Fourty Nine Shades of Black, One of Blue

This is going to be a shorter post than usual as it was written rather quickly but here I'll be discussing the black overdyed trousers again as well as the blue John Lewis cufflinks.

Black:

My previous post discussed the dye treatment done to my Paul Smith trousers in order to modify them to be suitable for the S10 black overdyed trousers. Well this post is going to discuss colour, as many of you might know it's a tricky thing to pin down. Sometimes between dye batches there are noticeable differences, much like different production batches of nearly everything. In addition, inevitable washing and exposure to sunlight will fade the fabric to a degree as I'm sure anyone with an old pair of black jeans will know. All of this is assuming you have the fabric in hand, through a camera lens with various filters and lightnings it can be extremely difficult to pin down a specific shade. Essentially, what I'm getting at is that colour is a tricky thing to pin down.

Well by sheer dumb luck I managed to very recently get hold of a pair of Paul Smith stretch cotton twill trousers in my size with completely unaltered leg length that were made in black out of the factory, unworn and with no overdye needed. What's interesting is that despite being newer and black out of the box, they don't seem as accurate as the overdyed ones. As I said, colour is tricky to pin down. My camera isn't really good enough to accurately show what I mean hence the lack of pictures but I'll try my best to explain.

If you've ever tried to put a black three piece suit together out of mismatched items you'll know it doesn't work, different fabrics are different shades of black and some will look darker or lighter than the others. The trousers I dyed both ended up a fairly comparable shade to the Palmer waistcoat, perhaps a little lighter, but were both definitely a sufficiently dark shade to be categorically called black. The trousers that came out of the factory black however are a noticeably deeper black than my overdyed trousers or the TM Lewin waistcoat.

If you look at the pictures in my previous post you might notice that the screen worn S10 overdyed trousers appear to be a lighter shade of black than basically all of the other black clothes in the picture, though are definitely overdyed to be black as stated by Hayley Nebauer on Twitter. The reason for this is that the trousers are 97% cotton and 3% elastane, the cotton takes the dye readily however the elastane will not do so using conventional dye methods due to its synthetic nature. Despite only being a small percentage of the overall blend it is enough to prevent the trousers reaching the deepest shades of black. The reason the trousers that left the factory as black are deeper is due to the more effective industrial dye processes employed during production. Despite one of the two pairs of my overdyed trousers starting as a rather dark colour (both the cotton and elastane content) additional hand dyeing is not capable of making it colour match the ones that started out as black.

So now I've got three pairs of black Paul Smith trousers, one is a deep production black colour and the other two are a slightly lighter black as a result of the overdyeing. The lighter overdyed black appears to be be a more accurate shade however the newer production black ones have longer legs more suited to my height. As a result of this I will probably auction off my size 32 overdyed trousers and keep the factory black ones, if I use them regularly day to day they'll fade to a more accurate shade in time. So if anyone is after a pair of black overdyed size 32 trousers they'll probably be made available via auction in the near future.

Blue:

As many of you know I managed to obtain a very limited number of the blue enamel John Lewis cufflinks. I had three spare initially, one was put aside for a friend and two were made available for trade offers. The friend passed on them and I received a fair screen accurate trade offer for one of the sets so that brings the number of spare unreserved pairs I have back to two.

A set of the beautiful enamel John Lewis cufflinks.

I would've preferred to trade each set for something discontinued of similar original retail value, such as the Label Lab tees, I received very many offers (both trade and cash) for the cufflinks however I ultimately only ended up accepting that one trade offer. So this leaves me in a bit of a pickle, how to fairly divide such a limited supply amongst such high demand? Well to be honest I'm amazed I even got one pair, let alone multiple, given that I found them in a John Lewis shop quite some time after their identity was revealed to the community. So I decided to use my astoundingly good luck to do a little good and have come to this decision:

One set of the remaining cufflinks will go to auction through eBay with half the money going to Cancer Research UK. This way I'll at least cover my costs and maybe make a small profit, someone will get a set of screen accurate cufflinks and a small amount of good might be done as a result. A link to the auction can be found within the sales page. The final set I will hold onto until I've decided what to do with them.