Douglas Luhanko - Indigo: Cultivate, dye, create

On the cold, grey November day that we first met, I was looking for someone to dye indigo with and, by chance, stepped into Douglass shop on the very day he had ordered a starter kit for natural indigo dyeing. Since then, weve explored indigos possibilities and limitations together. Douglas has dedicated his working life to denim and creates handmade jeans, and Im a mens tailor with a strong interest in handicrafts. Together, we run the shop Second Sunrise in Sdermalm, Stockholm.

Indigo has been used to colour textiles blue for over 6,000 years and has played a significant role in different cultures, not least in our own time. Perhaps it is for this reason that there are more myths and legends attributed to the indigo pigment than any other. Among other folk tales, it has been mistaken for a mineral, it has been called the devils dye, and a current common myth is that you have to use urine to fix the blue dye. Another subject to ponder is just why indigo became synonymous with workers clothes.

After reading countless guides and putting their instructions into practice in order to grow and dye with indigo plants ourselves, we are delighted to have compiled everything weve learned into this book and we hope it will be of help to those wanting to dye with indigo. We want to show that indigo dyeing doesnt have to be any more difficult than baking scones on a Sunday morning. Happy reading!

Douglas Luhanko and Kerstin Neumller

Indigo plants grow naturally in the blue areas.

Detail from a Japanese patchwork quilt made from several layers of indigo-dyed fabrics.

Indigo is a rich blue colour that can be extracted from plants. There are an incredible 800 or so plant species across the globe that all contain a substance that, together with oxygen, creates indigo pigment. Only a handful of these plants, however, contain high enough levels of the substance to make growing them for dye production worthwhile. Indigo can also be produced synthetically.

Dyeing with indigo is a skill that seems to have emerged simultaneously in several different places around the world in prehistoric times, despite the complex preparation work thats required before the dyeing process can start. We see this as an example of how humanitys curiosity can lead to similar solutions being discovered in different places, completely independent of one another, before spreading to other regions.

The word indigo derives from the Greek word indikon, which later became the Latin word indicum, and literally means from India. The majority of indigo used today is synthetically produced, but you can get hold of naturally produced pigment and its also perfectly possible to grow plants containing indigo at home.

Colouring with indigo is an art that goes far back in time and the pigment is regarded as one of the oldest plant dyes for textiles. Ancient indigo-dyed textiles have been found in different parts of the world and the oldest find is dated to around 4,200 BC from Huaca, Peru.

At that time in Europe, they hadnt developed a technique for extracting pure pigment from the brassica plant, woad. Instead, indigo was preserved and transported by crushing the leaves and rolling them into balls that were then dried. Since indigo came from the East in the form of blue cakes, for a long time there was a common misconception that indigo was a mineral. It wasnt until the end of the 13th century, when Marco Polo returned from his travels to Asia, that this myth was debunked.

Woad continued to be the main source for blue colours in Europe until the 15th century, when Vasco da Gama made seaborne trade possible with India. By then, indigo dye could be imported in greater quantities instead of the limited amount that had previously reached Europe via the trade caravans of the Silk Road.

But indigo from the East didnt get a warm welcome everywhere and in some regions laws were introduced that banned the use of imported indigo, since it threatened to eliminate local woad production. The new indigo was both cheaper and more efficient to dye with, but in some areas breaking the law was punishable by death.

During the 17th century, imported indigo was named the devils dye by Ferdinand III of Hungary, and it wasnt until 1800 that the use of imported indigo became legal in the whole of Europe.

Its almost impossible to talk about indigos history without mentioning slavery and human suffering. During the mid-19th century, indigo was a sought-after commodity and the demand for it increased with the industrialization that steamed ahead in the Western world. During this time, many areas that offered good conditions for indigo cultivation were colonized by the most powerful countries in Europe and plantation owners quickly realized that there was a lot of money to be made. In India and South America, large indigo plantations spread across the countryside, but the local inhabitants and slaves who had to work on them paid a high price; the demand for indigo increased to such an extent that in India, indigo was favoured over other crops including staple foods which lead to famine and misery for much of the population.

As such problems increased, chemists attempted to invent a way to produce synthetic pigments that were both more efficient and cheaper than the ones that the plant world had to offer. In 1880, the German researcher Adolf von Baeyer successfully synthesized a pigment with the same chemical composition as natural indigo pigment and, later in 1883, formulated its structure. The result was synthetic indigo that contained a greater quantity of indigo and was also easier to dye with, since its qualities were more consistent and therefore better suited for the industrys needs than natural indigo. It wasnt long before this new synthetic indigo made the natural version redundant, just as the Eastern indigo had out-competed woad a few hundred years earlier.

The dilemma with indigo today is not only that synthetic indigo has a negative effect on the environment, but that it is impossible to grow enough of the natural variety to meet the demand of modern industry. Research into the subject is ongoing and hopefully there will be environmentally friendly alternatives for producing and using synthetic indigo in the future.

Jeans and denim have always been synonymous with indigo from the California Gold Rush in 1848 to today. Jeans first began as workers clothes, then became associated with rebel youth culture and today are one of the most common garments in our wardrobes.

Almost all the worlds indigo is used for dyeing denim, and you could say that the increasing popularity of jeans in the middle of the 20th century saved indigo. During this time, alternative blue dyes had started cropping up that were both cheaper and more durable, but the unique way in which indigo ages and fades could not be bettered, and that has guaranteed that indigo continues to remain the blue in blue jeans.