dyeing linen

[Lepidina]

At the moment I only have to hand an English translation of the Price Edict of Diocletian which does grade garments by weight, quality, dyeing and decoration but not all the prices survive. Colours other than purple do not appear to be mentioned and dyeing once or twice is recorded in that instance. To get the sort of direct information required for this would need a lot of research of the written finds. I will ask around to see if anything like this has already been done or is in progress.

While double dipping might not be too much of an effort, I wonder if someone was doing it as a business they would think the same? A lot of textile finds are not dyed at all. Judging from the Egyptian portraits wealthy men seemed to wear whitened garments while women went for colours in the purple, red, blue, range. Many of the beige off white colours seen in Roman art could easily be un-dyed wool, while the yellow brown cloaks so popular amongst the military would also appear to be un-dyed.

The wealthy tend to wear white to show off that they don't have to work. Lower classes tend to wear colors, esp. darker colors because it doesn't show the dirt. (Massive generalization here mind you.) Women are peacocks so they wear whatever is in vogue at the moment.

As for as a business model, there are so many steps in the textile manufacturing that a second dip isn't that much extra work in the grand scheme of things. Plus there were home dyers as well so someone could buy a yellow or blue tunic and overdye it with something else at home to make green or overdye it when the original color starts to fade. Even though everything in the cloth trade is being done by hand, it is still a highly industrialized process. There was even a second hand clothing trade so plenty of stuff to keep dyers in business and a demand to have a variety of colors.

Green colours for clothing do not appear all that often in mosaics either, although ironically a model of a wool bale found in Scotland was coloured green.

I was talking to one of my natural dye friends today about the lack of green in Roman clothing and she mentioned that green tends to fade in art. Sometimes you'll see blue grass in paintings and tapestries because it has faded. So it could be that some of the blue tunics we are seeing in art were once green and have just faded. It's hard to know without a thorough pigment analysis.