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.Orders can be placed via our website: http://mitpress.mit.edu August 2012 • 368 pp., 121 color illus., £24.95 cloth • 9780262017770 Winner, 2013 Hacker Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of Technology The MIT Press NEWS

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Scholars have studied innovation from various perspectives, but few have considered the interaction between big business and the fashion marketplace. This study examines the efforts of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company to create and expand the American synthetic-fibers market after World War II. DuPont described this work as transforming the “relatively simple ‘art’ of selling fabric” into the “complicated ‘science’ of marketing.” This process involved developing in-house marketing expertise and reaching out to sources as disparate as American fabric designers, Parisian couturiers, Seventh Avenue manufacturers, southern textile giants, and mass-market retailers. To promote the “wonders” of synthetic fibers, DuPont relied on “fashion intermediaries” to determine what customers wanted and how its fibers could meet those needs. This study suggests that the mass-market success of DuPont's synthetic fibers owed as much to creative marketing, styling, and performance as it did to industrial research and organizational innovation.

This series brings together historical research on consumption and consumerism in the modern era, especially the twentieth century, and with a particular focus on comparative and transnational studies. It aims to make research available in English from an increasingly internationalized and interdisciplinary field. The history of consumption offers a vital link among diverse fields of history and other social sciences, because modern societies are consumer societies whose political, cultural, social, and economic structures and practices are bound up with the history of consumption. Worlds of Consumption highlights and explores these linkages, which deserve wide attention because they shape who we are as individuals and societies.