Colors of mourning
Black for grief is a local habit, not a law. Medieval queens mourned in white, as China long has.
- Victorian stages
- Full mourning, then half mourning
- White mourning
- Medieval queens (deuil blanc); Chinese tradition
In much of Europe and the Americas, grief wears black. Elsewhere it doesn't. White is the traditional color of mourning in Chinese culture, where white clothes were long tied to death. In Thailand black is now usual, though historically it was white, and widows may wear purple. Colors of grief are conventions, learned like words (see color psychology).
Europe had its own white mourning. The deepest mourning of medieval queens was white, and French queens wore deuil blanc, 'white mourning'. The custom echoed into the 20th century: in 1934 the Dutch royal family mourned Queen Wilhelmina's husband, Prince Hendrik, in white, as he had asked, and in 1938 Norman Hartnell made an all-white wardrobe for Britain's Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, for a state visit to France while she mourned her mother.
The Victorians turned black into a system. After Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria's long, public grief shaped how a whole society mourned. Widows moved through stages: full mourning in heavy black crape, then 'half mourning', when muted lilac, lavender and grey were allowed back. Jet, a black stone formed from fossil wood, became the mourning jewel.
Half mourning's lilacs overlapped with the late-1850s craze for the new mauve dye. Black also runs through church practice, where black vestments may be worn at funerals (see liturgical colors). And the same white that means a wedding in one culture can mean a funeral in another.
Swatches
- Black · Western mourning
- White · Chinese mourning; medieval queens
- Lilac · Victorian half mourning
- Lavender · Victorian half mourning
- Grey · Victorian half mourning
- Purple · Thai widows
Colors
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2014). Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire.
- Taylor, L. (1983). Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History. Allen & Unwin.
- Wikipedia, 'Mourning' (sections on Asia, white mourning and the Victorian era).
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.