Color in Renaissance Dress

In early modern Europe, there was a rapid growth in fashion technologies and innovations. One of the crucial issues at the heart of these innovations was color. By the sixteenth century, dyers had not only developed sophisticated methods to obtain the deepest and richest shades of expensive reds and blacks – the ultimate colors of power and fashion in the period – but contemporaries had also developed a broad range of social and cultural meanings that were expressed by means of different colors in dress. The choice of color might signal outward qualities (such as age, wealth, marital status, and social worth) or it could stand for intrinsic qualities, beliefs, or moods (such as reliability, honesty, dignity, religious belief, loss, grief, joyfulness, and love). This wide spectrum of meanings and values associated with color meant that clothing items dyed in brilliant and intensive colors were not only economically valuable products but were also seen as socially and culturally valuable assets that provided indispensable instruments for Renaissance men and women to communicate social, cultural, and personal values that were expressed and interpreted through multiple and sometimes conflicting social, religious, and cultural codes.