Fashionable Fading in the First Decade of Photography

In 1843, a rage for fabrics printed in the "rainbow" style spread across Europe. These fabrics exhibited subtly fading bands of bright colors obtained through chemical innovations in dying (colors which, nonetheless, often proved fugitive). By 1848, the rainbow fabrics had faded from fashion, and extant examples have been locked away in museum storerooms, or hidden in obscure manufacturers' and dyers' trial books. The paucity of visual representations of rainbow fabrics is also to blame for their absence in the collective imaginary of 1840s fashion: painted portraiture eschewed them in favor of more neutral, timeless textiles, while photography had been incapable of recording the rainbow fabrics' prismatic colors. However, this paper argues that, though they appear "faded," representations of rainbow garments in early photographs in fact offer one of the period's most synergistic alliances between pictorial element and representational medium. Part of this visual dynamism lies in the graphic inspiration that rainbow textile designs seemingly drew from experimental photogenic drawings. Conversely, photographers pursuing a modern form of art portraiture, in particular the Scottish team of Hill & Adamson, seemed to embrace the challenges of representing fashionable "fading" fabrics in a medium constantly fighting this effect. That some of the period's most important textile chemists, such as John Mercer in England and Daniel Dollfus-Ausset in France, were also early dabblers in photography underlines the sympathy that existed between these industrial artforms. As this paper reveals, this cross-media sympathy is manifested especially powerfully in apparently-faded photographs of rainbow-printed textiles.