The Color Revolution

Abstract

In the late 1920s and early 1930s several businessand advertising magazines touted the coming of what one of them called “the color revolution.” That label gave Regina Lee Blaszczyk the title of her beautifully produced and well-researched history of changing approaches to color in American marketing, fashion, and industrial design in the twentieth century. Color management—the work of “colorists”—became a profession and a staple tool of marketing and design in the decades after 1890. Its origins lie in the textile and clothing industries. The enhanced role of color was largely the result of new techniques of chemical synthesis that gave rise to brilliant new dyes, beginning with William Henry Perkin's “mauve” in the late 1850s. Dye chemists continued to expand the palette, first for textiles and clothing, and then for printers, leatherworkers, and other manufacturers. Color quickly became a marketing tool of enormous power. But in a pattern that would be repeated often, the expanded varieties and the continued push for novelty put both producers and consumers in dilemmas of choice and uncertainty.