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The Color Revolution

Blaszczyk demonstrates how 20th-century industry invented colour standards and forecasts as tools for eradicating waste in production and distribution with the ultimate goal of lowering prices and advancing consumer society. She shows that revolutionary palettes and design practices were born not of ‘genius designers’ but of collaborations among the chemical and creative industries (e.g., DuPont and Cheney silk mill) that were orchestrated by a range of ‘fashion intermediaries’: architects, art directors, camoufleurs-turned-admen, colour engineering consultants, and feminist businesswomen.

The book inspired Color Revolution: Style Meets Science in the 1960s, an exhibition at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, Mass., USA (Sept 2013-Jan 2014), and resulted in an invitation from the Victoria and Albert Museum to help plan a possible exhibition on The Future: A History, tentatively slated for 2017. In October 2013, the US Society for the History of Technology (the largest international organization of historians of technology) honoured The Color Revolution with its Sally Hacker Prize for exceptional scholarship.

An interdisciplinary work in the history of business, technology, design, and culture, The Color Revolution is the first study of colour management as a creative profession that shapes consumer culture. With discussions of the US, the UK, Germany, and France from 1850 to 1970, it is based on research over ten years in 109 periodical runs and 61 collections in American and European repositories. Blaszczyk’s use of neglected archives led to re-interpretations of major figures such as Harley Earl and Georgia O’Keeffe, and to the first critical analysis of the transfer of Parisian fashion colours to the US mass market.