Vogue Philippines’ holiday issue celebrates the royal color for the Yuletide festivities of the season. Lavender Fields and Olivia Rodrigo ’s Guts may currently be painting our small screens in shades of ultraviolet, but purple has ruled the wardrobe since the beginning of civilization. It distinguished the rich and powerful from the masses; reserved for priests, senators, and nobility in the ancient and medieval world.
Greek mythology claims the genesis of the color began in the Phoenician city of Tyre, (or now Lebanon) and was discovered by Hercules’ pet dog. To harvest a gram of Tyrian purple dye required up to 12,000 mollusks to produce, but many millenniums later in 1856, a British chemist called William Henry Perkin managed to accidentally invent a synthetic dye. ‘Mauve’ quickly infiltrated the well-heeled of Victorian society and soon became a symbol of social change in the 20 th century.
Representing feminism, power, and counterculture, its sartorial authority has dominated and endured in music, fashion, film, and diplomacy. Prince, Oprah, Kate Middleton , and Daphne Blake have all immortalized purple in full bloom. We’ve seen brands utilize the pigment as a marketing strategy.
Prada used the majestic nature of the color in the form of Bauhaus -esque carpets and sand dunes for the runway, Versace just launched a fragrance called ‘Dylan Purple’ , and Ralph Lauren has its Purple Label line, famously name-dropped in Beyonce’s Upgrade U . This season, yo.
