On an overcast day late last year, Denise Lambert retrieved a square of linen from a tall dye vat, wrung it out and hung it on a wall rack inside her small atelier in this picturesque southwestern French village.
“The kids think I’m a nice witch,” said Ms. Lambert, now 73, as the fabric reacted with the air, turning from a brilliant yellow to green to a vibrant blue.
The batch was just one of the orders for her company, L’Atelier des Bleus Pastel d’Occitanie, most of which are commissioned by fashion designers.
In previous weeks, the workshop’s drying racks had been lined with jeans for Tender, a brand by the British designer William Kroll, and work wear for a Japanese clothing company. But “you never know what you’re going to do,” she said.
Ms. Lambert — who tends to wear blue clothes, has glasses with blue frames and often finds her hands are blue from dye — has been in thrall to the color since 1993, when she and her husband, Henri, bought a derelict tannery in Lectoure, a hill town in southwestern France not far from Toulouse. At a chapel on the property, the pair discovered four 15th-century window shutters that, despite their age, were still blue.
Unable to find any trace of the color, used on horse carts in the 1400s for its insect repellent properties, Ms. Lambert said the couple wanted “to figure out why this blue didn’t exist anymore and where it came from.” The answer lay with the isatis tinctoria plant, also called woad.
Once the only blue dye in Europe, woad pigment made a fortune for the sun-rich Toulouse area during the Renaissance, when it also was called Toulouse’s Blue Gold. But over time, the plant was supplanted by indigo from Asia and, later, artificial dyes, said Chantal Armagnac, author of “Le Pastel en Pays de Cocagne,” a book about woad and its history in the region.
“It was much easier to dye with synthetic dyes,” Ms. Armagnac said. So “gradually, the know-how disappeared.”
Intent on reviving the color, the Lamberts founded a company called Bleu de Lectoure in 1994. Using seeds from the archives of the Conservatoire National des Plantes in Milly-la-Forêt, France and an 1813 treatise by Napoleon’s dye chemist, Giovanni Giobert, that a friend found at an auction, they embarked on a five-year project to recreate the pigment using modern techniques.
Mr. Lambert died in 2010 at age 55 and their company closed in 2016 after two years of bad harvests. But Ms. Lambert was determined to continue their work and in 2017, she founded L’Atelier des Bleus Pastel d’Occitanie. Now she lives in Roumens, working alongside their 36-year-old daughter, Mariam.
Company projects have included dyeing linen tablecloths for the Cannes Film Festival, feathers for the 2017 film “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” a Viking dress in need of restoration for the National Museum of Finland, wooden kitchenware for a Japanese company and couture pieces for runway shows. (Confidentiality agreements mean the company cannot identify some of its clients, but their ranks include Nana Aganovich and Ted Lapidus, Ms. Lambert said.)
In contrast to the luxury items often handled by the atelier, the workshop and its tools are fairly basic.
The space, lit by fluorescent strip lights and with a concrete floor, totals only about 380 square feet. Large plastic trash cans are used as dye vats; plumbing pipes fixed to one wall provide drying racks; and long thin wooden broom handles, one for each Lambert, are used as dye sticks, to drag fabrics out of the depths of the vats.
Dyeing begins with the creation of a so-called “mother solution,” prepared in a five-liter plastic jug that sits on a cabinet top. (The more attractive, but less practical, glass container on the shelf above is reserved for use when TV film crews are visiting, Ms. Lambert said with a grin.)
Ingredients include powdered pigment, now purchased from local farmers; volcanic spring water from the Auvergne region of France, heated to 70 or 80 degrees Fahrenheit (21 to 27 degrees Celsius); diluted ammonia, a modern replacement for the men’s urine traditionally used to achieve a balance between the mix’s acid and alkaline levels; and powdered fructose to prevent the mixture from oxidizing. The amounts of each substance used in the mix depends on the shade of blue that is desired and the type of fabric to be dyed.
The ingredients are blended by placing the container on the flat surface of a machine called a magnetic stirrer, putting a magnet into the container and running the machine for 25 to 60 minutes. After allowing the mixture to rest for 24 hours, it is added to a vat already filled with cold water.
Anything being dyed “has to go in very delicately,” Ms. Lambert said as she lowered another linen square slowly into the vat’s dark, green waters. If the liquid is disturbed too much, air would get into the mixture and turn it an unwanted blue, she said, acknowledging the alchemy of the process: “Nothing is normal with woad.”
Numerous factors determine the final color, she said, including how many times something is dipped (the dying process involves a minimum of three and a maximum of seven baths; between baths, the fabric is squeezed to remove excess water and aired), soaking time, the type of fabric and even the weather.
“You have a bacteria that’s alive and that may want to work or may not want to work,” said Ms. Lambert, comparing the dye to a petulant teen. “It’s never a boring day.”
For Robin Khayat, the owner of the French luxury clothing brand Blanc Bleu, the result is a subtly shifting palette that far outshines commercial, standardized colors.
“People can immediately see there’s something different,” said Mr. Khayat, whose two-year collaboration with the atelier has included Blanc Bleu’s signature Cable sweater (1,350 euros, or $1,412). “Suddenly, you have these types of blues you haven’t seen before, and it’s just magic.”
Ms. Lambert said she worked seven-day weeks to fit lectures, workshops, consulting with museums such as the Jewish Museum of New York and collaborating with universities such as BOKU University in Vienna. And she still has many plans, including establishing an international academy to study natural colors.
“You never stop hoping to have the best blue,” said Ms. Lambert as she watched the linens on her rack change color. “It’s fascinating what you can obtain. It hooks on to you, and you can’t get rid of it.”
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