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jackironsides:

achronalart:

FWIW, “mauve” was one of the coal-tar dyes developed in the mid-19th century that made eye-wateringly bright clothing fashionable for a few decades.

It was an eye-popping magenta purple

Back view of the top half of an 1860s dress in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. It is extremely fussy and a uniform brilliant magenta purply-pink.ALT

HOWEVER, like most aniline dyes, it faded badly, to a washed-out blue-grey …

…which was the color ignorant youngsters in the 1920s associated with “mauve”.

(This dress is labeled “mauve” as it is the color the above becomes after fading).

1920s “Robe satin mauve”fashion plate. Her dress is a washed-out grey, barely on the purple side of neutral.ALT

They colored their vision of the past with washed-out pastels that were NOTHING like the eye-popping electric shades the mid-Victorians loved. This 1926 fashion history book by Paul di Giafferi paints a hugely distorted, I would say dishonest picture of the past.

Plate from the truly awful 1926 fashion history "The history of the feminine costume of the world” by Paul di Giafferi, showing a bunch of VERY badly drawn historic costumes in washed-out pastel tonesALT

Ever since then this faded bluish lavender and not the original electric eye-watering hot pink-purple is the color associated with the word “mauve”.

A 1920s fashion plate from “Chic Parisienne” showing a pale lavender-grey dress with a pink inset and undersleeves and beaded edgesALT

Oh! Just like the Victorians did to the Gothic, where actual Gothic cathedrals which had been built to be bright and full of light were portrayed as dark and gloomy places, because that’s what happens after a cathedral is filled with candles for several hundred years.