How Jeans Got Their Fade
Peter Campbell: Mauve and indigo, 14 December 2000
Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour that Changed the World
by Simon Garfield.
Faber, 222 pp., £9.99, September 2000,0 571 20197 0 Show More
by Simon Garfield.
Faber, 222 pp., £9.99, September 2000,
“... The cloth when taken from the vat of greenish dye turned blue on exposure to the air. In Indigo, Jenny Balfour-Paul glosses these processes scientifically. The first surprise is that indigo, the dye of dyes, is in some ways more like a pigment. It needs no mordant, even on non-absorbent fabrics like cotton. Tiny particles, not individual ... ”