Caring for the Roberts Indigo Short Dress
Buy the Roberts and you are not buying a colour off a chart. The dress is printed with natural indigo dye, and the depth of its blue is decided by things no factory controls: the weather on the day, the humidity in the air, and how long the fabric spent in the vat. Your dress will not match the next one on the rack, and that is the point. It also means the dye deserves a little care.
Why no two are the same
Natural indigo is a living process rather than a fixed pigment. The vat changes from day to day, so the blue shifts in depth from piece to piece. Treat the variation as provenance: it is the visible record of how your particular dress was made. What care does is slow the change from here on, so the blue you chose is the blue you keep.
Washing natural indigo
Gentle is the standing rule for this dress. Wash it cold, on a gentle cycle or by hand, with a mild detergent. Turn it inside out first, and wash it separately or with dark colours only — natural indigo can release a little dye in the wash, especially early on, and you do not want it settling into a white shirt.
The first few washes
Expect the water to carry a faint blue tint the first several times. That is surface dye lifting, not the dress failing. It settles down with each wash, and the colour that remains is the one that was properly fixed in the cloth.
Drying and storing
Skip the dryer. Heat is hard on natural dye, so hang the dress to dry, and hang it out of direct sun — sunlight will fade indigo faster than wear ever will. Stored on a hanger away from a bright window, it needs nothing else.
The dress under the dye
The Roberts itself is simple on purpose. It is cut above the knee, sits on a V-neckline, and pulls straight on over your head — no zip, no buttons, nothing to fuss with. The plain construction leaves the printed indigo to do all the talking, which is exactly what a dye like this should be allowed to do.
It runs the full XS to XL, covering US 0 through 18, and sits at $54.99 — the hand-dyed printing is what you are paying for at that price. The Roberts Short Dress in indigo page shows the print and the depth of blue on the actual pieces we photographed.
If you want indigo in another length
The Roberts is the shortest, plainest cut in our indigo group. The same natural dye turns up elsewhere in the short and mini dress collection and beyond it, in tiered and ankle-length cuts, and every one of them follows the same care rules you just read: cold, gentle, out of the sun. Learn them once and you are set for any of the four.