In fact, it is estimated that the average person in the U.S. Or you can purchase cochineal dye ready-made at this website. So if you are interested in upsetting the masses and starting a revolution by making or obtaining your own purple dye (just kidding, I think you would have to be “born in the purple” for that formula to work), you can pay upwards of $3,725 per gram of Tyrian purple or you can pay the same amount in travel expenses to wind your way through the streets of Morrocco looking for the man described in this blog, who produces genuine Tyrian purple.
We may think we have come a long way since the social implications of ancient Tyrian purple, but sometimes the improvements are more of a façade than a reality. And so Walmart’s offerings quell any discontent for the social status discrepancies, and allow us to go along our merry way with the belief that we are all truly as socio-economically equal as Walmart’s egalitarian color schemes. But were there only four or five hues available to us, I don’t doubt our appearances would become quite a lot more telling of our socioeconomic positions, and we might not be so tolerant of the glaring inequity. Can you imagine if we still lived in a world where only the ruler of our nation could wear a certain color? And if Obama was so fashion-totalitarian, would we tolerate it? Of course not, and maybe that is exactly why Wal-Mart is such a curse-every color we could ever want available at prices almost everyone can afford makes us think we all have access to the same resources. While religious clergy still wear certain colors (usually purple in particular), I doubt most of us today would ever think about what a color says about social status, or how the dye was made, or whether or not it was synthetic (which it is in probably 99% of the cases). It adds radiance to every garment, while in a triumphal robe it is best blended with gold.” Shown below is a mosaic dressed with Tyrian purple and depicting Justinian, the most important emperor from Byzantium:īold colors went out of fashion from the 30’s to 50’s, but appeared once again and stronger than ever in the psychedelic 60’s, and stayed a constant trend in fashion since then. The Roman author and historian, Pliny the Elder, wrote of Tyrian purple in the first century: “It is called in to secure the favour of the Gods.
The only other use for Tyrian purple in these civilizations was for the decoration of religious statues and paintings in order to say, “look everyone! God came down and painted his image with the same color as my robes happen to be! He’s trying to tell you that I’m better than you!” and so this demonstrated royalty’s proximity to the divine. The Romans and Byzantines (the latter is otherwise known as the Eastern Romans) were especially fond of the hue and rigidly controlled the use of the color to be exclusive to royalty, so that the threat of death hung over anyone who dared sport purple. the Phoenicians (remember them? They were the first immigrants in Spain) discovered a certain type of mollusk (sea snail) of the “Murex trunculus” species (I hereby give him the nickname Munculus), that secreted a richly-colored goo (I can’t resist one more set of parenthesis in this sentence to interject the Ween song “the Mollusk.” Have a listen: The MolluskĪs centuries turned and new Mediterranean civilizations appeared, various royal families continued the Phoenician tradition of wearing Tyrian purple as a display of status. Such also was the case with ancient fashion, by the extent artisans were forced to travail to produce certain dyes for the elite and royal classes. Think back to ancient civilizations like the Etruscans or the Moors or the Byzantines-all of the major architecture, art, and jewelry from these societies was so much more detailed, exclusive, and labor-intensive than anything designed today. This trend still persists in our supposedly egalitarian modern society, but even the most elite goods today are not nearly as specialized or exclusive as they were in antiquity. If there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that consolidation of power sure facilitates the production of highly specialized and detailed goods.
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