The Color Revolution: Commerce, Technology, and Aesthetics in Transnational Perspective

FAIN: FB-53171-07

Regina Lee Blaszczyk
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Philadelphia, PA 19147)

This interdisciplinary project uses the transnational history of commercial color practice—forecasting, styling, and standardizing—to explore the economic, scientific, technological, and aesthetic foundations of modern consumer culture. Whether in Denver or Dubai, customers expect fashion colors to change every season, but few understand that these coordinated hues are the result of a deliberate, established, and time-specific business effort to structure the “soft” realms of fashion, style, and taste. By examining commercial color, this book demonstrates how industrial science, corporate culture, and the concepts of information dissemination and cultural transmission gave rise to the international fashion system.