the first time I actually saw it change from one to the other.