A history of color and commerce from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design.
When the fashion industry declares that lime green is the new black, or instructs us to “think pink!,” it is not the result of a backroom deal forged by a secretive cabal of fashion journalists, designers, manufacturers, and the editor of Vogue. It is the latest development of a color revolution that has been unfolding for more than a century. In this book, the award-winning historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture.
Blaszczyk examines the evolution of the color profession from 1850 to 1970, telling the stories of innovators who managed the color cornucopia that modern artificial dyes and pigments made possible. These “color stylists,” “color forecasters,” and “color engineers” helped corporations understand the art of illusion and the psychology of color. Blaszczyk describes the strategic burst of color that took place in the 1920s, when General Motors introduced a bright blue sedan to compete with Ford's all-black Model T and when housewares became available in a range of brilliant hues. She explains the process of color forecasting―not a conspiracy to manipulate hapless consumers but a careful reading of cultural trends and consumer taste. And she shows how color information flowed from the fashion houses of Paris to textile mills in New Jersey.
Today professional colorists are part of design management teams at such global corporations as Hilton, Disney, and Toyota. The Color Revolution tells the history of how colorists help industry capture the hearts and dollars of consumers.

The Color Revolution (Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series)

Arts & Photography

Blaszczyk, Regina Lee

Graphic Design

The MIT Press

Designed to encourage critical thinking, the Major Problems in American History series introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history. The central theme of this volume asserts that the history of business is inexorably linked to politics and culture. The authors explore specific issues, including foreign policy, race and ethnicity, gender, religion, work, leisure, and technological innovation, as well as high and low culture.

Major Problems in American Business History: Documents and Essays (Major Problems in American History Series)

History

Americas

Wadsworth Publishing

Imagining Consumers tells for the first time the story of American consumer society from the perspective of mass-market manufacturers and retailers. It relates the trials and tribulations of china and glassware producers in their contest for the hearts of the working- and middle-class women who made up more than eighty percent of those buying mass-manufactured goods by the 1920s.
 Based on extensive research in untapped corporate archives, Imagining Consumers supplies a fresh appraisal of the history of American business, culture, and consumerism. Case studies illuminate decision making in key firms―including the Homer Laughlin China Company, the Kohler Company, and Corning Glass Works―and consider the design and development of ubiquitous lines such as Fiesta tableware and Pyrex Ovenware.

Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Studies in Industry and Society)

Business & Money

Economics

Johns Hopkins University Press

Rohm and Haas: A Century of Innovation

In 1909, German entrepreneur Otto Haas came to Philadelphia to sell Oropon, an invention of his friend and business partner, Dr. Otto Röhm, for use in transforming goatskins into kid leather. A century later, Rohm and Haas is a global leader in providing advanced chemicals that enhance the performance of consumer goods, from fast-drying water-based paints to sunscreens with greater SPF functionality and more powerful semiconductor chips.
In Rohm and Haas: A Century of Innovation, business historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk examines the 100-year history of this Philadelphia-based chemical company which has long stressed the importance of connecting with the customer. Based on interviews with top executives and research in the firm's corporate archives, the book explores how Rohm and Haas developed its commitment to customer service, growing from a family firm with transatlantic connections into one of the world's leading specialty chemical companies. From its founding, the firm's interactions with different types of customers—tanneries in industrial Philadelphia, the U.S. Army and Navy air forces during World War II, European agriculturalists during the Marshall Plan, and the contemporary electronics industry in Asia—have facilitated innovation, generated products that improved everyday life, and led to global growth.

Industries

University of Pennsylvania Press

This startlingly original and highly readable volume adds a new richness and depth to an element of U.S. history that is all too often taken for granted. In American Consumer Society, Regina Lee Blaszczyk examines the emergence of consumerism in the Victorian era, and, in tracing its evolution over the next 140 years, shows how the emergence of a mass market was followed by its fragmentation. Niche marketing focused on successive waves of new consumers as each made its presence known: Irish immigrants, urban African Americans, teenagers, computer geeks, and soccer moms, to name but a few. Blaszczyk demonstrates that middle-class consumerism is an intrinsic part of American identity, but exactly how consumerism reflected that identity changed over time. Initially driven to imitate those who had already achieved success, Americans eventually began to use their purchases to express themselves. This led to a fundamental change in American culture―one in which the American reverence for things was replaced by a passion for experiences. New Millennium families no longer treasured exquisite china or dress in fine clothes, but they’ll spare no expense on being able to make phone calls, retrieve emails, watch ESPN, or visit web sites at any place, any time. Victorian mothers just wouldn’t understand. Using materials and techniques from business history, art history, anthropology, sociology, material culture, and good story-telling, this lavishly illustrated and highly thoughtful narrative offers a compelling re-interpretation of American culture through the lens of consumerism, making it perfect for use not only as supplementary reading in the U.S. survey, but also for a variety of courses in Business, Culture, Economics, Marketing, and Fashion and Design history.

American Consumer Society, 1865 - 2005: From Hearth to HDTV

Wiley/Blackwell

Rohm and Haas: A Century of Innovation

Fenwick Publishing Group

Fashion studies is a burgeoning field that often highlights the contributions of genius designers and high-profile brands with little reference to what goes on behind the scenes in the supply chain. This book pulls back the curtain on the global fashion system of the past 200 years to examine the relationship between the textile mills of Yorkshire – the firms that provided the entire Western world with warm wool fabrics – and their customers. It is a microhistory of a single firm, Abraham Moon and Sons Ltd, that sheds light on important macro questions about British industry, government policies on international trade, the role of multi-generational family firms and the place of design and innovation in business strategy. It is the first book to connect Yorkshire tweeds to the fashion system. Written in lively, accessible prose, this book will appeal to anyone who works in fashion or who wears fashion. There is nothing like it – and it will raise the bar for historical studies of global fashion. Here you’ll find intriguing stories about a tweed theft from the Leeds Coloured Cloth Hall, debates on tariffs and global trade, the battle against synthetic fibres and the reinvention of British tweeds around heritage marketing. You won’t be bored.

Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the creation of British cloth for the global market

Manchester University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Blaszczyk, Regina Lee

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Color Revolution (Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series)

Major Problems in American Business History: Documents and Essays (Major Problems in American History Series)

Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Studies in Industry and Society)

Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Studies in Industry and Society)

Rohm and Haas: A Century of Innovation

American Consumer Society, 1865 - 2005: From Hearth to HDTV

Rohm and Haas: A Century of Innovation

Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the creation of British cloth for the global market