Capitalism and the Senses is the first edited volume to explore how the forces of capitalism are entangled with everyday sensory experience. If the senses have a history, as Karl Marx wrote, then that history is inseparable from the development of capitalism, which has both taken advantage of the senses and influenced how sensory experience has changed over time. This pioneering collection shows how seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching have both shaped and been shaped by commercial interests from the turn of the twentieth century to our own time. From the manipulation of taste and texture in the food industry to the careful engineering of the feel of artificial fabrics, capitalist enterprises have worked to commodify the senses in a wide variety of ways. Drawing on history, anthropology, geography, and other fields, the volume’s essays analyze not only where this effort has succeeded but also where the senses have resisted control and the logic of markets. The result is an innovative ensemble that demonstrates how the drive to exploit sensorial experience for profit became a defining feature of capitalist modernity and establishes the senses as an important dimension of the history of capitalism. Contributors: Nicholas Anderman, Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Jessica P. Clark, Ai Hisano, Lisa Jacobson, Sven Kube, Grace Lees-Maffei, Ingemar Pettersson, David Suisman, Ana María Ulloa, Nicole Welk-Joerger.

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. -- .

Winner of the Hagley Prize in Business History from The Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History ConferenceSelected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Originally published in 1999. 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.

The period since 1945 has been a transformative era for the fashion industry. Over the course of seventy years, the fashion world has moved from celebrating the craftsmanship of haute couture to revelling in ever-changing fast-fashion. This volume examines the transition from the old system to the new in a series of case studies grouped around three major themes. Part I focuses on Paris as a creative hub, aiming to understand how the birthplace of haute couture adapted to late-twentieth-century developments. Part II considers the retailer's role in shaping taste, responding to consumer expectations and disseminating fashion merchandise. Part III looks to alternative visions of the European fashion system that have appeared in unexpected places. The volume is highly interdisciplinary, covering design history, cultural anthropology, ethnography, management studies and the cultural history of business. -- .

The fashion business has been collecting and analyzing information about colors, fabrics, silhouettes, and styles since the 18th century - activities that have long been shrouded in mystery. The Fashion Forecasters is the first book to reveal the hidden history of color and trend forecasting and to explore its relevance to the fashion business of the past two centuries. It sheds light on trend forecasting in the industrial era, the profession's maturation during the modernist moment of the 20th century, and its continued importance in today's digital fast-fashion culture. Based on in-depth archival research and oral history interviews, The Fashion Forecasters examines the entrepreneurs, service companies, and consultants that have worked behind the scenes to connect designers and retailers to emerging fashion trends in Europe, North America, and Asia. Here you will read about the trend studios, color experts, and international trade fairs that formalized the prediction process in the modern era, and hear the voices of leading contemporary practitioners at international forecasting companies such as the Doneger Group in New York and WGSN in London. Probing the inner workings of the global fashion system, The Fashion Forecasters blends history, biography, and ethnography into a highly readable cultural narrative.

Color is a visible technology that invisibly connects so many puzzling aspects of modern Western consumer societies-research and development, making and selling, predicting fashion trends, and more. Building on Regina Lee Blaszczyk's go-to history of the "color revolution" in the United States, this book explores further transatlantic and multidisciplinary dimensions of the topic. Covering history from the mid nineteenth century into the immediate past, it examines the relationship between color, commerce, and consumer societies in unfamiliar settings and in the company of new kinds of experts. Readers will learn about the early dye industry, the dynamic nomenclature for color, and efforts to standardize, understand, and educate the public about color. Readers will also encounter early food coloring, new consumer goods, technical and business innovations in print and on the silver screen, the interrelationship between gender and color, and color forecasting in the fashion industry.

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 fashion business has been collecting and analyzing information about colors, fabrics, silhouettes, and styles since the 18th century - activities that have long been shrouded in mystery. The Fashion Forecasters is the first book to reveal the hidden history of color and trend forecasting and to explore its relevance to the fashion business of the past two centuries. It sheds light on trend forecasting in the industrial era, the profession's maturation during the modernist moment of the 20th century, and its continued importance in today's digital fast-fashion culture. Based on in-depth archival research and oral history interviews, The Fashion Forecasters examines the entrepreneurs, service companies, and consultants that have worked behind the scenes to connect designers and retailers to emerging fashion trends in Europe, North America, and Asia. Here you will read about the trend studios, color experts, and international trade fairs that formalized the prediction process in the modern era, and hear the voices of leading contemporary practitioners at international forecasting companies such as the Doneger Group in New York and WGSN in London. Probing the inner workings of the global fashion system, The Fashion Forecasters blends history, biography, and ethnography into a highly readable cultural narrative.

How has Paris, the world's fashion capital, influenced Milan, New York, and Tokyo? When did the Marlboro Man become a symbol of American masculinity? Why do Americans love to dress down in high-tech Lycra fabrics, while they wax nostalgic for quaint, old-fashioned Victorian cottages?Fashion icons and failures have long captivated the general public, but few scholars have examined the historical role of business and commerce in creating the international market for style goods. "Producing Fashion" is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that shows how economic institutions in Europe and North America laid the foundation for the global fashion system and sustained it commercially through the mechanisms of advertising, licensing, marketing, publishing, and retailing.The collection reveals how public and private institutions--from government censors in imperial Russia to large corporations in the United States--worked to shape fashion, style, and taste with varying degrees of success. Fourteen contributors draw on original research and fresh insight into the producers of fashion--advertising agents, architects, corporate executives, department stores, designers, editors, government officials, hairdressers, haute couturiers, and Web retailers--in their bid for influence, acclaim, and shoppers' dollars."Producing Fashion" looks to the past, revealing the rationale behind style choices, while explaining how the interplay of custom, invented traditions, and sales imperatives continue to drive innovation in the fashion industries.

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.