Pretty in Pink.....Well Light Red

There has been many a long debate amogst the costume community if pink was considered at period color. The term Pink is modern and only goes back to the late 17th Century as a description for a color, we hear of the term rosy or rosa in an early poem to describe the dawn sky by Lucretius as a pink hue.
  It is a name for cutting small slashes to decorate fabric in a pattern known as "pinking" which dates back to the 14th century.  It also date to the plant, garden pinks which is a form of Dianthus, a more wild relative of the modern carnation. Pink was a form of yellow hue in painting and mixed with other ingredients to make the yellow various shades in paint during the 17th Century. So that is the history of the word but what does that mean to us?

Some folks like to use light red as a reference to pink usage in costuming pre-17th Century. Modern reenactors, costumers, seamstresses and tailors will refer to the rose color of the gown, and yet others skip over the color all together. I have known some folks to opt for more coral orange based hues, and yet others to embrace the color in certain shades shown in paintings. Still more debated due to age and light fading the paintings may have shown another hue all together different to the depictions we see know of renaissance paintings. I myself try to keep the shades depicted from the actual paintings and sometimes hunt for hours finding the best resolution photo.

  I collected a few example images of paintings in this mysterious hue, many of these I am interested in making gowns just like the paintings. A few gowns are in progress and others are a figment of my garb making imagination. Enjoy my mini Pink gallery of gowns.

Thanks for looking,

Lady Mairin