The Fashion Forecasters: A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction, edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs

摘要

It is quite extraordinary that trend and colour forecasting for the fashion industry can be traced back to an atelier in Paris in the early nineteenth century. Frenchman Victor Jean-Claude wandered the streets of Paris to learn about the latest styles, and then 'squirreled away in his atelier to create sketches and assemble samples for his customers' (p. 253). Jean-Claude was the first to export French colour cards to fashion centres around the world, and his story is one of many others in The Fashion Forecasters: A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction. This anthology is a meticulously documented and extensive historical overview of the hidden history of trend and colour forecasting, and emphasizes the long-standing significance of these activities to the global fashion system. The book is based on 'The Enterprise of Culture: International Structures and Connections in the Fashion Industry Since 1945', a three-year interdisciplinary research project which studied the business dimensions of the fashion industry. The project was led by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs, who also edited this volume. Both Blaszczyk and Wubs are business historians who are not strangers to the field of the global fashion business. Blaszczyk is Leadership Chair in the History of Business and Society at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on global business history and she authored the award-winning The Color Revolution' (2012), which explored the colour profession and its role in consumer culture. Wubs is Professor in International Business History at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. His research is related to multinationals, business systems, transnational economic regions, Dutch-German economic relations, and the global fashion industry.