Crimson & Yellow & Indigo

Crimson is the ceremonial dress — the deep vivid cool-red of the Tuareg wedding and ceremonial dress tradition, which uses deep crimson-to-red as one of the primary prestige colors for women's formal occasions. The Tuareg women's dress tradition (in contrast to the men's all-over indigo tradition) uses a more chromatic and more multi-color vocabulary — vivid reds, oranges, and crimsons appear in the most ceremonially significant women's dress (tashelhit) alongside yellow, gold, and indigo. In Tuareg wedding traditions, the bride wears the most chromatic and most multi-color dress in the entire Tuareg textile vocabulary — which can include deep crimson, vivid yellow, and indigo in a single ceremonial ensemble. Yellow is the saffron — the vivid solar yellow of saffron (Crocus sativus), the most economically significant dyestuff in the Saharan trade routes and the primary source of vivid yellow in Tuareg textile tradition. Saffron was one of the most valuable trade goods of the trans-Saharan trade routes (the same routes that connected Sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean and the Islamic world from approximately 700-1600 CE) — the specific vivid solar yellow of saffron-dyed silk and wool was the prestige yellow of the entire Saharan and North African textile tradition. Indigo is the tagelmust — the deep blue-violet of the indigo-dyed turban-and-veil worn by Tuareg men, which gives them the 'Blue Men of the Sahara' identity. The specific Saharan indigo (from Indigofera tinctoria, a plant cultivated in the Sahelian zone south of the Sahara, or traded from India and West Africa) creates a deep blue-violet that, when applied to cotton in multiple dip-dye baths, achieves the specific very-dark blue-violet closest to Newton's 'indigo' in the visible spectrum.