From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 7 August 1880, Image digitized by Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County
As the local haberdasheries and modistes swell with shoppers clamoring for appropriate gifts for their kith and kin, what colors do they promote? It seems a silly question these days when, as the old song once claimed, “anything goes,” and the entire spectrum is accessible for plundering in the name of habilimentation. Is there any color particularly fashionable this year?
More than a century ago, that was quite a pertinent inquiry. The wrong shade of your dress might ostracize you from society. Reading antique articles about bygone fashion trends is always entertaining, but there are occasions in which it appears that stylish Cincinnatians were engaged in sorcery. Were there premonitions of Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak? Here is the Cincinnati Enquirer from 3 February 1889:
“A pretty house dress is here shown. It is of invisible green soft wool goods with tracings of fawn color, and trimmed with bands of fawn and brighter green.”
And here the Cincinnati Gazette from 8 August 1877:
“The dry goods stores are announcing their last selling off arrangements to close the season, and in a little while fall fashions and dress goods will hold full sway. Respecting the coming season, we are told that the color for street wear will be sage green in its darkest shades, rechristened Marjolaine, or else a very dark, almost an invisible green.”
What in the world is invisible green? Was this something like the recent fad for camouflage patterns in sportswear? Were Cincinnatians attempting to glide down Fourth Street with no one catching a glimpse of them, perhaps skulking toward a discreet rendezvous?
As it turns out, “Invisible Green” as a fashionable color originated not among the ateliers of Paris, but in the gardens of Regency England. As a color, it has, perhaps, more to do with Jane Austen than with later couturières.
Invisible Green was a favorite color of Humphrey Repton, a legendary landscape designer during Jane Austen’s lifetime. Invisible Green was a very dark green oil paint compounded by mixing yellow ochre and black pigments with white lead. The resulting hue proved to be ideal for slathering on wooden and ironwork gates and rails in parks, pleasure grounds, and gardens to render them almost invisible at a distance because of the manner in which this particular hue approximated the natural color of vegetation.
T.H. Vanherman, the premier London “colourman” of his day, described Invisible Green in this manner in 1829:
“The Invisible Green is one of the most pleasant colours for fences, and all work connected with buildings, gardens, or pleasure grounds, as it displays a richness and solidity, and also harmonizes with every object, and is a back-ground and foil to the foliage of fields, trees, and plants, as also to flowers.”
From Cincinnati Enquirer 3 February 1889, Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
Soon enough, Invisible Green was adopted by the fashionistas, and fabrics in that particular shade were being unloaded at the Cincinnati wharfs as early as 1838. The fashion pages of Cincinnati’s newspapers regularly announced Invisible Green as either the primary color or a trim color for men’s and women’s fashions for the next 60 years.
Yes, men were just as enamored with Invisible Green as were the womenfolk. Here is the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [4 January 1890]:
“It is stated by fashion authorities that the fashionable color in men’s clothing for spring will be green, and already orders have been given by fashionable tailors for solid invisible green in diagonals and worsteds.”
And here is the Enquirer [21 April 1882], laying down the law on men’s vests for the spring season:
“Vests are all single-breasted, no-collar, closed high with seven or eight buttons, four patch pockets, short in the waist and cut straight across the front. There is no demand for collars on the vest, even dress suits being without them. The finish of the edge corresponds with the coat and the material with the trousers. Fancy vestings are gaining in popularity. Invisible greens, reds or blues form a background for dots, broken designs, checks and bars placed at right angles, touched up with streaks of color.”
Even transportation adopted Invisible Green. The Enquirer [5 May 1882] described the “finest drag in America,” a “drag” being a type of stagecoach pulled by four horses:
“The springs and axles are regular mail-coach make, and have been thoroughly tested and given the highest grading. The wheel hubs are furnished with dust excluders of the best pattern. The body of the drag stands so high that the front wheels can be turned right under it, so that it can be wheeled around in its own length. The seats and facings are of the finest invisible green French cloth.”
We forget, in these kaleidoscopic days of extreme coloration, that the 1800s were not a drab, monochromatic time. Our forebears reveled in color and eye-popping fashion. They were continually putting one another down for violating what we would consider arcane peccadillos in dress. Perhaps the worst insult a woman could land on a social rival was to observe that she was wearing last year’s color.
To read the old fashion pages is to find oneself immersed in a palette of almost psychedelic possibilities. We hear about cadet, mastic, ecru, canary, tobacco, seal, sea water, vine, fawn, wheat, pansy, dahlia, pearl, lilac, claret, gendarme, mulberry chartreuse, absinthe, capucine, nasturtium and moss. So, why not Invisible Green?
So common was this color that a Cincinnati journalist even adopted the pen name of “Invisible Green, Esq.” (More on that fellow at a later date.)
Eventually, after a century of not actually being invisible, the time-hallowed shade of Invisible Green fell out of fashion. The death knell sounded in the form of a joke. It was published in the Cincinnati Post [31 October 1904] and it went like this:
“Servant: The butcher won’t leave no more meat, sir, he says, until he sees the color of your money.
“Mr. Hardup: Why – er – tell him it’s invisible green.”
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