KCIDigital Archives

The KCI Digital Archives on the KCI website presents image and text information for the objects in the collection, arranged in chronological order.

Day Dress

© The Kyoto Costume Institute, photo by Takashi Hatakeyama

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Day Dress

c. 1875 - England

Material
Blue wool twill; one-piece dress and overskirt.
Inventory Number(s)
AC4844 1984-18-4AB

A dress in a vivid blue that is distinctive of synthetic dyes. The invention of aniline dyes in 1856 by British chemist William Parkin (1837-1907) led to a range of synthetic colors that caught the world's imagination, and in the second half of the 19th century they rapidly became popular, used in everything from high-class haute couture to more ordinary clothing. A wide range of blues were produced in this period using synthetic dyes, including Lyons Blue, Alkali Blue, and synthetic indigo.
Renoir's La Parisienne (1874) depicts a model wearing a dress in a color very similar to this blue. Manet, Monet, Tissot, and other artists who adopted new perspectives on color all provide lively representations of new, hitherto unseen colors used in fashion.

1870s-1880s