Colors in Fashion

Why did the British suffragettes wear white? What color did Thailand's Queen Sirikit sport on Fridays? And why were dyed green carnations in the early 1800s so deadly? The role of color in the world of fashion, as readers will learn, is to inform, communicate, and even discriminate, as well as to illustrate political, economic, and sexual ideas. This book includes 16 of the best papers presented at the 2014 Costume Colloquium conference held in Florence, Italy, and they cover many shades of the rainbow to answer the questions above, as well as the meaning of black in postwar Paris, how fashion and color are used to show identity and belonging with the Yoruba in Nigeria, and how early colorized silent films employed high fashion to attract female viewers and blur the lines between upper- and lower-class forms of entertainment.