Indigo

I have written about indigo before .... mentioning that it was produced from a marine snail, but at the same time indigo can also be obtained from the indigo plant. The entry on Wikipedia has quite a bit of information. it is a purplish-blue colour and usually quite expensive when manufactured from one of the two organic sources.

I'm more interested in the use in fashionable garb. The most fascinating use is for the traditional garments worn by the "Blue men of the desert".

Picture from: "Colors of Africa" by Duncan Clarke

The indigo in their clothing is not dyed in the usual way, since water is scarce. Therefore the indigo is pounded into the fabric, instead of boiled, giving the fabric a beautiful sheen (as seen in the picture above), but as the garment is worn, the dye rubs off onto the skin as can be seen in the pictures below. Because indigo is an expensive dye, it has become a status symbol amongst the Tuareg; the bluer the skin, the richer the wearer. The Tuareg have  always fascinated me and only after visiting quite a few sites did I come across the fact that the Tuareg use the indigo plant to dye their clothes.

Other African tribes use indigo for items like the one below.

 Indigo resist dye, hand-spun cotton; Dyula peoples, Bobo-Dioulasso region, Burkina Faso, 1990's
Taken from "The Art of African Textiles" by Duncan Clarke

All other pictures taken from this website

The most famous piece of indigo clothing we know, is denim (on which I will have to do another post).
Denim has been warp dyed, meaning that only the warp threads (the ones that run length-wise) have been dyed with the blue. Since the end of the 19th century synthetic dyes have replaced organic indigo, and linked mostly with practical fabrics and work clothes. Further information can be found here...

In the Bible, indigo is not mentioned by name, but whenever the cloth is dyed "purple" or blue, probably indigo was used. You can see that there are quite a number of references and each of them is found in relation to Kings, wealth or at least denoting some indication that the cloth was expensive. I have mentioned before that the "Proverbs 31 woman" is a trader in purple cloth, i.e. she is so rich that she can support her family so that they lack nothing.

As part of the rainbow, it is one of those colours that appear, but that people cannot usually distinguish from purple, or even see on the colour chart, because we divide the chart into three and then further into 6 (and not 7). Indigo sits between the blue and the purple on the colour chart and as such, is a beautiful colour, if you look at the reference in Wikipedia.

There is not much more to say.... happy browsing through the websites