Dyeing for Paris

This piece was created after I saw a video about Paris green (from History with Amy). I had used the inspiration dress (from The Met) in another piece (the collages This Way and That Way), before I knew the historical context of the dress. I was surprised to see the exact dress in the video, and even more shocked to learn about Paris green. (I should note here that The Met's website does not indicate whether or not the dress used Paris green fabric; however the time period and the color are right, and the dress is British, so it seems highly likely it did. Plus Amy knows her stuff and it's the first dress in her video. At any rate, the dress is typical of one that would have been worn during this period and made with this particular fabric, so I was fine with using it as inspiration.)

Paris green was a fashionable shade of green used in the Victorian ages. Primarily used in women's clothing, it was also found in wallpaper and artificial flowers that women would wear in their hair. Unfortunately, it got its fabulous green color from arsenic! As you can imagine, wearing arsenic could be problematic: it could cause skin lesions, turn skin green, and for at least one unfortunate worker, death. Eventually, once society became aware of the dangers of Paris green, its use fell out of fashion (no pun intended), but was still later used as a rodenticide.