The Indigo Clash
WHY THE DYE THAT WOULD PUT THE BLUE IN JEANS WAS BANNED WHEN IT REACHED THE WEST
IT MIGHT SEEM ODD to outlaw a pigment, but that’s what European monarchs did in a strangely zealous campaign against indigo. The ancient blue dye, extracted in an elaborate process from the leaves of the bushy legume Indigofera tinctoria, was first shipped to Europe from India and Java in the 16th century.
To many Europeans, using the dye seemed unpleasant. “The fermenting process yielded a putrid stench not unlike that of a decaying body,” James Sullivan notes in his book Jeans . Unlike other dyes, indigo turns cloth vivid blue only after the dyed fabric has been in contact with air for several minutes, a mysterious delay that some found unsettling.
Plus, indigo represented a threat to European textile merchants who had heavily invested in woad, a homegrown source of blue dye. They played on anxieties about the import in a “deliberate smear campaign,” Jenny Balfour-Paul writes in her history of indigo. Weavers were told it would damage their cloth. A Dutch superstition held that any man who touched the plant would become impotent.
Governments got the message. Germany banned “the devil’s dye” ( Teufelsfarbe) for more than 100 years beginning in 1577, while England banned it from 1581 to 1660. In France in 1598, King Henry IV favored woad producers by banning the import of indigo, and in 1609 decreed that anyone using the dye would be executed.
Still, the dye’s resistance to running and fading couldn’t be denied, and by the 18th century it was all the rage in Europe. It would be overtaken by synthetic indigo, developed by the German chemist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer—a discovery so far-reaching it was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1905.