Purple’s Anatomy The cinema, the art and the sport explain us why this color is so important

nss factory and Converse invite you tomorrow, Wednesday, December 19, to the Purple Christmas G-Club Edition at Palazzo Giureconsulti, the highly anticipated Christmas event that will transport you in the magical female universe. Key word of the evening will be the purple, a color particularly dear to nss, eclectic nuance of a thousand shades.

It's the result of the fusion of two opposites, the red heat and the blue cold, has ancient origins and a ray of influence that has invested numerous but above all different areas: from the history of politics to that of art, from cinema to fashion. Loved by royalty and pop stars, chosen as the uniform of many teams, but also as a symbol of the feminist movement, protagonist of legendary paintings as well as the most beautiful design work.  The purple and every its variant is an obsession that we do not want to leave. 

Purple between History and Politics

We are in the first millennium BC, when the purple or violet of Tire is discovered, the pigment extracted from the mucous membranes of a small mollusk from Lebanon called Murice. Thus began the story of a color that, thanks to the high cost and the difficulty of finding (to obtain about ten grams of product need about 250,000 shells) becomes since its first appearance the color / favorite of kings, nobles, priests and magistrates throughout the Mediterranean. Mentioned in the Old Testament, but also in the Iliad of Homer and in the Aeneid of Virgil, depopulated between the Byzantines and among the most aristocratic Ancient Ancients. Julius Caesar falls in love with him during an expedition to the Royal Palace of Cleopatra, in Egypt, where everything were purple.

If the famous emperor on his return, declares, with a lot of ad hoc legislative corpus, that in Rome alone he has the right to wear a toga of that tint, Nero goes further and promises death to anyone who dares show off a head of the beloved chroma. More or less the same idea are Lorenzo de 'Medici in Florence during the Renaissance and Queen Elizabeth I of England in the sixteenth century that allows its use only to the closest members of the royal family (among which it is still a must). Things change since 1856 in the nineteenth century when William Henry Perkin, an 18-year-old chemistry student, casually discovers a synthetic recipe for pigment creation or, more precisely, for the "mauve" nuance. Result? The innovation makes the color the most "in" of the moment, so widespread that the English newspaper Punchderise labels the phenomenon as "mauve measles". The greater accessibility also coincides with a switch within the company: after being long exclusive of the ruling class, purple stands as an emblem of social change and in 1908 Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence inserts it as a symbol of loyalty and dignity, among the colors of the suffragettes. A decision taken even in the '70s when it’s elected the color of the Women's Liberation Movement.