Writer in residence

No, not all denim-related...

Found this morning in the garden, where we're building a writing and work studio: a salt-glazed earthenware ink pot, probably from the 1850s.

Indigo : an interview with Jenny Balfour-Paul

Indigo, Jenny Balfour-Paul's landmark work on the history of this magical dye, has finally been republished. I've been obsessed with this book for many years - for it tells the story, not just of a dye, or of fabrics, but of humanity itself. I'm often asked why the appeal of denim is so pervasive - yet our love affair with this fabric is a mere dalliance, compared to the enduring influence indigo has exerted on our history. 

There's a huge amount of technical information in Indigo - you'll learn about the different strains, the difference between woad, always popular in Europe, and the various Indigofera plants, as well as the different dyeing methods employed in different cultures. This alone will equip most readers with an entirely new vocabulary. Yet the book is a ripping yarn, too, which takes in the Pharoahs, royalty, slavery, and wars. It is a dye that many have indeed died for. 

I had this book recommended to me years ago, and I'll be forever grateful to those who turned me on to it. If you find any elements of this modest blog interesting, you owe it to yourself to buy this book. Scroll to the bottom for details of a Reader Offer.

I was overjoyed, therefore, to track down Jenny Balfour-Paul for an interview on Loomstate. This is a Q&A so dense with history, that I've split it into two parts - the second half will follow within a week. 

I was re-reading the book and there’s such a wealth of cultural information - the story of indigo parallels the story of humanity. So, firstly, I have to ask – what's the oldest piece of indigo-dyed fabric you've seen, or handled?

It’s a linen Egyptian mummy wrapping in the British museum collection, and it’s over four thousand years old.  Other ancient dyes such as madder wouldn't dye linen. They are making new discoveries in China, where, for example, they've found mummies of Urumchi wrapped in cloth dyed with indigo, but I haven't seen those.  So exciting research is on-going.  Indigo was also used on Peruvian mummy wrappings – I saw some very old Peruvian cloth in Peru, although not as old as the pieces in the British museum. 

What was the source for that Egyptian indigo?

Ah, that's a good question. The theory, because of the translations of the papyri – and it's so difficult with translations – is that they were growing woad in northern Egypt.  But it can't be proved. That’s the curious things about Indigo - when you've archaeological textiles, all you get on them are the blue indigo molecules and the source could have been any of the indigo plants, including woad, because the indigo molecule is identical from all the indigo sources.  This is why it’s irritating hearing, for example, French dyers trying to say woad blue is different from indigo blue.

You've seen a road map - but have you seen a woad map?  

Tell me about the alchemical magic of indigo.

One of the elements of the magic is that is you can't really explain it. When I was writing the book, I thought of all the different strands and how they are all interwoven so that the the mystique accretes. Then there's the actual physical magic of using this transforming dye. It's unique out of all natural dyes, chemically-speaking. 

All the other dyes are the colours that show in the raw; you use a mordant and boil them up, and if, for example, it’s madder or morinda, you see the red, and it’s like that for the others.  Indigo is the only one with this unique chemistry - it's in an invisible form in the plant, and needs water and oxygen to turn into the blue dyestuff, but this is insoluble, and you have to remove the oxygen from the dye vat for actual dyeing. This chemistry, with its strange transformations, makes indigo extraordinary to use.  When I first dyed a piece of cloth with indigo, I was surprised by the rather weird looking yellowish green dye in the vat – then I pulled the cloth out of the vat and watched its transformation in the air from greeny-yellow to blue– it really is amazing to see. Because of the knowledge and skill required, indigo dyers were always specialists who guarded their secrets and handed them down the generations of dyers.

Added to that is all the other stuff of course – cultural beliefs, myths and legends and so forth. But I think the mystery all comes down to the strange chemistry.

You have mentioned that a lot of your journey with indigo started with your trip to the Yemen – it seems to have been a formative experience for you?

Totally.  If I hadn't gone there I wouldn't be doing what I am now. I wasn’t intending to be a writer.  Funnily enough, as a child I always wrote but I also wanted to be a painter and a craftsman. My life had gone more into craft, I was doing batiks and teaching dyeing, fabric printing and other things at that stage, but the first trip to Yemen, back in the 1980s, steered me onto that other path of research.

Did you record processes that would have been lost otherwise?

Yes, and I'm not sure if there's anyone left doing it now, possibly just two or three at most. The thing about craft traditions is that they’re taken for granted - you have potters in your village for thousands of years, for example - and then the next generation turns to modern technology and it's all gone.  No one records it at the time because it's mundane. 

Can we talk briefly about the background of Woad? Obviously for Europeans Woad was the principal source of indigo; how was it extracted in the earliest days?

Woad is indeed the European indigo plant. The extraction process was very laborious in the past and was similar to traditional Japanese methods.  Woad made the mediaeval European way worked well with wool, the two went together, but it wasn't strong enough to dye Indian cottons when they reached the markets from the sixteenth century.  It took ages to make woad dye then - leaves were picked and crushed with a roller or cutting wheels, horse drawn usually, then made into rough balls of compost, which were dried on racks and then hammered and watered to make what was known as ‘couched woad’, which was traded to the dye markets in barrels. The Japanese method, still used in Japan today with their own indigo plant, is very similar.  It takes months and you have a form of compost they call ‘sukumo’. It dissolves very well and makes a more gentle vat, but in some respects it's not the most efficient way to produce indigo.  However, in Japan it's a cultural thing going way back in time and  there's no way they would make indigo in a different way, whereas revivals in Europe are now applying fast Indian methods to woad to extract the dyestuff, rather than making traditional compost.

Tell me about the background of fustians... a denim expert friend of mine asks, has JBP seen the exhibit 'il maestro della tela jeans' at the Galerie Canesso in Paris? And what does she think of the paintings of people in what appears to be denim? Is it fustian/fustagno? Wool warp dyed with pastello (woad) with a cotton or linen weft? 

I spoke to the gallery owners and they sent me the catalogue. It's fabulous - and incidentally, the show toured to New York City last year. The painter was painting work clothes in the later 17th century; while other painters around him were painting posh things he was observing local scenes, and poor workers – there's a boy in a jacket with a crust of bread and a woman in a torn apron, and a glimpse of what look like the lower leg of actual jeans, and what they're wearing looks just like denim and indeed it really is. It is an indigo-dyed twill and the painter has even used indigo paint to depict it. So it is effectively denim … they've completely got the look, it could be denim today.  Fascinating.

Portrait of a young boy, in indigo-dyed workwear. Not only does this fabric fade much like today's denim - it even has similar contrasting stitching!

Would you think that is fustian, fustagno? 

What is fustian? Nobody is quite sure, as it goes back so far, possibly to Fustat, the old capital of Egypt, which may have given it its name... fustian can be many different fabrics it seems, but they all seem to be hard-wearing. 

Would the Maestro fabric have been dyed with woad?


At that period, probably, although he was painting in the transition period with the more concentrated imported indigo from the east increasingly being used by the dyers so it’s impossible to be sure. 

Indigo could dye ‘royal blue’ silks but was also a practical colour to use for work wear. In some places such as the  Arab world, indigo was considered a practical dark substance, rather than a blue colour,  They would dye clothing as dark as possible, using indigo (sometimes mixed with other dyes) to make a good near-black, knowing that other organic dyes used for blacks were based on tannic acid and therefore bad for the fibres. 

 Part 2 of this Q&A will follow soon!

Many thanks to Jenny Balfour-Paul for sharing her insights. All photos here are taken from Indigo, copyright controlled by JBP and are not to be used without permission. 

Reader Offer

Loomstate readers can get hold of Indigo at a discount price, 10% off with free postage in the UK: simply click here and enter the discount code Loomsgate 10. Offer is valid to 10 July, while stocks last, and is not available with any other promotion. 

Glimpses of a forgotten past

I recently came across a fascinating archive of colour photos, all taken in pre-Soviet Russia circa 1910. The photographer, Sergei Prokudin-Gorski, developed his own colour process using filters and three separate plates - it has taken the advent of digital technology to produce a clear colour composite from the process and now the photos, all in the archive of the Library of Congress, sparkle as if they were taken yesterday. I've been on a Russian reading jag recently - I especially enjoyed Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy - and these photos depict how strange and often backward, to Western eyes, Russian culture was.

Cotton was a major contributor to the Russian economy. Throughout this period Russian agriculture was primitive, as in many areas a system of collective ownership, or Obschchina, tended to remove incentive to develop arable land. The cotton and dyeing industry is poorly-documented, but Prokudin-Gorski's photos provide a tantalising glimpse.

This is the interior of a textile mill - using the local cotton - probably in Tashkent. Any guesses as to the machines and particular parts of the process gratefully received!

 A cotton field, in the Sukhumi Botanical Garden.

I love this photo of a fabric merchant at the Samarkand market, because the colours are all true, not hand-tinted. Note the framed page from the Koran at the top of the stall. Like the others, this photo was taken around 1910 and depicted a way of life that more or less disappeared within a decade.

Other glimpses of the diversity of culture in the pre-War period

The many political hues of Indigo

Mary Lance's new film on the history of Indigo, Blue Alchemy, is an intriguing work on many levels, some expected - and some surprising.

It was perhaps inevitable that, with a consultant like Jenny Balfour-Paul, author of the landmark (and recently republished) Indigo, it would be a fascinating examination of the diverse forms and techniques associated with indigo - there are many insights into the history of this fascinating dye, and throughout there's a wonder at its strange alchemy, of how a liquid that's a yellowy-green colour can turn fabrics, especially cotton, blue. The insights into the intricacies of indigo, how its use developed in different continents, and the way its heritage varies across the globe, are manifold. Throughout the film, there's an engaging focus on people, and how indigo permeates their lives, such as the wonderful Hiroyuki Shindo, who maintains the tradition of Sukumo, the composted leaves of  Polygonum Tinctorum, using this ancient Japanese technique to create beautiful, serene artworks.

 Hiroyuki Shindo - an exponent of the Sukumo, the traditional Japanese technique of making an indigo compost  (European woad dyers used a similar technique). Photo by Mary Lance.

The contrasting, more sophisticated technique, perfected in India, using the Indigofera Tinctorum plant. This produced an indigo "cake' that was easily transportable. These methods were copied (perhaps via industrial espionage) in Jamaica and South Carolina. Photo by Mary Lance.

Yet the fact that struck me most forcefully is that indigo is a political subject, which inevitably reflects the power structures of the world around it. This is an issue which surfaces in Jenny's book, where she discusses the dye's early history alongside that of Tyrian Purple - the colour that was the symbol of power and affluence in the Roman Empire; the history of indigo similarly stretches right back, to the second millennium BC, when it was used to colour the pharoahs' clothing. The political resonance of indigo intensified once dyeing techniques reached Europe in the 1500s. The dye was so prized that, from the 1700s onwards, huge tracts of Bengal were used to farm Indigofera Tinctoria; the East India Company and their planters coerced workers to convert their land use from food to the lucrative crop, which was used for dyeing both military uniforms and fashionable items like blue satin. The consequent food shortages, along with the meagre wages,  resulted in The Indigo Revolt; a rebellion which many see as the beginnings of non-violent protest, as practised so effectively by Mahatma Gandhi.

As with Sea Island Cotton, and so many of today's fashion items, the popularity of indigo resulted in exploitation and repression; after the Indigo Revolt, indigo culture moved to South Carolina - relying heavily on slave labour. As Lance's film explains, indigo's revival as a craft skill today has required producers in several areas to banish memories of a dark and cruel past.

Yet that dark past didn't recede with the passing of natural indigo. From the 1890s onwards, of course, the advent of synthetic indigo, via a process invented by Adolf von Baeyer, freed many from menial toil. But as Diurmud Jeffries relates in his gripping, but depressing book Hell's Cartell, Baeyer and his company BASF were an integral part of Germany's militaristic revival. By 1915, synthetic indigo had effectively wiped out the natural version, despite the efforts of the British empire. (Even Cone, who started producing denim for Levi's in 1915, are thought to have evaded restrictions on the German product during the First World War, and dyed their denim with synthetic indigo). BASF later became a key member of the IG Farben cartel, using their industrial muscle to bankroll the Nazis, and their huge income from synthetic indigo and other dyes helped fund research for products like synthetic petroleum, to help Hitler achieve his long-fantasied "Autarky" - economic self-sufficiency. When the allies liberated Auschwitz, they found a huge synthetic petroleum plant built by IG Farben, whose directors, according to Jeffries, only avoided the death penalties they deserved thanks to resurgent american anti-Semitism and the advent of the Cold War.

So far, so repressive. But all of human life is there, in the history of indigo. Perhaps the best counter-example to the dark side of the dye comes from the clothing popularised by Giuseppe Garibaldi. For in the Museo Del Risorgimento in Rome there are a pair of blue workpants known as 'Garibaldi's jeans', made from a blue fabric that is possibly a fustian  - cotton fill, probably with a indigo linen warp - or a cotton duck. This style of pants became known, of course, as' Genovesi'. Garibaldi, the "Lion of Liberty", was the first rebel with a cause, albeit in Blue Genes, rather than Blue Jeans.

 When it comes to totalitarianism vs the individual, indigo has historically backed both sides. Happily, Mary Lance's film gives a warming account of its new role, helping to liberate isolated, sometimes troubled communities, fostering the craft ethic in an increasingly industrialised world.

If it quacks, is it canvas?

Duck is denim's obscure older brother. When Jacob Davis first had the idea of riveting workpants, his first production run was not in denim – it was in white duck. Then when Jacob teamed up with Levi Strauss, the first work overalls – probably made by home-workers, earning a piece-rate – came in either cotton duck, or denim. Pretty soon it turned out that the first Levi's-wearers preferred denim due to how it wore in, but cotton duck was an integral part of Levi's product line for at least 20 years.


Today, thanks to people like Rising Sun, Ooe-Yofokuten, Left Field and Carhartt, cotton duck is back in fashion. Yet the origins of the fabric are still less understood than denim. For instance, are duck and canvas the same fabric? In some accounts, it was said that Levi's or Jacob Davis used canvas for their first pants because it was available in large quantities for use as sailcloth or tent-cloth. A decade ago, I was told by Levi's researchers that this story was incorrect and that they used duck, a different fabric.

Now, thanks to the work of fabrics guru Ralph Tharpe, it turns out it could well be true. Just over a year ago Ralph told me how LVC had ordered some duck for their new repros, and specified an unusual selvage – with a wide gap between the edge of the fabric and the black selvage line. This gives a distinctive look to early Levi's duck pants, where the selvage line is visible on the leg, outside the busted seam. Ralph started looking for information on this distinctive selvage: “I was doing research, in the Callaway Textile Dictionary and elsewhere, looking up the particular weaves and it referred me to sailcloths. I looked at the sail cloth definition and it said, in the UK the stuff was 24 inches wide, in the US 22 inches wide, and then they were 10 oz per linear yard - and it said there was a line in the fabric that was the guide for sewing the pieces together when making sails. The further the line is from the edge, the heavier the product. So without any question, things made from cotton duck with the line further away are Sail Fabrics!It is beautiful! I want to do more research on sailcloth, the dyeing et cetera. But can you imagine, in San Francisco in the 1870s, how there would be tons and tons of sailcloth around?”

 The suggestion that the black line in duck selvage is a guide for sewing sails is indeed a beautiful one. So I sent Ralph a bunch more questions about the origins of cotton duck, and here is his reply.(Incidentally, I didn't ask if he saw canvas and duck as being the same, as Bud Strickland answered that question in the affirmative a couple weeks ago.) There's lots of new information here: note also, Ralph's point that weights for earlier fabrics were based on linear yards, and that some of them were probably heavier than we'd think.

 How duck got its name
 Early flax sail cloth from England or Scotland came with 2 trade marks.  The raven mark was stenciled on the lighter fabrics, while the heavier ones bore the trademark picturing a duck.  This is according to Fairchild's Dictionary of Textiles.  Wikipedia says "cotton duck" is from the Dutch word "doek" meaning, linen canvas.  Probably there is some truth to both references.  Later the name "duck" was associated with heavy cotton fabrics in the USA.  Usually the word canvas and duck are used interchangeably.   However, there are many different end uses for "duck" from tents to fire hoses.  The fabrics come in a variety of different weights and yarn constructions.  Many have plied yarns in the construction and/or two singles yarns weaving side by side.  

Why that unusual selvage line?
The selvage line on some ducks, according to the textile dictionaries I am using, serves as a guide to the sewer when joining the narrow widths together to make sails, covered wagon covers, or tents.  The farther this colored thread is from the edge of the fabric, the heavier the duck.  In the pant examples from "late 1800s" that Mike Harris has sent me, the line is exposed on the outside of the pant near the "busted" out seam.  I did a punch weight on one of the garment fragments (brand is not known) and it weighed 14 oz.  Of course this is the washed weight and based on square yard ounce weight.  The sold weights at the time sometimes appeared in the catalogues or on the garments tags.  These weights were based on the weight of a linear yard of narrow fabric.  They are NOT square yard weights as we use the term today.   Eight, nine, and ten ounce weights were commonly quoted on the tags and in the catalogues, but the actual square yard and fully shrunk weights were much heavier.

 What's the typical weave for a duck or canvas?
OK, so you asked about the weave.  In general, duck and canvas weaves are based on the plain weave.  They don't have a twill line.  The weave is balanced so there is no leg twist common in vintage jeans.  The fragment mentioned above has two warp yarns weaving together and two weft yarns weaving together, which technically makes a basket weave.  Most often when someone says "duck" I generally think of two ends of warp weaving side by side with one weft yarn across.  But the basket weave one is also technically a "duck".  Among the fragments Mike has sent to me one can find only two ends weaving side by side in warp, but weft can be one yarn or two in the same shed.

 Was that duck originally destined for sails?
Based on the fact the selvage line is so far from the edge and the line is showing on the outside of the pant leg, can we assume that the fabric was not originally made for pants?  Did the "lap seam" line later become designed into the pant?  Or did they eliminate it at some point?  I would  dearly love to know.  I am also curious about the color of the fabrics used for sails and tents, etc.   However, based on the distance the selvage line is off the edge, it seems safe to assume that the early duck pants were made of fabric that were either dual purpose or not originally intended for pants.
Special thanks to Ralph Tharpe for sharing his insights.

This 1890s duck jumper repro, like the original, and other early duck items, is festooned with black selvage lines. We believe these betray the fabric's origins as sailcloth. 

Loomstate

 Loomstate fabric is fabric as it comes off the loom. Unsinged, raw, unsanforized, unstabilised, unskewed. For years, this type of fabric has been obscure, almost forgotten. When you wash it, it shrinks, it twists, it gets hairy. It is awkward, ornery stuff, and it fell out of use. Now, I hope, people are starting to love it.

The fabric shown here was spec'd up by me and a certain fabric genius called Ralph Tharpe, for use in a small run of jeans produced by Roy Slaper - you can find more about these, and photos of them around the world, at superfuture (if the site ever gets back up). I'm sure you'll hear more about them here soon, as you will about Cone, the company in North Carolina who made it. Loomstate means that there is no finishing whatsoever to the fabric after it comes off the loom. This is how all denim was produced up to the 1920s, but is unusual today, as even vintage-repro denim tends to have starching or stabilising treatments applied.

This called K87211, and uses a special, Pima yarn for the fill - the white part of the denim that you can see from the inside. This Pima yarn is a resonant, special quantity for fabric fetishists; it is related to Sea Island Cotton, reputedly the finest cotton of all time. The warp yarn, the blue one, was also specially developed, to emulate denim of circa 1915-1920 - tumultuous times in the denim industry, not least because of trade embargos and political upheaval. The warp yarn is dyed with indigo, and by the 1920s, synthetic indigo was fast becoming popular. But synthetic indigo was produced by a German company, and US manufacturers weren't supposed to use it. In 1918, the type of indigo you used was a political decision.

So this loomstate denim already has stories resonating through its warp, and its weft, even before we talk about how it got loomed, and what it got made into. I promise we'll come back to them.