Why did the Dutch flag change?

Originally, the Dutch flag was coloured: orange-white-blue, from top to bottom. Today, the colour is red-white-blue. It is one of the oldest national flags in the world and it inspired many other famous red-white-blue flags, such as the one of Luxembourg, France and Russia. Ours is the mother of all red-white-blue flags.

But why the red? The orange was an obvious reference of the royal house of Orange, the family that supplies our kings and queens even today. That is why Dutch football supporters are always dressed in orange, and why everyone in the Netherlands dresses in orange on King’s Day.

One possible reason is dye technology. Back in the day, the dye that was available to produce an orange colour tended to ‘fade’ to red over time under the influence of sunlight. Flags had to be replaced regularly because they simply stopped having the correct colour. At some point, someone said: enough is enough, let’s just say that our flag is ‘red-white-blue’, and that’s how it remained.

Clearly, by the time the Irish got to come up with a flag design, the ‘orange-to-red’ colour problem had been solved, but by that point we had fully committed to red-white-blue.

However, that is a somewhat disputed story (but a good one), and one reason for our dedication to the red-white-blue was also because we were a little miffed by the fact that under the French occupation we weren’t allowed to use that tricolour ‘because it resembled the French flag too much’ - no shit, Sherlock, you copied our design. So, understandably, as soon as we were able, we ‘retook’ the right to be represented by red-white-blue.

The history of the Dutch flag is excellently summarised in the eponymous wikipedia article: Flag of the Netherlands - Wikipedia

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