![]() They drew on the sales data provided by G.M.’s dealerships to develop a systematic approach to selecting the shades, which would prove most marketable.Īs a new profession, the color trade was a rare field where women could flourish. Ledyard Towle advised the chemical company DuPont on color after the war, and moved to Detroit in 1928 to work for General Motors as its first “color engineer” alongside its flamboyant head of design Harley Earl. One “camoufleur,” the artist and army veteran H. He devised contraptions, like the Munsell Color Sphere, to choose appealing combinations of colors for manufacturers to adopt, generally in the unobtrusive tones that he liked best.Ī new genre of color expert emerged in the artists who had disguised warships and military trunks by painting camouflage patterns on them during wartime. Munsell, a professor of drawing in Boston, who had met Chevreul as a student in Paris. Among his American admirers was Albert H. He studied the effect of placing different hues together, and of looking at one shade after prolonged exposure to another. Many of the earliest color professionals were artists, who applied the principles of the early 19th-century French color theorist, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, to commercial ends. Typically, they advised companies on how to respond to the latest hues from Europe, principally those chosen by the Paris couturiers, who were the dominant influence over the style of American consumer goods. Mostly self-taught, they were an eclectic bunch, many of whom had started out in different fields only to reinvent themselves as color experts. A new profession emerged to help, the “color stylists” or “color engineers,” who are the heroes and heroines of Ms. People responded by choosing the vivid colors that had until then been denied them when clothing themselves and furnishing their homes, prompting the upper classes to choose subtler shades as a form of snobbish protest.Ĭolor’s newfound popularity prompted manufacturers to find ways of managing it efficiently. The development of chemical dyes, like Perkin’s, enabled more shades to be created in brighter, longer lasting hues. Yet the dyes used in even the most expensive items were so unstable that they often faded or discolored. ![]() ![]() Up until the mid-19th century, bright colors were the preserve of the wealthy, the only people who could afford them. Color also featured in the “Sumptuary Laws,” which were introduced by many countries during the Middle Ages to regulate what people from different social classes were allowed to wear, principally to prevent pushy arrivistes from dressing “above their station.” One of Queen Victoria’s feistier ancestors, King Henry VIII, insisted on being the only person in the country to be permitted to wear purple during his reign. In ancient Egypt, ointment jars were made of deep blue cobalt and white glass, and public monuments in ancient Greece were painted in vivid hues. Blaszczyk begins by explaining the historic importance of color.
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