Blue is the color with the longest history in this garment, and it is not a coincidence.
About 60km west of Tamale sits Daboya, a town in the Gonja area with an organic indigo dyeing and weaving tradition running back more than three centuries. Local accounts trace the craft to migration from Mende, in what is now Mali. Roughly three quarters of the men in Daboya work in fugu production. When people picture a Ghana smock, the deep blue and blue-white strip cloth they are picturing is Daboya cloth. Read more on the towns and the craft in how a fugu smock is made.
Indigo behaves unlike any other dye. It does not bond into the fibre the way a modern reactive dye does. It sits on the surface in layers, which is why real indigo cloth crocks a little when new, rubbing faint blue onto a white shirt underneath for the first few wears, and why it ages by fading in the places you move: the shoulders, the elbows, the front of the chest. Denim does the same thing for the same reason. A well-worn indigo smock ends up mapped to the person wearing it.
Eight blues, and they are genuinely different garments.
Royal Blue, $199 and Blue Patchwork, $209 are the daytime pieces, bright and easy. Blue & White, $215 is the classic, the combination the tradition has been making longest. Navy Blue, $225 is the one that reads as formal anywhere in the world, including places nobody knows what a fugu is. Sapphire Blue, $235 is more saturated and more photographed. Indigo, $239 is the deepest and the one closest to the historic cloth. Cobalt Check, $245 and Blue & Gold, $250 are the ceremonial end, Presidential Elite, hand-embroidered, 10 to 21 days on the loom.
If you are buying one blue smock, buy Navy Blue. If you are buying the one with the story in it, buy Indigo.
Wash cold, alone, for the first three washes. Indigo will run and it will find every white thing in the load. See how to wash a fugu smock without shrinking it for the full routine.
All One Size, fitting a 36 to 52 inch chest, with free custom sizing. Flat $15 worldwide shipping, free over $350.