The Fade Record: The Documented Color History of an Object

The color of an old garment today is not the color it had when it came out of the dye. That much can always be said. How far it has faded, and why, is a different question, and on Tailor, Weaver, Jeweler, Dyer it is answered only from records. We call those records the fade record.

What goes in

An object's fade record holds three kinds of documented evidence: the conditions it is recorded as having been kept in, technical tests of its color such as dye analysis, and records of conservation or treatment. Each item comes with its source.

What stays out

Anything without a record is marked not verified: how much light the object saw, how much sweat it absorbed, how often it was washed. The site does not invent a past for an object to explain its color, and a guess about why a red now looks brown is not part of the record, however likely it seems.

So a page can say that the color you see now is not the original color. It says how much the color changed, or why, only when a test shows it.

An example: the Glen Affric tartan

A fade record can be very short, and the Glen Affric tartan's is. In V&A Dundee's 2023 account, National Museums Scotland scientists looking through a digital microscope found green and brown in the cloth, with red and yellow possible. A dye test showed the green held indigo or woad; the tests on the other colors came out inconclusive, likely because those dyes had broken down.

So the record settles a single point, the blue in the green, and nothing more. How bright any red was, and whether there was red at all, it leaves open. The tartan entry keeps to that limit when it reads the cloth.

The record on other pages

The Tyrian purple entry keeps Pliny's and Plutarch's opposite remarks about fading out of the record, since neither man tested any surviving cloth. The indigo dye entry reads a Met cloth catalogued as indigo-dyed, for which the records read show no dye test; the catalogue's word is all there is. The arsenic green entry lets arsenic into a green dress's record only after a test, and sorts the tests that found it from those that could not settle the question.

Sources

V&A Dundee. "Scotland's oldest tartan discovered by Scottish Tartans Authority." 26 March 2023. vam.ac.uk/dundee/info/scotland-s-oldest-tartan-discovered-by-scottish-tartans-authority