Inspiration often comes from unexpected sources and this post is one of those…Recently, we came across some pictures featuring an circa early 1950s evening dress designed by a one Fred Perlberg that was featured on the Augusta Auctions website. While this dress seemingly has nothing to do with late 19th Century fashion, it does illustrate an interesting point in regard to the use of color in fashion design and especially when applied to the 1870s and 1880s: specifically, monochromatic colors were used in combination with each other. Essentially, monochromatic colors involved the use of tints, shades and tones of one color and in this case, green, as illustrated below:

In this example, we see an incredibly rich dark green combined with a much lighter shade of green- basically a tint where white has been added to the dark green. On a practical level, this is probably the easiest way to create an interesting dress design. Below is an example of an 1880s day dress that we made, using a similar color scheme:

In this example, we’ve used three distinct tints of blue:

The Perlberg dress is a fairly simple example but it gets the idea across very directly. Here’s another example depicted with the first and fourth figures in this December 1880 fashion plate from Godey’s Magazine:

Finally, here’s a little more complex example with this mid to late 1880s day dress:

Day Dress, c. 1883 – 1889; Goldstein Museum of Design (1963.007.002a-b)

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this tiny exploration in the use of monochromatic colors as a design tool in fashion. Stay tuned for more!