an interesting thing about clothing in late medieval and early modern europe is that, while lower class people generally did wear brightly colored clothing instead of muddy brown clothes, there were very distinct differences in the color of clothing people of different classes wore. clothing was done with all natural dyes, of course, but they were either dyed locally with cheap and easily accessible ingredients, or they were dyed in holland, italy, the ottoman empire, or even further afield using a jealously guarded secret combination of difficult-to-access ingredients, including (crucially) better-quality fixatives. this means that not only did expensive imported fabrics maintain a dark, rich tone much longer than a locally dyed one, which would get a washed out look after a couple of years, but there were also certain colors that a working class farmer literally couldn’t afford to wear, and even though the difference between a cheap local lincoln green and an expensive imported popingay green might seem subtle to us people then seem to have been very sensitive to those differences. that’s also why the colors puritans tended to wear seem uncharacteristically bright to our modern eye—black was such a rich and expensive color that it would be inappropriate to wear to anything other than a portrait sitting, but the colors orange and kendall green were deeply humble in their origins
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