People who are experienced in working with vintage and historical clothing will tell you that there is no magic formula to putting a date on when a garment was made. Of course, there are those lucky times when the label is dated, or you find the exact garment pictured in a vintage magazine, but that is usually not the case. That’s when you go to the clues: the styling, the label, the construction methods, the materials. But a clue that is sometimes over-looked is the color.
Knowing which colors were used in which eras is just like knowing the styles – you have to study them. I’ve never run cross a book on the subject, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. So in the absence of a color bible, you go to the primary sources. Studying the fashion magazines of a season will give you a pretty good idea of what colors were “in”. Even better are home sewing catalogs. All the major pattern companies put out a home catalog magazine from the 1920s through the present day, and most of them have a feature on popular fabrics and colors.
The best print source I’ve found is American Fabrics magazine. It was a trade publication, with its audience being the many US clothing makers. The magazine started publication in the late 1940s and is like a time capsule of the trends in fabrics, prints and colors.
Harder to find are fabric merchant samples like the ones pictured here. I got these through a bit of luck, included in a batch of other fashion advertising junk in an ebay auction. These are from the late 1920s. Can’t you picture 1920s outfits in these color combinations?
The Vintage Traveler 
You lucky lady – those are great color swatches
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This is so interesting, thank you for sharing this! It’s one of the exciting things about finding vintage pieces outside of a black and white photo – seeing them in color is like going back in a time machine and seeing a garment as others did then.
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I wish there was a Color Bible out there… Maybe YOU should take on the task of pulling one together! I’ll bet that thought has crossed your mind, hasn’t it?
I love the names they gave colors in different eras. “Mother Goose” – Was that a fairly standard industry name for a number of years? I know that I’ve run across that one before in some catalog…
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Actually, no it hasn’t crossed my mind; Im too lazy to write a book. All my writing is in small doses so my short attention span won’t be taxed!
The closest this I know of to a color bible is Dating Fabrics: A Color Guide 1800-1960 by Eileen Jahnke Trestain. It was written as a help to people dating antique quilts, but I find it handy for other fabrics as well. The dating is a bit generalized, though. Still there’s lots of great info in it that I’ve never seen in another source.
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