The Fashion Forecasters: A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction 9781350017160, 9781350017177, 9781350017191, 9781350017184

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THE FASHION FORECASTERS

THE FASHION FORECASTERS A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction

Edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 © Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs, 2018 Individual chapters © the contributors, 2018 Subediting and photo research by Mary Schoeser and Diane Mackay Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvi-xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Holly Bell Cover image: Woman and large scale fashion drawings, Interstoff 1982. Courtesy Hessisches Wirtschaftsachiv, Darmstadt. (© Sepp Jäger) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Blaszczyk, Regina Lee, editor. |  Wubs, Ben, editor. Title: The fashion forecasters : a hidden history of color and trend prediction / edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017046790 | ISBN 9781350017160 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Clothing trade–Forecasting. | Fashion–Forecasting. Classification: LCC TT497 .F35 2018 | DDC 746.9/20112–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046790 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3500-1716-0 978-1-3500-1717-7 978-1-3500-1718-4 978-1-3500-1715-3

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  viii List of Tables  xiii List of Contributors  xiv Acknowledgments  xvi

1 Beyond the Crystal Ball: The Rationale Behind Color and Trend Forecasting  1 Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs

PART ONE  WHEN PARIS LED AND AMERICA FOLLOWED  33 2 The Rise of Color Forecasting in the United States and Great Britain  35 Regina Lee Blaszczyk 3 Tobé Coller Davis: A Career in Fashion Forecasting in America  63 Véronique Pouillard and Karen Jamison Trivette

PART TWO  GOING INTERNATIONAL  87 4 From Window Dresser to Fashion Forecaster: David Wolfe of the Doneger Group Tells How He Got Started in Trends  89

5 What Do Baby Boomers Want?: How the Swinging Sixties Became the Trending Seventies  97 Regina Lee Blaszczyk 6 The View from Paris: Nelly Rodi and the Early Days of French Trend Forecasting  133 7 Fibers, Feathers, and the Future: Ornella Bignami on the Importance of Materials  141 8 Fashion Prediction and the Transformation of the Japanese Textile Industry: The Role of Kentaro Kawasaki, 1950–90  149 Pierre-Yves Donzé 9 Interstoff’s Fashion Table: The Internalization of Fashion Forecasting in the World’s Most Important Fashion Fabric Fair  167 Ben Wubs 10 The Role of the Pitti Uomo Trade Fair in the Menswear Fashion Industry  191 Mariangela Lavanga

PART THREE  THE DIGITAL IMPERATIVE  211 11 Looking Behind the Scenes of Swedish Fashion Forecasting  213 Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson 12 Trending Online: Valerie Wilson Trower Discusses Stylesight in the Asia Pacific Region  235 13 Fast Fashion, Fast Futures: Catriona Macnab on WGSN and the Global Digital World  243

vi

CONTENTS

PART FOUR  CONCLUSION  251 14 Fashion Futures  253     Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs Selected Bibliography  264 Index  268

CONTENTS

vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 J. Claude Frères & cie, Carte de ses nuances nouvelles saison d’été 1895. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 121  2 1.2 Cover of fashion report, Bilbille & cie, Couture Openings, March 1952. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 96  2 1.3 Colors for silk, Bilbille & cie, Couture Openings, March 1952. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 96  3 1.4 Pacific Mills, advertisement from the New Yorker, 1957. Provided courtesy of Burlington Industries, a division of International Textile Group, Inc.  7 1.5 Fashion plate from Le Mercure galant (1678). Courtesy Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, classification mark 807157  10 1.6 Textile swatches held in the resolutions (“resoluties”) of the Heeren XVII (Lords Seventeen), VOC’s Board, dated October 16, 1755. National Archive The Hague, VOC, 1.04.02, inv. no. 54  11 1.7 Société de teinture & d’apprêt, Printemps 1929, Carte de nuances, Adoptée par l’Association des Teinturiers en Soie, Basel, Switzerland. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 89  14 1.8 Miss Chemistry model at the DuPont Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library; DuPont Textile Fibers Product Information Photographs, accession 1984.259  18 1.9 International Wool Secretariat, Wool Knitwear Colours for Men and Women Autumn/Winter 84/85. Forecasting Collection, Fashion Institute of Technology. Courtesy of The Woolmark Company and Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library  19 1.10 Première Vision’s fashion forecasting area during its main event in Paris in 2005. Courtesy Première Vision  21 1.11 Report of the French Knitwear Show in February 1977; Nigel French Enterprises, Salon de la Maille, Knitwear for Fall 77. Forecasting Collection,

Fashion Institute of Technology. Courtesy of Nigel French and Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library  23 2.1 Fédération de la soie, Nuances adoptees et recommandees par les Fabricants de Soieries et Rubans pour la Saison de Printemps 1919. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 108  36 2.2 Shop exterior of Adkins & Rice in Coventry, England, early twentieth century. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk  38 2.3 Textile Color Card Association of the United States, Standard Color Card of America, 8th edition, revised 1928. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 47; reproduced with the permission of the Color Association of the United States  40 2.4 Textile Color Card Association of the United States, 1939 Fall Season Color Card of America. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 57; reproduced with the permission of the Color Association of the United States  41 2.5 Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company, Color Forecast Spring 1928 Cheney Silks. Courtesy, Library of Congress; Edward L. Bernays Collection  43 2.6 The TCCA office kept track of thousands of colors using a simple system of record cards. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 9; reproduced with the permission of the Color Association of the United States  48 2.7 Edition of Broadcast published on January 20, 1941. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 1983, box 7; reproduced with the permission of the Color Association of the United States  49 2.8 Marshall & Aston, Ltd, advertisement in Drapers’ Organiser (June 1925): 32. © The British Library Board, Lou.Lon. 230 (1925)  52 2.9 British Colour Council, 1933 Autumn Season Woollen Card. Courtesy Abraham Moon and Sons, Ltd  54 2.10 Airstep Shoes, advertisement from Life magazine, 1940. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk  57 3.1 Cover page of January 27, 1944, Fashion Report from Tobé. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA; © The TOBE Report  64 3.2 Page from September 8, 1938, Fashion Report from Tobé. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA; © The TOBE Report  65

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ix

3.3 Macy’s clipping from January 4, 1934, Fashion Report from Tobé as featured originally in the New York Herald Tribune on January 2. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA  71 3.4 Page 21 from January 4, 1934, Fashion Report from Tobé. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA; © The TOBE Report  72 3.5 Page 8A from January 15, 1942, Fashion Report from Tobé. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA; © The TOBE Report  78 4.1 David Wolfe’s sketches for “Nomads” from The Fashion Service, Forecast, winter ’90 issue. Collection of David Wolfe; courtesy of the Doneger Group  93 5.1 Cover of program, Jordan Marsh Presents the Mademoiselle College Clinic, August 1945. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk  99 5.2 The Associated Merchandising Corporation, AMC Fashion Forecast, Fall & Winter ’56: Women’s, Misses’, Children’s, Men’s and Boys’, Home Furnishings (New York: Associated Merchandising Corporation, 1956), 7–8. Courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library  103 5.3 F. B. S.: French Boot Shop of New Rochelle, Spring and Summer 1961 (New Rochelle, NY: French Boot Shop, 1961). Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk  106 5.4

Butterick pattern no. 5007, mid-1960s. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk; reproduced courtesy of The McCall Pattern Company Inc. and Mary Quant  108

5.5 Easy-to-Make Fashions in Rav-on 50% Antron 50% Sayelle (Illinois); advertising booklet for knitwear patterns. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk  111 5.6 Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe at IM International, c. 1970. Reproduced with the permission of Leigh Rudd  119 5.7 IM International Designs (July 1970), 26. Collection of David Wolfe; reproduced with the permission of Leigh Rudd  121 5.8 Page from IM International Designs (April 1972). Courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library; reproduced with the permission of Leigh Rudd  123 5.9 IM Report (March 1978). Courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library; reproduced with the permission of Leigh Rudd  125

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

6.1

Nelly Rodi at a major international conference, History and Future of Fashion Prediction: University Meets Industry. Collection of Ben Wubs; photographer Dennis Wisse  134

7.1

Ornella Bignami leading the Trend Table at Messe Frankfurt, 1998. Collection of Ben Wubs  142

8.1

The Idea of Fashion Technology: From Fashion Prediction to Product Planning, authored by Kentaro Kawasaki in 1981. Courtesy Diamond Company, Japan  157

8.2

Tokyo, Japan, on December 29, 2012, a shopper walks into a UNIQLO clothing store. Getty Images; photographer SeanPavonePhoto  161

9.1

Interstoff exterior, 1961. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt  171

9.2

Interstoff interior, 1961. © Hessisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, Darmstadt. Photo: Sepp Jäger  172

9.3

Catalogue cover for the 11th Interstoff (May 26–9, 1964). Courtesy Messe Frankfurt  175

9.4

Interstoff 1983 display of design trends for summer 1984. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt  176

9.5

Catalogue cover for the 51st Interstoff (April 16–18, 1984). Courtesy Messe Frankfurt; photographer Helmut Newton  177

9.6

Catalogue cover for Interstoff, October 25–7, 1994. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt  179

9.7

An Interstoff World mood board, autumn/winter 1997/8. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt  184

9.8

The interplay between fabric and fashion trends for summer 1983 as shown at Interstoff, 1982. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt  186

10.1 Pitti People—Stylish men at Pitti Uomo 87, December 13, 2015. Courtesy Pitti Immagine website (www.pittimmagine.com), Pitti Uomo; photographer AKA Studio Collective  199 10.2 The latest fashion buzz at Pitti Uomo 90, June 16, 2016. Courtesy Pitti Immagine website (www.pittimmagine.com); photographer AKA Studio Collective  201 10.3 Raf Simons at Pitti Uomo 90, June 16, 2016. Courtesy Pitti Immagine website (www.pittimmagine.com); photographer Vanni Bassetti  202 10.4 Fashion buyers at Pitti Uomo 90, June 16, 2016. Courtesy Pitti Immagine website (www.pittimmagine.com); photographer AKA Studio Collective  203

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

xi

11.1 Nordic Fashion Council Fashion Forecast for Shoes and Leather, spring 1957 (Våren 1957) with cover design by the first fashion consultant of the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council, Aili Pekonen. © The Swedish Shoe Council; photographer Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson  216 11.2 Modeurop color card, spring/summer 1979. Photograph and © Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson  218 11.3 Märthaskolan; Marg von Schwerin is surrounded by models in evening gowns from spring 1961. Archive of the Nordic Museum, Stockholm; photographer uknown  220 11.4 Antonio Canovas del Castillo (head designer of the haute couture house Castillo), Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, and Alice Chavannes de Dalmassy, 1964. Courtesy of Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson  221 11.5 Interior exhibition (bedroom view), part of the exhibition “Home 92–93,” presenting interiors for 1992–3. © Swedish Fashion Council  225 11.6 H&M trend department. © H&M Archive, Center for Business History, Stockholm  228 11.7 “Water” dress designed by Hjördis Agustsdottir. © Hjördis Agustsdottir, courtesy National Museum Stockholm; photographer Erik Cornelius  229 12.1 Valerie Wilson Trower making a presentation at InShow. Courtesy Valerie Wilson Trower  237 13.1 Catriona Macnab. © Natalya Headshots; photographer Natalya Chagrin  249 14.1 Cohama’s Color Forecast for spring 1966 at the Interstoff 1965 fair in Frankfurt am Main. Courtesy Hessisches Wirtschaftsachiv, Darmstadt, Photo: Sepp Jager  256 14.2 Fashion plate from Le Mercure galant (1678). Courtesy Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Classification mark 807157  259 14.3 Gypsy dresses, Nigel French Enterprises. Source: Interstoff Report Spring 76 with Womenswear and Menswear Styling Directions Spring 76 (London: Nigel French Enterprises, Ltd, June 1975) Courtesy of Nigel French Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library  260

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LIST OF TABLES

8.1

Members of the Fashion Technology Group in 1980. Source: Kentaro Kawasaki, Fasshon tekunoroji no hasso: ryuko yosoku kara shohin kikaku he (Tokyo: Daiamondo, 1981), 9  155

8.2

Sales (in billion yen) and operating profit (as a %) of Chori Co., 1950–2007. Source: Chori kabushikikaisha (2008), Chori setsuritsu 60 shunen kinenshi, Osaka: Chori kabushikikaisha, appendix  159

8.3

Top ten apparel companies in Japan, ranked by gross sales, 2013. Source: http://gyokai-search.com/4-apparel-uriage.htm and annual reports  160

9.1

Interstoff spring (S) and autumn (A), exhibition space, exhibitors, and visitors, 1959–99. Source: Messe Frankfurt, MAFO, Entwicklung Eigenveranstaltungen am Messeplatz Frankfurt, October 16, 2013  173

10.1 Pitti Uomo exhibitors 1990–2013. Source: own elaboration, data from Osservatorio Fiere Italia-Europa, CERMES, Bocconi University  200 10.2 Pitti Uomo square meterage 1990–2013. Source: own elaboration, data from Osservatorio Fiere Italia-Europa, CERMES, Bocconi University  200 10.3 Pitti Uomo visitor numbers 1990–2013. Source: own elaboration, data from Osservatorio Fiere Italia-Europa, CERMES, Bocconi University  203

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Regina Lee Blaszczyk is Leadership Chair in the History of Business and Society at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on global business history with an emphasis on design and innovation in the creative industries; consumer society; and the chemical industries. She is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (2001); Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (2008); American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV (2009); Rohm and Haas: A Century of Innovation (2009); The Color Revolution (2012); Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture (2017, co-edited with Uwe Spiekermann); Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market (2017); and European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry (2018, coedited with Véronique Pouillard). She was the project leader for The Enterprise of Culture, which served as the springboard for this anthology. Pierre-Yves Donzé is Professor of Business History at the Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University, Japan, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Born in Switzerland, he studied history at the University of Neuchâtel, where he obtained his PhD in 2005, before making postdoctoral research stays in Japan and in the US. He is member of the councils of the European Business History Association (EBHA) and the Business History Society of Japan, and involved in several international research projects on industrial competitiveness, multinational enterprises, and luxury business. He recently published “European Luxury Big Business and Emerging Asian Markets, 1960–2010” (Business History, 2015, with Rika Fujioka). His last books include A Business History of the Swatch Group: The Rebirth of Swiss Watchmaking and the Globalization of the Luxury Industry (2014, original edition in French, translated in Japanese and in Italian). Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson is Senior Advisor at the Centre for Business History in Stockholm, one of The Enterprise of Culture’s associated partner organizations, where she has had the role of interviewer for the EOC pilot oral history programme. An ethnologist, trend analyst, and historian, Ingrid has a long experience of the international and Swedish fashion industry, having worked at French haute couture houses and other European fashion organizations before becoming director of the Swedish Fashion Council. She initiated the establishment of the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University and was instrumental in documenting H&M’s corporate history. Ingrid is a consultant to a range of cultural and business institutions, and has curated fashion exhibits such as the Ten Views of Sweden touring exhibition. She contributed to a range of publications and print

media, most recently with “No One Escapes Fashion” in Sofia Hedman’s Utopian Bodies: Fashion Looks Forward (2015). Mariangela Lavanga is Assistant Professor in Cultural Economics at Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC), Erasmus University Rotterdam. Prior to coming to Rotterdam, Mariangela worked as Research Fellow at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Economics of Information and Communication from IULM University in Milan, an MSc in Urban Management from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a BSc-MSc in Economics from Bocconi University in Milan. Her work brings together cultural economics and economic geography. She has researched and published on the relationships between the creative industries, the economy, and cities; her most recent research interests focus on temporary clusters and intermediaries in the fashion industry. Véronique Pouillard is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Europe at the University of Oslo, Norway. Prior to this, she has held posts and fellowships at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, at Columbia University, and at Harvard Business School. She was a principal investigator in the HERA II project on The Enterprise of Culture funded by the European Science Foundation (2013–16). A specialist in consumption societies, Véronique works on the history of fashion, the media, and intellectual property rights. She has published three books, several edited volumes, and her articles have been published in, among others, Business History, Business History Review, Vingtième siècle, and Journalism Studies. Karen Jamison Trivette is Head of Special Collections and College Archives (SPARC) in the Gladys Marcus Library at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a part of the State University of New York; she has held this position since 2008. She holds a Master of Library Science with a concentration in Archives and Records Management from the University at Albany (New York) and a BA in Art History from UNC-Chapel Hill (North Carolina). She has worked primarily in art libraries and art archives (including the Albany Institute of History and Art; the Clark Art Institute Library; and the Museum of Modern Art Archives) except for an over three-year post at the New York State Archives where she primarily advised practitioners on archives and records management matters. She edited the recent publication Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style (2015), which was sourced from SPARC holdings, and has presented at many conferences, both national and international in scope. Ben Wubs is Professor in International Business History at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and appointed Project Professor at the Graduate School of Economics Kyoto University. He has published articles and books related to multinationals, business systems, transnational economic regions, Dutch-German economic relations, and the transnational fashion industry. He is secretary of RHIN(e), a collaborative network of economic, business, and technology historians consisting of scholars from various universities in Europe, North America, and Japan. Wubs is council member of the European Business History Association (EBHA). From 2013 until 2016, he was principal investigator of the Anglo-Dutch-Norwegian HERA II consortium which researched the transnational connections of fashion industry since 1945. Currently, he is involved in an Erasmus Mundus project GLOCAL (Global Markets and Local Creativities), an international masters set-up by University of Glasgow, University of Göttingen, University of Barcelona, and Erasmus University Rotterdam. LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his book was funded by the European Commission through HERA II: Humanities in the European Research Area, which from 2013 to 2016 sponsored our three-year collaborative research project, The Enterprise of Culture: International Structures and Connections in the Fashion Industry since 1945. We are grateful to the European Commission for its confidence in our exploration of the business dimensions of the fashion industry, which has been most often studied from a theoretical or cultural viewpoint. The Enterprise of Culture project included more than a dozen public events on the business history of European fashion; produced numerous books, journal issues, and academic articles; and, hopefully, has laid the foundation for further research in this territory. This book is based on research by the core team and partners of The Enterprise of Culture. The title of our research project, The Enterprise of Culture, reflects our interdisciplinary approach to fashion and our belief that humanities research can benefit from collaboration with business. This book embodies that philosophy. We are very pleased to have received a positive response to our work as business historians from various companies and professionals in the global fashion industry. The inspiration for this anthology was our one-day public conference, The History and Future of Fashion Prediction: University Meets Industry, held at Erasmus University in Rotterdam in October 2014. That conference brought together an audience of 150 academics, students, librarians, curators, and fashion industry professionals to explore the understudied history of color prediction and trend forecasting. Several trend professionals spoke at the Erasmus event, and some of them subsequently participated in the Pilot Oral History Programme of The Enterprise of Culture. These oral histories, conducted by project members at the Centre for Business History Stockholm and the University of Leeds, have been deposited in the Special Collections unit of Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, where they can be studied by researchers. Edited excerpts from a select number of our interviews appear in this anthology as Chapters 4, 6, 7, 12, and 13. We encourage academic faculty to use those edited interviews to introduce students to oral histories as a type of primary source and to consider the advantages and limitations of remembered experience as historical evidence. We are grateful to several individuals who helped to bring our work on the history of trend forecasting to fruition, including Fiona Blair in The Enterprise of Culture’s home office at the University of Leeds and our very capable subeditors Mary Schoeser and Diane Mackay. Our postdoctoral fellow Thierry Maillet and students from the New Fashion Society at Erasmus University are to be commended for their diligence and energy in

helping to organize our conference on The History and Future of Fashion Prediction. Fashion consultants Mariette Hoitink (HTNK) and Susanne Vegter (STUDIO SV) linked us to many professionals in the industry. Leigh Rudd graciously provided permission to reproduce several images from her company, IM International. Lana Bittman and Karen J. Trivette provided access to and images from the Forecasting Collection at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Lucas Clawson and Lynn Catanese performed heroic feats to create beautiful illustrations from business archives at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware. Messe Frankfurt’s archivist Peter Kerwien gave us access to a great collection of records and photographs of Interstoff. And finally, Messe Frankfurt provided many beautiful images we used in this book. Additional funding for this book came from the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication at Erasmus University, the Erasmus Trustfonds, and the Posthumus Institute, and from another EU-funded project, Future Perfect, which is housed the University of Leeds. Future Perfect focuses on the history of European and American consumer culture with reference to design and marketing pioneers such as the fashion forecasters in this book. Regina Lee Blaszczyk is thankful to the Future Perfect project for research leave, and to Simon Hall, head of the School of History at the University of Leeds. She also thanks Abraham Lenhoff at the University of Delaware for continued support to help her connect the chemical industries and the fashion system. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, University of Leeds Ben Wubs, Erasmus University

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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1 BEYOND THE CRYSTAL BALL The Rationale Behind Color and Trend Forecasting Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs

S

uccess in fashion, as in many other businesses, involves the uncanny ability to psyche out trends and translate them into products that will win favor with the customer. Throughout history, successful entrepreneurs have turned unarticulated longings into saleable merchandise. The hard-driving Steve Jobs sensed the desire for touch-screen connectivity before the average teenager, and the couturier Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel recognized that modern women wanted practical suits that fit their natural shape rather than the wasp-waisted New Look. Both entrepreneurs, it can be said, harnessed their creative genius to launch disruptive innovations. Creative genius is inspiring, but it camouflages the nuts-and-bolts activities that undergird most businesses. Fashion is no exception. Beneath the glamour, the global fashion system depends on well-oiled mechanisms for gathering and sharing intelligence about colors, fabrics, and silhouettes. By no accident do similar styles find their way onto the Paris runways and onto the fast-fashion racks of Primark and Zara almost simultaneously. Neither fashion dictatorship nor serendipity is responsible. This high level of coordination is made possible by trend reports from the fashion industry’s shadow information system, a hidden reconnaissance operation that gathers and analyzes data and recirculates it as style forecasts. This book focuses on the hidden history of those activities, known as color forecasting and trend prediction. The fashion business has been a reconnaissance business for almost two centuries. Back in the 1800s, the now-forgotten Paris firm of J. Claude Frères & cie got shade cards from Lyon dye houses, added flowery prose about French taste, and packaged the new Paris trend reports for sale around the world (Figure 1.1). Style forecasting was thereby born in an atelier on the Seine. A century later, color prediction was systematized and adapted to mass production by Americans with a talent for science and technology. In fashion, as in economics, statistical data and computers were added to the toolkit of the trend analyst in the course of the twentieth century, but intuition never lost its sway. In the postwar years, established French style reporting bureaus, such as Bilbille & cie—a Parisian sampling house established in the 1880s—continued to do business as usual, producing books of fabric swatches to guide fashion designers around the world who sought to adapt French fashion to their local markets (Figures 1.2 and 1.3).1 The applecart was upset by a new generation of forecasters who came of age in the “swinging sixties” and who focused less on reporting about extant styles and more on using their intuition to anticipate future styles. More recently, fashion predictors have capitalized

FIGURE 1.1  J. Claude Frères & cie, Carte de ses nuances nouvelles saison d’été 1895. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 121.

FIGURE 1.2  Cover of fashion report, Bilbille & cie, Couture Openings, March 1952. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 96.

2

THE FASHION FORECASTERS

FIGURE 1.3  Colors for silk, Bilbille & cie, Couture Openings, March 1952. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 96.

on the digital age, offering subscriptions to private Web portals where style mysteries are revealed. Today, trend forecasters are the major providers of style information to the fashion industry, from the invisible fabric buyers at Ralph Lauren Purple Label to the celebrity brands of LVMH to the designers of auto interiors at the General Motors Corporation, whether in the United States or Australia. Firms like Pantone, a color intelligence service based in the United States, call the shots on trends with promotional

BEYOND THE CRYSTAL BALL

3

programs like “Color of the Year,” which declared Cerulean blue as the “it” color for 2000 and Rose Quartz and Serenity as the must-have shades for 2016.2 If we are to push the envelope in fashion studies, it is essential to probe the inner workings of the fashion system both as “enterprise” and as “culture.” This anthology— the first comprehensive historical study of color and trend prediction in Europe, America, and Asia—is a major step in this direction. This book contains seven academic essays based on new research in the archives of trend studios, market researchers, color forecasters, and international trade fairs, plus five interviews with leading contemporary forecasters. History, biography, and ethnography are blended into a highly readable cultural narrative.

Fashion, fashion prediction, and trendsetting “Fashion” is one of those ubiquitous modern buzzwords. Everyone uses it but seldom defines what he or she means. In modern shopping districts such as the British high street, the word “fashion” is often used to sell cheaply made apparel, often called “fast fashion.” But during the numerous fashion weeks that nowadays are organized all over the world, it means something completely different—not to mention the connotations the word has on the Paris catwalks. In general, “fashion” often refers to a certain style of dress. But what does the word “style” mean, and does fashion only denote dress? Ideas such as a certain lifestyle or behavior can also be in fashion. The sociologists Patrik Aspers and Frédéric Godart define fashion “as an unplanned process of recurrent change against a backdrop of order in the public realm.” They distinguish fashion from four related concepts: fad, innovation, style, and trend.3 Fashions are related to past fashions, while fads appear and disappear suddenly. Innovation and fashion are both closely related to change, write Aspers and Godart, but innovation has a deeper social impact and always refers to improvement, while this is not the case with fashion. Style can have a long-lasting cultural impact and can transcend time, as shown by the punk look that has been with us since the 1970s, but style in itself is not fashion. A trend is “the direction in which fashion maybe heading.”4 In the interviews we have included in this book, these concepts are intermingled because practitioners in fashion and trend forecasting often use them in different ways. We respectfully take issue with Aspers and Godart that fashion is “an unplanned process of recurrent change.” Their definition is very close to some of the ideas that Georg Simmel outlined in his seminal article, “Fashion,” from 1904: Fashion is a form of imitation and so of social equalization, but, paradoxically, in changing incessantly, it differentiates one time from another and one social stratum from another. It unites those of a social class and segregates them from others. The elite initiates a fashion and, when the mass imitates it in an effort to obliterate the external distinctions of class, abandons it for a new mode—a process that quickens with the increase of wealth.5

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We cannot disagree with this particular sociological process, which has been described repeatedly in fashion research in the twentieth century. We believe, however, that this is not the whole story, irrespective of the direction fashion was moving sociologically. Did fashion still trickle down in the 1960s and 1970s when streetwear, leisurewear, and denim jeans began to dominate global fashion, and haute couture was only made for a diminishing customer base of the wealthy few? Or did the world of fashion return to Simmel’s paradigm on social equalization with the triumph of designer brands in the 1990s? And to what extent are contemporary fashion celebrities a new elite that initiates fashion? These sociological questions are extremely provocative. However, they are not the focus of this book on the history of fashion forecasters. Fashion prediction or trend forecasting is a fascinating but under-researched topic in history and fashion studies. Fashion history often focuses on the creativity of the designer or on the cultural meaning of clothing. This anthology draws on research in the new culturally-informed business history to step inside the fashion system and examine its inner workings. Rather than focusing on the relationships among producers and consumers, the book shifts the analysis to “business-to-business” (B2B) activities. It takes as its main actors the entrepreneurs, trade associations, service companies, and consultants that work behind the scenes to generate the cultural data—color cards, sketches and other images, and narratives—that inform fashion creators and retailers about emerging trends. The information is often packaged and sold as paper trend books and, increasingly, as online resources, on a subscription basis. This anthology examines the hidden and untold story of this intermediary activity from a comparative, international, and transnational perspective that encompasses Europe, North America, and Asia. “Fashion is capitalism’s favorite child, she sprung from its deepest being, and shows its specificity like hardly any other social phenomenon of our time,” wrote the German economic historian Werner Sombart in 1902.6 What he meant is that fashion is not just about aesthetics and sociological processes, but it is an essential part of the economic system. According to Sombart, fashion is an instrument that industry wields to mobilize consumption. It is a capitalistic phenomenon used by entrepreneurs to increase sales and profits. Fashion, which influences ever more sectors of economic life, constantly creates innovation, obsolescence, more innovation, and further obsolescence, and therefore it has become one of the drivers of modern capitalism.7 To borrow the words of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who did not discuss the fashion industry in his work but who was heavily influenced by Sombart, one could say that fashion is part or even at the foundation of the “perpetual process of creative destruction.”8 Following the logic of these great economic thinkers, fashion is at the heart of our economic system. It is only recently, however, that scholars have started to study fashion as a major economic and business activity.9 Fashion is often studied from a purely theoretical perspective, from a costume history or dress history viewpoint, or from a popular media-driven vantage point. This book, however, aims to study fashion and fashion forecasting from a business and economic perspective, without ignoring the cultural aspects of the world’s “most glamorous” industry.10 This anthology situates the history of color and trend forecasting within the context of the literature on fashion studies, cultural history, and the new business history, which focuses on relationships among enterprise, society, and culture. If fashion is at the heart of our economic system and one of its most important drivers, then the question comes to mind: What drives fashion? This intriguing question sets the tone for this historical

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study, which endeavors to answer the following sub-questions: Was producing fashion a spontaneous process, or was it calculated and prefabricated by a small group of experts who decided on colors, materials, shapes, and styles? Who were the so-called samplers, color stylists, and trend forecasters? Did they predict future trends, or did they set or predetermine them? Or were their forecasts merely self-fulfilling prophecies? How did the job of fashion forecaster evolve, and what was the national and international impact of this new profession? How did the maturation of color forecasting and trend prediction figure into or enable the late-twentieth-century phenomena of “fashion for everyone”? How did this intermediary business evolve over time, and how and when did it become a transnational and global activity? Finally, what is the future of fashion prediction in the era of brands seeking to establish unique identities and in the age of digitalization and fast fashion?

Studies on fashion forecasting In the last decade, several studies about fashion prediction or that are pertinent to forecasting in general were published. Most of these studies, however, do not take an historical approach. One exception is David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old.11 This insightful book by Britain’s leading historian of technology examines the impact of technologies that are visibly invisible, such as horses in the nineteenth century and electricity and central heating in our own time. Edgerton does not discuss fashion, but the central argument in his book has great merit for our interpretation of trend forecasting, which could be described as a technology—a way of doing—that is omnipresent but hidden from view. Another exceptional work is Philip Anthony Sykas’s book, The Secret Life of Textiles. This wellillustrated monograph highlights the little-studied nineteenth-century swatch books and color cards that are squirreled away in museum collections in the old textile manufacturing cities and towns in the North of England. Sykas brings the once commonplace nature of these design tools to light, and, in doing so, paves the way for this study on visual thinking, intuition, and risk management in the textile industries.12 Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s The Color Revolution is the first full-length historical treatment of color forecasting in the United States, with reference to developments in France and Great Britain.13 It serves as another springboard for the wider discussion of trend forecasting in this anthology. One of Blaszczyk’s other anthologies, Bright Modernity, co-edited with Uwe Spiekermann, includes a section on color forecasting with chapters by Blaszczyk on the UK, Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson on Sweden, and the journalist Mary Lisa Gavenas on the early history of the Parisian fabric fair Première Vision. The emphasis is on color, commerce, and consumer culture.14 Jenny Lantz’s book, The Trendmakers, gives some historical background, but it mainly explores the significance of trend forecasters in the current global fashion industry through interviews with major actors in the business with reference to their roles in setting trends.15 Although The Trendmakers complements our study, particularly for recent developments, it is not a work of history based on archival research. Walter Friedman’s Fortune Tellers is a full discussion of the birth of economic forecasting in the interwar period in the United States. Written by an accomplished business historian interested in the intersection of enterprise and culture, it provides historical background

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information for our analysis, even though it does not discuss fashion forecasting.16 The emergence of various types of forecasting activities—economic, weather, and fashion forecasting—in the modern era highlights the phenomenon’s links to scientific management and the cult of rationality (Figure 1.4). The pioneer economic forecasters studied by Friedman helped to build enduring institutions, such as Moody’s Investors Service, and

FIGURE 1.4  Prediction takes many forms and is often portrayed as being highly scientific. This geeky television meteorologist made sure to dress stylishly for his weather forecast. Pacific Mills, advertisement from the New Yorker, 1957. Provided courtesy of Burlington Industries, a division of International Textile Group, Inc.

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to develop important statistical tools, such as indexes of production. However much they tried to distance themselves from soothsayers, economic forecasters were lumped together in the public mind with fortune tellers and their crystal balls. Their scientific predictions were often no more accurate that the sorcerers’ potions were magical, because they relied heavily on speculation.17 Business writers have also grappled with the mysteries of prediction. In this vein, Superforecasting, written by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, was named one of the best books of 2015 by The Economist, Bloomberg, and Amazon. com.18 It casts a wide net and looks at predictive activities in a range of “serious” contexts, mainly contemporary politics, sports, and the stock market. However, trend forecasting in fashion is not discussed. This oversight might be due to the widespread misperception that fashion is “superfluous.” We tend to be a bit more generous in our evaluation of trend and color prediction, seeing fashion forecasting as significant cultural activity worthy of analysis. Unlike the economic forecasters studied by Friedman, the fashion forecasters in this book, for the most part, had no pretensions to scientific exactitude. Our interviews with contemporary trend forecasters have led us to believe that the anticipation of style changes on behalf of the creative industries depends a good deal on intuition or a “sixth sense.” The goal is to provide busy product designers and developers with information and inspiration, nothing more, nothing less. Another set of books on forecasting addresses the concerns of students and curious businesspeople who want information on the contemporary fashion industry. A long list of recent publications on fashion forecasting are primarily written as textbooks for fashion students, but they lack an historical dimension. Diane Tracey and Tom Cassidy’s Colour Forecasting is a textbook for students in design, fashion, and textiles, mainly a how-to guide.19 It contains a short historical section, but the discussion is not based on archival research. Eundeok Kim, Ann Marie Fiore, and Hyejeong Kim’s Fashion Trends introduces undergraduate students to the central concepts of fashion trend analysis and forecasting.20 The book demonstrates how and why fashion forecasting is vital to successful product and brand development. It provides some background information for our discussion, but it mainly serves to illustrate our point that most books on color and trend forecasting are ahistorical.21 We believe that leaving history out of the discussion is a puzzling omission when one wants to understand the most important feature of fashion: change. A final body of work is worth mentioning: books by design futurists such as Bradley Quinn. In Textile Futures and Fashion Futures, Quinn focuses on futuristic garments and speculates on the possible impact of technologies such as genetic engineering and nanotechnology.22 While Quinn hopes to understand the future, we seek to unravel the past. We not only show that fashion prediction and color forecasting have a long history, but we also analyze their evolution into the present, showing that trendsetting has had many faces and has followed many paths. Historically, forecasting has been done by designers, fashion magazines, dedicated fashion intermediaries, and, finally, the people who run online services. Another distinctive feature of this anthology is its international and transnational approach. We show that fashion forecasting is neither a French nor an American invention. The rise of fashion forecasting occurred in several geographic locales almost simultaneously because of the economic and cultural logic of the Second Industrial Revolution. It emerged in response to the need to manage and reduce risk, but was also influenced by developments in various countries as a result of transnational cultural encounters.

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A short history of early fashion forecasting It is debatable when “fashion” became an important economic and social phenomenon. Evidently, as soon as human civilization arose, dress and style began to matter as social identifiers. However, most fashion historians date the rise of the modern fashion system to the second half of the fourteenth century, thereby following Werner Sombart’s thesis that it was the demand for luxuries, emanating from the rising class of merchants and bankers in cities like Florence and Venice and later in Amsterdam and London, which transformed the socioeconomic system of Europe from feudalism into capitalism.23 The reason for the extravagant growth of luxury at that time was the emergence of the “bourgeoisie” who lived in a hierarchical society. The bourgeois citizen had to distinguish himself or herself from the lesser sorts by consuming a higher degree of luxury.24 This further increased the demand for luxury, which resulted in the creation of new markets. So for Sombart, the rise of luxury, including fashion, was closely connected to the rise of capitalism and modernity. As a matter of fact, the German and French words “mode” and Italian “moda” find their origins in the Latin word “modus,” which means manners, but are also linked to the concepts “modern” and “modernity” and thus to the rise of capitalism.25 However, a lot more research is needed to understand the origins of the modern fashion system, with the rise of fashion tastemakers that were an essential part of it. Who other than fashion tastemakers would advise and decide what would be fashionable and suitably trendy for merchants, bankers, monarchs, aristocrats, and, starting in the eighteenth century, successful industrialists? Fashion trendsetting must therefore be nearly as old as fashion itself. Unfortunately, little research has been done into the prehistory of this intermediary activity. The French magazine Le Mercure galant is generally regarded as the first report on fashion trends.26 Founded by Jean Donneau de Visé in 1672, the magazine became a monthly in 1678. Many pages written by the founder and editor described the fashions of Louis XIV and his royal court, and also discussed the roles of the craftsmen, merchants, and upper-class consumers who created, sold, and used French fashion. The journal went into great detail on clothing and accessories, and included advertisements for merchants who were selling these fashionable goods. In 1678, the magazine featured two fashion plates, actually the first such illustrations to appear in any magazine, of a man and a woman dressed in the latest styles (Figures 1.5 and 14.2).27 Clearly, these pictures are among the earliest examples of fashion forecasting. The magazine explicitly advised its readers how to get dressed; in modern parlance, it conveyed “business-to-consumer” (B2C) information, a format still used by modern fashion magazines. In contrast, this anthology focuses on the “business-to-business” (B2B) side of fashion forecasting. Interestingly, fashion plates were also used by textile manufacturers, but little or no research has been done on this topic. Another example of early modern fashion or color forecasting, or at least an example that has certain elements of modern forecasting, is the usage of sample or swatch books. A textile sample is a piece of fabric designed to represent a larger whole, and a small rectangular cutting is called a swatch. A textile manufacturer pasted numerous swatches of his material into a sample book, enabling a salesman to show potential customers a wide selection of available fabric designs in various colors. Not all sample books, however, were used for sales purposes; some were just used by the textile manufacturer as a record of the

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FIGURE 1.5  Fashion plate from Le Mercure galant (1678). Courtesy Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, classification mark 807517.

design and dyeing process. For example, the famous Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC)—the Dutch East India Company, established in 1602—used samples or swatches in everyday business transactions. The VOC was granted a trade monopoly with Asia from the Estates General of the Dutch Republic and existed for two centuries. In 1604, the VOC

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began trading in India, procuring and selling spices and fabrics, particularly silk and cotton. For two and a half centuries, the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to trade in Japan, where there was a considerable demand for Indian silk.28 For the intra-Asian and Dutch-Asian trade, sample books enabled the VOC to show a wide selection of available designs and colors to Asian customers while soliciting new orders (Figure 1.6).29 In this way, the VOC sample books began to play a role as conveyor of design and color information, and served to show the latest trends. As textile curator Lesley Miller has shown, it was common practice for eighteenth-century silk mills in Lyon, France, to market their fabrics using similar sample books. In the case of Lyon, salesmen showed the sample books to customers, and, once an order was in hand, the mill would begin to make the fabrics.30 The next step was the professionalization of the sampling process by a new type of business, a subscription service that specialized in cuttings. In France, from the 1790s to the 1870s, the main fashion intermediaries in Paris and Lyon were entrepreneurial samplers who collected fabrics from weavers and repackaged them as swatches for sale to rival mills, dressmakers, tailors, and fabric retailers. After the discovery of synthetic dyes, the samplers added color cards to their offerings, showcasing the potential of the new artificial tints. In his doctoral thesis, Thierry Maillet describes how the designer Victor Jean-Claude moved in 1825 from the Vosges mountains in eastern France to Paris, where he made sketches and procured samples for his clients back in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines. Ten years later in

FIGURE 1.6  These textile swatches were found in the resolutions (“resoluties”) of the Heeren XVII (Lords Seventeen), VOC’s Board, dated October 16, 1755. The swatches are made of silk and other fabrics from China. National Archive The Hague, VOC, 1.04.02, inv. no. 54.

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1834, sampling had become the main occupation of Victor Jean-Claude and his brother François Claude. From Paris, the Claude brothers sold information on the latest fashion trends to French manufacturers, and from 1855 to schools in the textile center of Roubaix in northern France and to associations of designers in Mulhouse, another textile center in eastern France close to the Swiss border. Little else is known about the firm’s early history, but it appears to have operated as J. Claude Frères & Balliman for part of the nineteenth century and then as J. Claude Frères & cie until it merged with Bilbille, its major rival, in 1979. As testimony to its significance in the nineteenth century, the Claude sampling service received a prize at the Exposition Universelle in 1878, one of the great world’s fairs in Paris. The prestigious accolade was testimony to the growing importance of sampling activities to the French fashion and textile industries.31 Meanwhile, fashion designers began to play a role as tastemakers. The Englishman Charles Frederick Worth moved from London to Paris in 1845 to become an assistant salesman with Gagelin, a famous haberdasher. Worth’s future wife Marie Vernet inspired him to design his first dress, which became a huge success. At the world’s fairs in London in 1851 and Paris in 1855, Worth won awards for his innovative designs.32 In 1858, he set up a company together with a young Swede, Otto Gustaf Bobergh. The Worth-Bobergh partnership shows the international dimension of fashion at the time. Worth was not only innovative in his designs, but he was also a very good businessman; by 1873, his company employed a staff of 1,200. He was the first dressmaker who used female models to show his costumes “ready-to-try-on.” Before this time, fashion dolls were used as models or poor young men showed the new dresses as a “mannequin, [or] model for fashions.”33 During Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70), Worth became the official supplier of the garments for the Empress Eugénie, a Spanish beauty with a passion for fashion; he gained a great international reputation after he had dressed the czarina of Russia, the queen of Italy, the empress of Austria, and Victoria, the queen of England. Worth transformed the status of the dressmaker from that of an anonymous craftsman to that of a designer whose name and taste mattered.34 Although the words “couture” and “haute couture” were not used yet— Worth was still using the word “confection” in his company name—the role of celebrity designers as fashion tastemakers increased tremendously at the end of the nineteenth century. Other examples include John Redfern (an English tailor established in Paris and London), Jacques Doucet (a Frenchman heavily influenced by the art of the painters Edgar Degas and Claude Monet), and Paul Poiret (another Frenchman who diversified from ladies’ fashion into decorative arts and perfume).35 According to Didier Grumbach, the couturier Poiret “became the catalyst for fashion trends and his philosophy penetrated all areas in which he extended his influence.”36 Meanwhile, Paris had become the trendsetting capital of the world.

When Paris led and others followed For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Paris was a remarkable public-relations machine that generated spin to promote haute couture as the world’s one and only “Fashion” with a capital “F.” Very few women could afford couture, but the society

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dressmakers of the rue de la Paix and the avenue Montaigne added to the city’s cultural cachet, contributing to its allure as the great European hub of art and culture. The European fashion system pivoted on the creativity of haute couture, and on the ability of clothing manufacturers in countries throughout the West to secure original information about Paris fashion so they could adapt the designs. The couture houses granted special permission to foreign retail buyers to attend their semiannual shows and developed complicated systems for selling exclusive reproduction rights to those overseas customers.37 It was strictly prohibited for anyone attending a couture show to take photographs or make sketches. These restrictive practices were enforced to preserve the exclusivity of haute couture, which in turn buttressed the reputation of Paris as the world’s fashion capital. But not all foreign clothing manufacturers and retailers could afford to pay, or wanted to pay, the high prices that the couturiers demanded for models and reproduction rights. Inevitably, the couture-led culture of secrecy gave birth to a type of fashion espionage. A specialist business emerged to provide other businesses around the world with reports on the latest Paris styles, fabrics, and silhouettes. For decades, those reports were essential to the inner workings of the world’s largest garment industry, which served the world’s most advanced consumer society, that of the United States. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, middle-class and upperclass women in the United States had learned to covet fashion direction from Paris. Despite endeavors by fashion nationalists and the protectionist policies of the federal government before the First World War, the American consumer took inspiration from modern French designs for gowns and accessories, such as gloves, shoes, and millinery. Around the turn of the century, most newspapers around the country and elite fashion-aware magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazar (later called Harper’s Bazaar) had correspondents in Paris who scouted out and reported on the latest trends.38 At the start of the war, Vogue supported American fashion, but as soon as the Parisian houses re-opened in 1915, this society magazine geared to upper-class readers began to report on French trends once again.39 However, the First World War put a damper on French leadership in swatch and color sampling. Between 1914 and 1940, a new approach to color and trend forecasting crystallized in the United States. Although the Americans did not invent color forecasting, they borrowed French practices and augmented them by applying the principles of scientific management to forecasting practices. During the First World War, the American ready-to-wear industry (which was more developed than its counterparts in Britain and France) was cut off from supplies of French color information and German dyestuffs. As Regina Lee Blaszczyk shows in Chapter 2, milliners and textile manufacturers who had become dependent on French color forecasts from agencies like J. Claude Frères & cie decided to form their own trade association, Textile Color Card Association of the United States (TCCA), which started to publish its own Standard Color Card and its own seasonal color forecasts for trendy sections of the textile industry such as silk.40 Gender stereotypes of the modern era created new opportunities for women to work in jobs that connected color, commerce, and fashion. It was scientifically proven that women were less likely to be color blind than men, and it was culturally believed they had greater sensitivity to color’s emotive qualities. America’s first professional color forecaster, Margaret Hayden Rorke, was the quintessential example of a “New Woman” who harnessed gender biases to craft a long professional career for herself in the New York

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fashion industry. As Blaszczyk discusses, “Mrs. Rorke” had her ultimate satisfaction when the British textile industry created the British Colour Council as a mirror-image twin to the TCCA. In today’s brand-conscious culture, no business would use a cumbersome name like the Textile Color Card Association, but we should not let our modern sensibilities dismiss the importance of the TCCA as a pioneer of modern color forecasting. Another modern woman emerged as a counterpart to Rorke in the area of American fashion forecasting and trend reporting. In Chapter 3, Véronique Pouillard and Karen J. Trivette introduce us to Tobé Coller Davis, or “Miss Tobé” as she was widely known in the fashion trade. In the early 1920s, Davis moved to New York from the Midwest and launched a career in the retail business. After a few years scouting trends and ideas in retailing, she opened her own consultancy firm, Tobé Associates, in 1927, selling trend advice to her customers. This marked another milestone in the evolution of modern fashion forecasting in the United States, helping to translate exclusive trends, mainly from France, into trend descriptions for American ready-to-wear manufacturers and department store retailers. Tobé’s clients were willing to pay an annual fee to receive her weekly trend reports. In 1937, Tobé diversified into education, when she and Julia Coburn, an experienced fashion editor, opened the TobéCoburn School for Fashion Careers in New York. Although Tobé was not the only fashion forecaster in the United States in the interwar period, she was probably the best known, and had the longest career in the forecasting and trend reporting business until her death in 1962. As the Anglo-American world sharpened its skills in color and fashion prediction, the great European chemical and textile industries recovered from the First World War and again shipped their color cards around the world. Like the Germans, the Swiss had an advanced synthetic organic chemicals industry, and a sophisticated textile industry to boot. Swiss trade organizations such as the Société de teinture & d’apprêt in Basel produced color cards that found their way to the United States and guided forecasters like Margaret Hayden Rorke on European trends from style centers besides Paris (Figure 1.7). Other commercial associations jumped on the bandwagon for color prediction. In the United States in the 1930s, for example, the Cotton-Textile Institute, a New York-based information clearinghouse on cotton fabrics supported by the cotton growers, collaborated with journalists from the trade press and popular magazines—Dry Goods Economist, Women’s Wear Daily, Harper’s Bazaar, Collier’s, and Vogue—to decide on the popular colors for the upcoming season. The

FIGURE 1.7  Société de teinture & d’apprêt, Printemps 1929, Carte de nuances, Adoptée par l’Association des Teinturiers en Soie, Basel, Switzerland. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 89.

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Cotton-Textile Institute publicized these trend predictions through a special “swatching service” which issued seasonal fashion reports showing garment makers how to achieve color harmonies using cotton fabrics.41 Efforts like this were mainly designed to battle the onslaught of man-made fibers, most notably rayon, but they contributed to the idea that fashion could be studied, tamed, rationalized, and predicted. Paris had its own crop of new fashion forecasters. In 1937, Fred Carlin, a 35-year-old textile engineer from Lyon, set up a consulting and textile wholesale firm in Paris. He imagined that sample books could be attractive and actually invented the forerunner of what would become the Paris trend book. Fabric wholesalers had to sell the overstock from the previous season’s collection. Carlin purchased these fabrics, cut them into swatches, put the pieces in sample books, and sold them mainly to foreign customers. The smart new sample books provided retail buyers with coveted French fashion information and illustrated the latest “Parisian style.”42 Carlin continued to develop his business after the Second World War. In 1947, he started a textile creation agency, and in 1958 he founded the Comité Français de la couleur (the French Center of Color). Ten years, later he set up his bureau de style (style office).43 Despite Carlin’s creative entrepreneurial activities, his business was not located in the heart of the Paris fashion district, and moreover, he was an outsider to the city’s elite fashion milieu.44 This may be why his sample books are generally not acknowledged to be the first trend books made in France nor has he been celebrated for his pioneering efforts in Paris-based trend prediction. That honor may go to Presage and Promostyl, two of a new breed of forecasting companies established after the Second World War. As we will see in due course, Promostyl was producing trend books by the late 1960s.

Going international After the Second World War, American trade associations and consulting firms dedicated to color and trend forecasting did not expand abroad, mainly because the tremendous growth of consumer society in the United States provided a vast internal market for the domestic apparel industry. The American woman was known as the “best dressed woman in the world,” owing this compliment to a highly developed garment industry that was mostly, but not exclusively, clustered in Manhattan around Seventh Avenue. The Seventh Avenue fashion district stretched for blocks out from the giant R. H. Macy & Company department store at Herald Square on West Thirty-Fourth Street to Madison Avenue to the east, the Fashion Institute of Technology to the south, and Times Square to the north. The postwar economic boom opened the portal of consumer society to greater numbers of people, and fashion was one of the trendy consumer products that every woman wanted.45 The Seventh Avenue district, and apparel clusters in cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, fed the hunger for attractive clothing by combining American casual styles with design inspiration from Europe. Cleveland was the headquarters of Bobbie Brooks, the largest US apparel manufacturer in the 1960s (mentioned later in discussion of Nigel French). The editors at Vogue, Glamour, and Seventeen picked up the gauntlet for fashion prediction, and magazines began to play a larger role as forecasters and trend leaders. New color forecasting entities emerged—Pantone for printers and graphic artists, the Color Marketing Group for industrial designers and interior designers—and created a competitive environment for older organizations like the TCCA.46

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London-based entrepreneurs were among the first business people in Europe to recognize that the large and prosperous American market was ripe for a new type of fashion prediction. As Regina Lee Blaszczyk shows in Chapter 5, London of the 1960s was a hotbed of design creativity whose fashion leaders—innovators like Mary Quant and John Stephen— have been widely studied. Absent from the fashion history literature, however, are a group of young forecasting entrepreneurs like Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe (the subject of Chapter 4) who imagined a bright future in exporting news about the London Look to retailers and garment manufacturers in the United States. Many of these entrepreneurs were American expatriates living in London, people with dual American and British citizenship, or British nationals who had worked in the United States. London-based reporting agencies such as IM International and Nigel French Enterprises (discussed below) first exported news about youthful London styles, and then adapted to the changing market by expanding their scope and developing trend predictions based on what was observed in the wider culture and on the streets, shops, and runways of London, Milan, Munich, Paris, Saint-Tropez, and Tel Aviv. These new agencies, which honed the concept of trends, emerged at a pivotal moment in the history of the fashion business. Paris haute couture was on its last breath, and a new type of fashion creator was just emerging. The target audience for trendy clothes was the burgeoning youth market comprised of Baby Boomers. The first generation of designer brands was supplanting the old “garmentos” or makers-up in the United States and Great Britain. In part, the fashion forecasters of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s worked behind the scenes to provide cultural information and design inspiration mainly to a new group of American fashion design entrepreneurs, whose success, like that of the couturiers, depended on presenting an image of unrivaled inventive genius. As Leigh Rudd explained, it would have been contrary to a designer’s interests to admit that inspiration came from a fashion service.47 Everything was hush-hush as the emerging coterie of designers built the first designer brands. Because of the secrecy, the trend companies of this period have largely been hidden from history. The French, in keeping with their tradition of state intervention in the style industries, created a government unit to oversee fashion prediction. After a mission of French garment manufacturers to the United States in 1955 at the invitation of the American commerce department, the French trade association for womenswear launched a fashion prediction department, Comité de coordination des industries de la mode (Committee for the Coordination of Fashion Industries), commonly known as the CIM. The aim of the committee was to provide various actors in the French fashion and apparel industry—textile mills, artificial fiber producers, woman’s ready-to-wear manufacturers, accessories companies, and so forth— with precise information about current trends. For a decade in the later part of the CIM’s history, the renowned trend forecaster Nelly Rodi served as its director and recounts some of that experience in Chapter 6. The output of the CIM, however, was limited and its procedures were not very efficient. For example, fashion stylists, who played an important role in bringing France forward into the age of ready-to-wear, were not represented on the committee.48 Nevertheless, the postwar French consumer’s hunger for affordable store-bought clothing stimulated the ready-to-wear industry and inspired a new generation of entrepreneurs to create Paris-based trend agencies. In 1966, Françoise Vincent-Ricard established Promostyl (short for “promotion” and “style”). By 1969, this agency employed thirty-six young women “to do everything from styling fabrics to sketching fashion tendencies to predicting color trends up to eighteen months in advance of a season.” Subscribers to the Promostyl service received “handsome bound books” filled with color and trend information “creatively put

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together.”49 The agency was further developed by Danièlle de Diesbach and Sébastien de Diesbach. Another important style bureau, Mafia (Maïmé Arnodin Fayolle International Associés) was established in the spring of 1968 by Maïmé Arnodin (1916–2003) and Denise Fayolle (1923–95) as a “complete creative agency” that “designs everything.” Notably, Mafia introduced the methods and techniques of the advertising business to the style industries, and most important, acknowledged that “marketing is more and more important.” “Industrialists need creative help,” Fayolle told Women’s Wear Daily, the major newspaper for the New York fashion industry, in 1969. From an all-white, ultra-modern office in the Montmartre section of Paris, Mafia helped textile and fashion companies design new lines, drawing heavily on Fayolle’s experience at Prisunic (discussed in Chapter 6), where she was the creative dynamo behind the upgrading of the chain from a practical store for the pennywise housewife to “the snob place to shop.”50 Another important trend agency emerged in Paris in 1970. After working for the Printemps department store, the stylist Dominique Peclers founded Peclers Paris, a trend consultancy that generated forecasts for the fashion, textile, and home products businesses. Later on, during the 1990s, Peclers’ trend agency would diversify into other industries.51 The reinvention of the French fashion industry around ready-to-wear, accessories, and brands from the 1960s onward created further entrepreneurial opportunities that led to French leadership in the international business of fashion prediction. Promostyl took its successful formula abroad. Over the course of the early 1970s, it licensed the Promostyl brand name in Japan; collaborated with the New York designer Halston to adapt a new urethane fabric to ready-to-wear; and joined forces with a clothing factory in India to design apparel for American department stores such as R. H. Macy & Company and Bloomingdale’s. By 1976, Promostyl had an office in Times Square, in proximity to the bustling Seventh Avenue garment district, to better cater to these and other American customers.52 After serving as director of the CIM from 1975 to 1985, Nelly Rodi departed to focus on developing her own trend agency. She was one of the first fashion forecasters to widen the scope of fashion prediction to include automobiles, beauty, food, and home decoration. In 1986, her Dutch colleague, Lidewij “Li” Edelkoort—the two women had worked together at the CIM—started an independent agency specializing in trend foresight, Trend Union. Today, Edelkoort’s team publishes biannual trend forecasts, which are sold in more than twenty countries. She has advised global brands like Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, and Siemens, showing that trend forecasts can have an impact far beyond the fashion industry.53 Like David Wolfe and Leigh Rudd, both Rodi and Edelkoort believe that intuition is the core of their methodology. Despite the flurry of specialist trend start-ups, fiber companies and trade associations continued to exert a powerful sway in the business of prediction. Three forecasters whose oral histories appear in this book—Nelly Rodi, Ornella Bignami, and Catriona Macnab— started their careers by working on color and fashion prediction in fibers. Famously, the synthetic age began in 1938 when E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company of Wilmington, Delaware, introduced nylon, the world’s first test-tube fiber. In 1939, DuPont nylon was promoted as the fiber of the future at the New York World’s Fair, a public extravaganza that celebrated industrial progress (Figure 1.8). After the Second World War, DuPont and other fiber makers ramped up synthetics production, commercializing new products such as nylon, polyester, acrylic, and spandex. A fiber war ensued, as the cellulose, cotton, silk, and wool industries fought for their lives against the onslaught of synthetics. Established in 1937 by woolgrowers in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to promote merino

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FIGURE 1.8  Fiber companies have long played an important role in promoting fashion futures. Here, Miss Chemistry models the latest high-tech fashion—nylon stockings—at the DuPont Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library; DuPont Textile Fibers Product Information Photographs, accession 1984.259.

fleece, the International Wool Secretariat (IWS) introduced the Woolmark logo, inspired by a skein of wool, to put virgin wool in the public eye, in 1964 (Figure 1.9).54 The great war of the fibers—natural materials versus synthetic materials—not only led chemical companies to invest in scientific research and mass advertising, but also to undertake fashion prediction. In Chapter 8, Pierre-Yves Donzé examines the history of Chori Co. Ltd, 18

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FIGURE 1.9  International Wool Secretariat, Wool Knitwear Colours for Men and Women Autumn/Winter 84/85. Courtesy of The Woolmark Company and Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library.

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a small trading company in Osaka, Japan, that specialized in silk and synthetic fibers. Donzé’s study shows that fiber manufacturers took changing consumer tastes seriously enough to assign their most talented engineers the problem of fashion prediction. The engineer Kentaro Kawasaki spent most of his industrial career at Chori, first heading the textile development division and then directing the marketing unit. In the early 1970s, he developed a deep interest in fashion prediction as related to the challenges of fiber development. In collaboration with engineering and management colleagues elsewhere in the Japanese chemical, textile, and apparel industries, Kawasaki created a scientific working group that developed a rational approach to product planning based on the statistical analysis of data on population structure, economic cycles, market segments, and other factors. In contrast to forecasters coming from retailing or design backgrounds who relied on intuition, the Japanese experts applied engineering principles to the problem of changing consumer expectations and commercial risk. They engaged mathematical models in an effort to forecast shifting tastes among Japanese consumers with the ultimate goal to eradicate guesswork and better manage risk in the capital-intensive enterprise of fiber production. The 1939 celebration of nylon at the DuPont Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair foreshadowed the crucial role that commercial exhibitions would play in the postwar era. Although world’s fairs for the general public have diminished in importance, business-tobusiness fairs and trade shows have proliferated and grown in significance. After the Second World War, two European fashion textile trade fairs, Interstoff and Première Vision, became the most important fairs for the Continental textile industry. Interstoff was launched in 1959 by Messe Frankfurt, a specialist firm that organizes trade fairs, starting in Frankfurt, Germany, and now elsewhere in the world. Interstoff was the number one textile fair in the world for almost forty years, although it lost its prime position in the European fabric fair business at the end of the 1990s. Première Vision was launched in Lyon in 1972 and moved to Paris two years later. Since 1985, “PV” (as the show is nicknamed) has combined fashion prediction with fabric promotion. In the 1980s and 1990s, Li Edelkoort organized a series of highly successful trend shows during the PV fair. Although Interstoff was a trend-making event from the start, it began to make trend forecasting an explicit part of each edition in the early 1980s. During the 1990s, Interstoff asked Promostyl and Ornella Bignami to set up a biannual Trend Table, as Ben Wubs explains in Chapter 9. These two fabric fairs mobilized fashion prediction in order to position themselves as central to the fashion system. The aim was to complement the routine business of selling fabric with the more glamorous exchange of trend information.55 Messe Frankfurt shuttered the Interstoff event in Frankfurt in 1999 but has continued to organize textile fairs in Asia, particularly China. While it has also established Asian editions, Première Vision still organizes the classic Paris show on a biannual basis and adheres to an information-centric model that helps Western Europe to retain its cultural hegemony as the central location for worldwide fabric trendsetting (Figure 1.10). In 2002, Messe Frankfurt launched Texworld, a new textile event in Paris to compete with Première Vision in the French fashion capital. While Chapter 9 delves into the role of fashion forecasting at the Interstoff apparel fabric fair in Frankfurt, Chapter 10 looks into one of the world’s most important trade international fairs for menswear: Pitti Uomo in Florence, Italy. Mariangela Lavanga explores the rise of the Pitti Uomo trade fair, its role in trend development, and the reasons behind its success. She explores the strategies of Pitti Uomo and the perspectives of the fashion designers and brands that exhibited there. The competitive selection process, internationalization, and

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FIGURE 1.10  Première Vision’s fashion forecasting area during its main event in Paris in 2005. Courtesy Première Vision.

the development of a culture for high-quality products has allowed this fair to remain an important intermediary in the process of trend development in global menswear. Although the menswear industry has long operated in the shadow of the womenswear industry, the market for male apparel has become more and more important over the past few decades. In the past, trends and styles in menswear changed more slowly than those in women’s fashion, but since the pace of those changes is accelerating, there is a greater need to scope out future trends.

In print: The lifecycle of a forecasting agency No business enterprise is created to last in perpetuity, and such is the case with forecasting agencies. They rise to meet a need, adapt to suit changing circumstances or not, and shut their doors when the business ceases to be profitable or when the owners decide to pursue other interests. Nigel French Enterprises, Ltd, a leading UK provider of forecasting services for nearly three decades, is a case in point. This London-based agency operated from June 1969 to May 1996.56 The founder, Nigel French, is a British businessman who today is chairman of Traub Associates Europe, a firm that provides business-to-business services in trend forecasting, licensing, and franchising.57 The young Nigel French launched his career as a trainee buyer at Woollands in Knightsbridge, a store owned by Debenhams, under Martin Moss, who as managing

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director helped to develop and promote the early designs of the London womenswear impresario Mary Quant.58 French then moved across the Atlantic Ocean to cut his teeth in American retailing. He mastered the American market as the merchandising director at Bobbie Brooks in Cleveland, Ohio, a ladies’ sportswear company and the world’s largest apparel manufacturer.59 By 1967, he was back in the UK, where he eventually established Nigel French Enterprises, a London-based fashion reporting service (Figure 1.11). Bloomingdale’s was the first client.60 This upmarket New York retailer was known for its innovative approach to merchandising, most famously having been one of the first to stock designs by Ralph Lauren. By the early 1970s, American department stores wanted to buy European merchandise more often and more efficiently. The May Department Stores Company of St. Louis— the largest American department store chain with twelve divisions, 110 stores around the country, and net sales of $1.5 billion—reported on the rising popularity of foreign merchandise, particularly when style was a factor.61 In 1973, French joined the executive ranks at the May Company when the chain acquired his two companies: Nigel French Enterprises and Associated Apparel Buyers, a firm that sourced and merchandised fabrics and apparel. At the May Company, French organized a foreign buying office called May Department Stores International (MDSI) and served as its first president. With the creation of MDSI, May terminated its 37-year arrangement with R. H. Macy & Company to use the services of the latter’s foreign buying offices. It was hoped that MDSI would give the May Company a competitive edge in gathering information and procuring merchandise globally.62 At MDSI, French built a network of twenty-two buying offices around the world, created a design team to develop private label merchandise, and streamlined the importing program to reduce costs.63 However, he seems to have grown disillusioned by the inefficiencies of the large chain and with department stores generally.64 In 1977, he resigned from MDSI and re-acquired Nigel French Enterprises.65 He focused on building Nigel French Enterprises into an international powerhouse in fashion reporting, forecasting, exporting, and licensing. By 1979, the company had offices in London and New York, and among other things, had assisted Mary Quant Ltd in developing a coordinated line of home accessories suited to the American market. Targeting the “’60s generation grown up,” the collection was sold by upscale retailers such as Bloomingdale’s and B. Altman in New York, Jordan Marsh in Boston, and the BroadwayHale stores in southern California.66 The firm had its own design studio, which created private label housewares with themes like Country Dairy suited to the “country look” that was popular among Baby Boomers in the 1980s.67 Fashion and textiles were still a major focus, as was the international dimension.68 The firm was so successful that it found itself to be the butt of jokes. In 1987, one humor column in New York magazine listed the musthaves for the man who wanted to look good: a haircut by a private stylist at the Hotel Pierre for $65; a facial at Barneys for $50; a manicure and pedicure at the Olcott Hotel for $30; a thirty-minute tanning session with a Fifth Avenue salon for $20; an hour-long workout with a private trainer for $50; and a “year of fashion consultations, including color, fabric, and design forecasts, by Nigel French Enterprises (49 West 38th Street), $5,000.”69 When the UK-based Design magazine spotlighted trend forecasting in 1992, it counted around fifty to sixty such agencies in the world, the majority of which focused on the apparel industry. However, the largest companies worked internationally and served a range of

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FIGURE 1.11  As trade shows became important sites of information exchange in the textile and fashion business, forecasting companies attended and published summaries for their subscribers. This report focuses on highlights of the French Knitwear Show in February 1977. Nigel French Enterprises, Salon de la Maille, Knitwear for Fall 77. Courtesy of Nigel French and Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library.

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clients, including those outside of the fashion business. The design staff at the Ford Motor Company, for example, used trend forecasts to create paint schemes and interiors for all of the models in the Ford line, creating mood boards that were later used by the marketing and advertising teams. According to Design, the “Big Three” among forecasters were Trend Union (headed by the Dutch forecaster Li Edelkoort), the French company Promostyl, and Nigel French International, all of which had offices in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.70 Within a few short years, however, the Nigel French agency had closed its doors. One former employee, Marie-Christine Viannay, had moved from France to Britain in the 1970s, working as a fabric buyer for Liberty’s, the famous upscale London retailer just off of Regent Street, before joining the Nigel French company. Looking back on her career, Viannay remembered the 1970s and 1980s as dream decades for forecasters. “The same trends were adopted by companies globally,” she explained, until the 1990s. As “the picture fragmented,” the business environment became more competitive and companies “scrutinized trends” more closely. “You had to sell them precisely tailored information by knowing their exact profile—how they saw themselves vis-à-vis the competition, their vision of themselves in five years’ time.” These heightened expectations stemmed from major changes in the retail landscape and the globalization of the supply chain. By the New Millennium, in both the United States and Great Britain, the great middle market had disappeared. The retailers who were left standing were divided into high and low, into the “luxury end” and the “Wal-Mart end.”71 The best way for fashion retailers to survive was to move upmarket, and upscale stores expected special treatment. Forecasting was a labor-intensive business to begin with; scouting out the information and creating trend books and color cards was a costly endeavor. It was even more difficult, indeed almost impossible, to make money when the customers wanted boutique forecasts. During the 1990s, the Internet—a technology now so ubiquitous that it is difficult to remember life before the Web—was in its infancy. Although businesses and consumers had desktop computers and access to email, the online world we live in today—the world of browsers, downloads, and the immediacy of digital information—was still a few years in the future. For centuries, fashion predictors had transmitted information about the latest trends on paper, via fashion prints, swatch cards, shade cards, sample books, and trend reports. Audio-visual trend recordings, mainly on VHS tapes, were introduced in the 1970s as supplements to the older tools. The Internet was a disruptive technology that would certainly make an impact on trend forecasting. But it was not the Internet that killed off some of the older print-based agencies; the fragmentation of the market proved insurmountable. Sometimes it was simply impractical or undesirable to change with the times. It was better to throw in the towel and invest in other business opportunities suited to the moment, as appears to have been the case with Nigel French Enterprises.

The digital imperative The entry of textile and fashion trade fairs into the realm of trend forecasting was another factor that transformed the forecasting field. The trend forums at Première Vision and Interstoff introduced an experiential form of trend forecasting. Whether we want to call this multifaceted sensory experience “postmodern” or not, the experience of attending a trade

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fair, visiting suppliers in their booths, and submersing yourself in a visual extravaganza designed by Li Edelkoort better satisfied the senses than a trend book filled with static photographs, printed fashion sketches, and tiny fabric swatches. It was also a lot more fun to fly to a trade fair in Frankfurt, Paris, or Milan than to sit in your office and wait for the post to deliver the monthly trend report. Did the advent of Web browsers in the mid-1990s mean that the digitalization of trend forecasting was inevitable? One way to explore this question is to examine the digital divide in a specific cultural context. In Chapter 11, Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson lays out the long history of forecasting in the Swedish fashion industries, commencing with the heyday of printed trend books and moving forward into the electronic era. Along the way, she considers how forecasters of the past few decades have re-conceptualized the business by reaching into new territories such as interior decoration and household accessories. Although printed books have not entirely disappeared, there is a greater appreciation for the instant gratification provided by the Web. As the business of fashion prediction continued to expand at the end of the twentieth century, new digital platforms were developed for the dissemination of trends. In London, the Worth Global Style Network (WGSN), founded as an online trend-forecasting platform by the brothers Julian and Marc Worth in 1998, became exceptionally successful, showing that, beyond Paris and New York, new practices of fashion prediction could emerge to serve customers who produce merchandise for different markets around the world.72 In 2005, the Worth brothers sold WGSN for £140 million to a British media company, demonstrating that fashion forecasting was no longer a small business. The rise and success of WGSN coincided with the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution, which dramatically sped up the globalization of the fashion industry. The two-season system of spring/summer and autumn/winter came to an end, as fashion brands and fast-fashion retailers constantly brought new items to market. Suddenly, in every corner of the world, there was an imperative for the instantaneous delivery of high-quality visual information, and WGSN met the demand. By 2011, the online trend-forecaster had 38,000 users at 3,000 companies, including regional brands such as C&A, the European retailer, and global brands such as Levi Strauss, LVMH, and Zara. However, as a result of the aestheticization of consumer products in the last decade, companies outside the fashion sector are more interested in fashion forecasts. As a result, Lufthansa, BMW, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, IKEA, and L’Oréal have all become clients of WGSN. In 2003, a cheaper competitor called Stylesight, Inc. was set up in New York and expanded rapidly. In 2011, it already had 25,000 users at 2,500 companies, including Prada, Zara, Bulgari, and Abercrombie & Fitch. Stylesight, Inc. was the only real competitor to WGSN in the realm of online fashion forecasting. In 2013, WGSN acquired Stylesight, Inc. to become the largest trend-forecasting company ever with 60,000 users at 4,000 clients.73 In Chapter 12, Valerie Wilson Trower discusses her experience as a trend director at Stylesight, Inc. and in Chapter 13, Catriona Macnab, the head of fashion at WGSN, talks about the challenges and opportunities for forecasters in the digital age. Fashion and color forecasting has evolved from a small hidden intermediary activity into a highly influential service business in the global economy. As inhabitants of the digital world, we have been schooled to believe that instantaneous Web communication is superior to newspapers, magazines, and other forms of print communication. Will printed trend books and color cards ever be entirely replaced by electronic delivery methods? History offers some food for thought. As David Edgerton

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explains, new technologies are often absorbed by the larger technological system and the broader culture to the point where they become commonplace. People still use stairs, even though we have escalators and elevators. In the everyday business of fashion, there is something to be said for tactile experience rather than digital downloads. Many trend experts agree that precise color matching is best done with swatches rather than with online tools, and agencies such as NellyRodi, Trend Union, and the Doneger Group still provide their customers with printed materials and fabric swatches. Nevertheless, the history of fashion forecasting does not end here.

The future of fashion forecasting Do color prediction and trend forecasting have a future? Business historians are akin to forecasters in that we canvass the cultural developments of the past, scrutinize patterns of behavior that emerge from the archives, and analyze that evidence to help us understand how entrepreneurs built firms that were suited to a particular time and place. We are not equipped with a crystal ball that provides access to the future, but we can use historical research to shine a light on the road forward. At first glance, the evidence suggests that the business of fashion forecasting may be at a crossroads, with the print era being challenged by the digital imperative. But in business, as in life, nothing is black-and-white. Other cultural and economic factors are at play. Looking back on his long career in trend forecasting, David Wolfe of the Doneger Group recalled the early days of IM International and the many face-to-face interactions he had with emerging fashion designers who are now household names, at least among fashionistas. He explained: We were creative people selling our ideas to other creative people. I remember we were based in London, but the company would send me to New York, and I would have a meeting one-on-one with Calvin Klein, and we would just discuss concepts and ideas. And I remember him telling me that he didn’t care about the clothes, he just wanted the girls to look hot. Or Ralph Lauren, or Gianni Versace in Milan.74 Wolfe remembers his early experience in trend forecasting as if it were part of golden age. Back in the 1970s, he worked at a startup and interacted with people at other startups. He matured as a trend forecaster at a time when advanced trend forecasting was still in its infancy. Today, Wolfe encounters a very different scene: Now—I’m still in the industry of trend—the clients are giant corporations, and you share your ideas with committees and trend staffs. Lots of the big box retailers have entire in-house trend departments. So it isn’t the same one-to-one understanding, gut instinct, rhythm. It’s much more a business, an industry. It used to be an art.75 Wolfe’s sentiments echo the recollections of Marie-Christine Viannay from Nigel French Enterprises and buttress one of the major points of this book. Fashion forecasting is not a black box. It is not a hot new thing that emerged last week, in recent years, or even in the

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late twentieth century. It is not stagnant and unchangeable. For the past few centuries, it has been practiced and developed by different types of firms, from large trading companies like the Dutch East India Company to small family-owned entrepreneurial ventures like NellyRodi. It has taken many different forms, and will undoubtedly continue to take on new forms yet again. Color prediction has evolved since the days of Margaret Hayden Rorke and it will continue to assume new forms in the future. The futurist Bradley Quinn offers some provocative insights that are a fitting closure to this introduction on the history of color prediction and trend forecasting. We are all immersed in the great digital revolution, but we should exert caution if tempted to believe that everything related to forecasting will be Web-based moving forward. In a 2016 interview, Quinn acknowledged that forecasters like Nelly Rodi and Li Edelkoort “do have the ability to anticipate trends and actually describe those trends to industry clients in a meaningful way that will help them actually incorporate those trends into product development.” But he was also emphatic in his belief that “the digital age changed everything.” Not only do services like WGSN deliver their content to subscribers via the Internet, but fashion producers now directly provide the general public with “inspirational images” through websites, blogs, and tools such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. In addition, celebrity culture has exploded, largely with the aid of the Web, and in Quinn’s view, celebrities are game changers. “I’m telling you, they can start a completely new style tribe. They are huge drivers for trends. They are the tastemakers of our age.”76 But celebrities have always influenced cultural trends, and the twenty-first century is no different. Celebrity culture has been around for centuries, as witnessed by the influence of royals and aristocrats in the early modern era, by stage actors in Victorian times, and by Hollywood stars in the twentieth century. Regardless of Quinn’s claims about celebrity culture, the history of fashion forecasters does not stop here, acquiescing to a cultural imperative to keep up with the Kardashians. The essence of fashion is change, a perpetual process of “creative destruction,” in the words of Werner Sombart and Joseph Schumpeter. Fashion lies at the heart of our commercial society, which constantly produces new goods, new styles, and new tastes. As a result, tastemakers will always be needed in one form or another. This book mainly focuses on fabrics for apparel and fashionable clothing, but as we have argued in this introduction and will demonstrate in the chapters ahead, fashion forecasting has moved beyond textiles. Indeed, nowadays, trend forecasts are of enormous interest to a great variety of industry sectors, from aviation to food, home decoration, and consumer electronics. Aesthetics and taste seem to matter more and more in a highly competitive global market. Forecasts have therefore become key to reducing risks for buyers as well as manufacturers, and not just in fashion apparel and accessories. Fashion forecasting has developed from an almost insignificant one-man operation in the nineteenth century, to small and medium-sized style agencies in the twentieth century, often established and led by women. Today, WGSN is a subsidiary of a larger media company, pointing to a new direction in the way forecasting agencies are organized and managed. Over the past fifty years, endeavors have been undertaken to build mathematical models, as shown by the work of Kentaro Kawasaki at Chori, while IBM and Google now aim to use big data to make fashion forecasts.77 Recent developments seem to auger a brave new world of fashion prediction, dominated by anonymous parent companies, big data, and digital dissemination. As historians, however, we offer a word of caution.

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To be sure, technology has been an important driver for change in the evolution of fashion forecasting. After all, the communications media of earlier trend forecasters—the printed fashion plate, the swatch book, and the color card—are themselves types of technologies. These technologies were invented as tools to convey visual and tactile information that were the result of human creativity and agency. Today we have the Web at our fingertips, but the reality is that designers, retailers, and marketers flock to international trade fairs in ever-greater numbers in order to interact with their suppliers, to look at the colors and the designs, and to touch the cloth. Even if celebrities like Kim Kardashian or Kate Middleton are setting the styles, somebody has to design the spin-off clothing that their fans will buy. It is difficult to plan the palette for a new outfit on a computer, as the flat digital screen does not capture the nuances of the texture, color, and weight. There are no better technologies than the human eye, the human touch, and the human mind. Although we cannot predict the future—we are just humble historians, after all—we believe that Internet platforms with millions of images and big data, useful though they may be, will never supersede the individual taste and intuition of the fashion forecaster. The human element matters, and it matters more than the latest digital devices. Our research has convinced us that trend forecasting, although often hidden from view, is one of the driving forces in the fashion business. The color forecaster and the trend predictor help make the wheels of fashion turn. Color prediction and trend forecasting are highly intuitive activities that have evolved to suit the times. The modern profession of fashion forecasting emerged out of the shadows of the nineteenth-century textile industry and matured in tandem with the triumph of ready-to-wear in the twentieth century. The Second Industrial Revolution played an important role in creating a space for the new fashion forecasters. The advent of synthetic dyes meant that someone had to rationalize, manage, and predict the palette. Thus was born the modern system of ribbon cards that depict standard colors and seasonal fashion colors. The rise of consumer society was another driver. The growing middle-class woman’s desire for Paris-inspired ensembles meant that somebody had to watch the couture houses and interpret those high styles for dress shops and mass retailers. Out of this came the fashion reporting service. The advent of transcontinental jet travel and the gradual elimination of tariff barriers opened regional and global markets and created an imperative for Western brands to know what Asian consumers wanted to wear. In response, the role of trade fairs as mediators and trend interpreters grew in importance. All told, the fashion forecasters figured out how to formulate solutions the problem of imperfect information about changing tastes and, along the way, they developed a niche business that is essential to the worlds of style, glamour, and mass consumption. We hope that this book will help others to understand the long history of color and trend prediction and to recognize the importance of these activities to the global fashion system.

Notes 1 Bradford College Textile Archive, “The Golden Age of Couture,” accessed June 2, 2017, http://textilearchive.bradfordcollege.ac.uk/node/51.

2 Pantone, “Rose Quartz & Serenity,” accessed June 2, 2017, https://www.pantone.com/ color-of-the-year-2016.

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3

Patrik Aspers and Frédéric Godart, “Sociology of Fashion: Order and Change,” Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 171–92.

4

Ibid., 174.

5

Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 541–58. The article was originally published in German and was translated into English for publication in this US journal.

6

Werner Sombart, “Wirthschaft und Mode. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der Modernen Bedarfsgestaltung Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens,” in EinzelDarstellungen für Gebildete aller Stände. Zwölftes Heft, ed. L. Loewenfeld and H. Kurella (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1902), 23.

7

Ibid., 1–23.

8

Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy (London: Routledge, 2000), 83.

9

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ed., Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 5–11.

10 Frédéric Godart, Unveiling Fashion: Business, Culture, and Identity in the Most Glamorous Industry (London: Palgrave, 2012). 11 David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 12 Philip Anthony Sykas, The Secret Life of Textiles: Six Pattern Book Archives in North West England (Bolton: Bolton Museums, Art Gallery and Aquarium, 2005). 13 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012). 14 Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017). 15 Jenny Lantz, The Trendmakers: Behind the Scenes of the Global Fashion Industry (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 16 Walter A. Friedman, Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 17 Ibid., 5. 18 Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (London: Random House, 2015). 19 Diane Tracey and Tom Cassidy, Colour Forecasting (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 20 Eundeok Kim, Ann Marie Fiore, and Hyejeong Kim, Fashion Trends: Analysis and Forecasting (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 21 Hanneke Kamphuis, Jeanne Tan and Hedwig van Onna, eds. Colour Hunting: How Colour Influences What We Buy, Make and Feel (Amsterdam: Frame, 2011); Michele Granger, Fashion: The Industry and Its Careers (New York: Fairchild Books, 2012); Sandra J. Keiser, Beyond Design: The Synergy of Apparel Product Development (New York: Fairchild, 2012); Kate Scully and Debra Johnston Cobb, Color Forecasting for Fashion (London: Laurence King, 2012); David Shaw and Dimitri Koumbis, Fashion Buying: From Trend Forecasting to Shop Floor (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 22 Bradley Quinn, Textile Futures: Fashion, Design and Technology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010); Bradley Quinn, Fashion Futures (London: Merrell, 2012). BEYOND THE CRYSTAL BALL

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23 Werner Sombart, Luxus und Kapitalismus (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1913). 24 Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 81. 25 Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans, eds., Fashion and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 1–7. 26 The World History Project, “Le Mercure Galant,” accessed December 29, 2016, http:// digitalworldhistoryproject.academic.wlu.edu/final-project-teel/le-mercure-galant/. 27 April Calahan and Karen Trivette Cannell, Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 2–3. 28 Maxine Berg, “Quality, Cotton and the Global Luxury Trade,” in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, 413 (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Chris Nierstrasz, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India Companies (1700–1800) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 139–49. 29 The papers of the VOC, including those from the board of directors, contain much valuable material on the early Dutch-Asian trade. This collection is housed in the National Archive at The Hague, the Netherlands. 30 Lesley Ellis Miller, “Material Marketing: How Lyonnais Silk Manufacturers Sold Silks, 1660–1789,” in Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century: Comparative Perspectives from Western Europe, ed. Jon Stobart and Bruno Blondé (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 85–98. 31 Thierry Maillet, “Histoire de la médiation entre textile et mode en France: des échantillonneurs aux bureaux de style (1825–1975)” (PhD diss., École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2013); Taylor Elyse Anderson, “Mailing Fashion: Parisian Sample Subscription Firms and Their Role in Twentieth-Century American Textile Manufacturing” (MA thesis, State University of New York, Fashion Institute of Technology, 2016); Wendy Moonan, “Old Fabrics and New Designs,” New York Times, July 25, 2008. 32 Didier Grumbach, History of International Fashion (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2014), 15–22. 33 Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 12–14. 34 Grumbach, History of International Fashion, 19–22. 35 Ibid., 22–31. 36 Ibid., 31. 37 For a detailed analysis of how the couture houses interacted with foreign buyers, see Alexandra Palmer, Couture and Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s (Vancouver, British Columbia: UBC Press, 2001). 38 Marlis Schweitzer, “American Fashion for American Woman: The Rise and Fall of Fashion Nationalism,” in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. Blaszczyk, 130–5. 39 Ibid., 148.

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40 Tracey and Cassidy, Colour Forecasting, 11; Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 71, 77–83, 86–92, 290, 292. 41 Types of Fashionable Cotton Fabrics for Spring 1931 (New York: Cotton-Textile Institute, December 1930); Types of Fashionable Cotton Fabrics for Summer & Spring 1934 (New York: Cotton-Textile Institute, n.d.); Types of Fashionable Cotton Fabrics for Spring & Summer 1935 (New York: Cotton-Textile Institute, n.d.), all in Forecasting Collection, Gladys Marcus Library, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. 42 Thierry Maillet, “Fred Carlin: The Unknown Founder of the First French Prediction Company 1902–1991,” paper presented at “Fashions,” the joint conference of the European Business History Association and the Business History Conference, Milan, June 11–13, 2009, 5–6. 43 “Carlin Group,” accessed January 1, 2017, http://carlin-creative.com/the-group/. 44 Maillet, “Fred Carlin,” 7–8. 45 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, American Consumer Society, 1865-2005: From Hearth to HDTV (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), Part III. 46 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 296–7. 47 Leigh Rudd, telephone conversation with author, January 18, 2017. 48 Grumbach, History of International Fashion, 189–91. 49 Carol Cooper Garey, “The Fabrics: Starting Point,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 5, 1969. 50 “Currents,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 2, 1969. For more on Mafia, see Gilles de Bure, “French Lessons,” Design 264 (December 1970): 48, accessed June 2, 2017, https://vads.ac.uk/diad/bres/pub/COID/264/048.jpg; and Sophie de Montvalon Chapdelaine, Le beau pour tous: Maïmé Arnodin et Denise Fayolle, l’aventure de deux femmes de style: mode, graphisme, design (Paris: Editions Les Arènes, 2009). 51 Grumbach, History of International Fashion, 207; Peclers Paris, “Our Vision,” accessed January 20, 2017, www.peclersparis.com/en/peclersparis/vision/dna. 52 “Executive Changes,” Women’s Wear Daily, February 7, 1972; “The Fabrics: Fabric Briefs,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 20, 1972; G. Y. Dryansky, “Indian RTW: Making Big Anonymously,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 2, 1975; Promostyl, advertisement, Women’s Wear Daily, March 3, 1976. 53 “Trend Forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort: ‘Fashion Gets Political when Clothes Become Uniforms’,” Deutsche Welle, accessed January 1, 2017, www.dw.com/en/ trend-forecaster-lidewij-edelkoort-fashion-gets-political-when-clothes-becomeuniforms/a-36430428. 54 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), chaps. 4–5; Woolmark Company, “History of the Woolmark Brand,” accessed January 5, 2017, www.woolmark.com/history/. 55 Ben Wubs and Thierry Maillet, “Building Competing Fashion Textile Fairs in Europe, 1970–2010: Première Vision (Paris) vs. Interstoff (Frankfurt),” Journal of Macromarketing 37, no. 1 (2015): 1–15. 56 Nigel French International, Return of Final Meeting in a Creditors’ Voluntary Winding Up, May 31, 1996; Nigel French International, Company Profile from Companies House, both accessed January 18, 2017, Kyckr.com.

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57 “Nigel French” at LinkedIn, accessed January 18, 2017, www.linkedin.com/in/nigelfrench-28603620/. 58 “Backing the Boss,” Financial Times, July 30, 1973. 59 “Nigel French” at zoominfo.com, updated June 6, 2016, accessed January 2, 2017, www.zoominfo.com/s/#!search/profile/person?personId=1279353815&targetid=profile. 60 “We Are Pop Up Positioned for Growth,” Shopping Centre, April 29, 2015, accessed January 2, 2017, http://shopping-centre.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/8110/We_Are_ Pop_Up_positioned_for_growth.html. 61 Ron Cohen, “May Co. Buying Looking More to Distant Shores,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 14, 1973; Earl Dash, “The Billion-Dollar Chains: An Analysis,” Women’s Wear Daily, November 20, 1974. 62 “May Co. Names French Head of New Foreign Buying Setup,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 16, 1973. 63 “Nigel French” at zoominfo.com. 64 John J. Pareti, “Department Stores Heading for a Fall, Exec Warns,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 2, 1980. 65 “Moss to Add Duties at May Co. Unit,” Women’s Wear Daily, August 8, 1977. 66 The US company was Nigel French Enterprises (USA) Ltd in 1979 and Nigel French International (USA) Ltd in 1991; “Nigel French International (USA) Ltd,” BusinessLookup, accessed January 18, 2017, www.businesslookup.org/NIGEL_ FRENCH_INTERNATIONAL_USA_LTD; Marilyn Hoffman, “From Mod to Moderate,” Christian Science Monitor, March 9, 1984. 67 Nigel French Enterprises, classified advertisement, Guardian, March 18, 1985. 68 Nigel French Enterprises, classified advertisement, Guardian, February 2, 1987. 69 “Fast Track,” New York (October 19, 1987): 42. 70 Harriet Quick, “Ever Changing Moods,” Design (September 1992): 14–15. 71 “The Future’s Here,” Guardian, March 29, 2001. 72 Lantz, The Trendmakers, 14–18. 73 Ibid., 34. 74 Lee Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 7,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 1, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQGx4xySmgY. 75 Ibid. 76 Bradley Quinn, interview by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, London, July 21, 2016, for The Enterprise of Culture Oral History Program, University of Leeds. 77 Joanna Jordan, “Watson Defining this Era’s Fashion Zeitgeist,” IBM, September 19, 2016, accessed January 22, 2017, www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2016/09/watsondefining-eras-fashion-zeitgeist/; Olivier Zimmer and Yarden Horwitz, “Fashion Trends for Spring 2015 as Told by Google Data,” Think with Google, March 2015, accessed January 22, 2017, www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/spring-2015-fashiontrends-google-data.html.

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PART ONE

WHEN PARIS LED AND AMERICA FOLLOWED

2 THE RISE OF COLOR FORECASTING IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN Regina Lee Blaszczyk

I

n 1930, the prominent British journalist and editor Holbrook Jackson addressed the Royal Society of Arts in London on an important commercial topic: “colour determination in the fashion trades” and the role of “Colour Forecasts.” Best known for his books on Bernard Shaw and William Morris, Jackson was editor of the Drapers’ Organiser, one of the major journals for the British dry-goods business. In this capacity, he had given considerable thought to color and commerce, acknowledging that this topic had artistic and economic significance. “Novelty businesses must live dangerously,” Jackson explained. “But the risks can be reduced and localized by co-operation.”1 The color of fashion and textiles was no exception. Happily, the British textile industry had just taken steps to reduce those risks by announcing the plan to establish a color management authority called the British Colour Council (BCC).2 For his audience of curious adult learners—fellow Londoners interested in architecture and design but by no means expert in fabrics, clothing, or retailing—Jackson described the color-management tools used by businesses in the fashion system. He started at square one: “The chief instrument of practical knowledge for colour users is the shade card.” Four types of shade cards were common among British businesses: (1) manufacturers’ stock cards that showed the number of colors available for immediate order, which were helpful to retailers selecting merchandise for their stores; (2) dye manufacturers’ cards that showed the new shades for different materials such as wool, linen, or leather that were used by textile mills and tanneries; (3) dyers’ and finishers’ cards showing seasonal ranges, geared to textile mills; and (4) color forecasts for manufacturers who were planning new shades and retailers who were selecting new merchandise.3 The color forecast was the most important tool for the textile mill, garment manufacturer, and retailer who needed cutting-edge information about colors that were likely to be trendy in the upcoming season. “The object of colour prediction,” Jackson explained, “is to provide the fashion trades with information sufficiently in advance of a season for them to prepare for demand.”4 Most of the color forecasts used by the British textile and fashion industries were imported from abroad and included shade cards issued by the Chambre syndicale des teinturiers (the dyers’ association in Lyon, France); the Fédération de la soie (a similar organization comprised of the silk manufacturers of Lyon and the ribbon makers of SaintÉtienne, France); the Société de teinture & d’apprêt of Basel, Switzerland (formerly A.

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FIGURE 2.1  Fédération de la soie, Nuances adoptees et recommandees par les Fabricants de Soieries et Rubans pour la Saison de Printemps 1919. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 108.

Clavel and F. Lindenmeyer); J. Claude Frères & cie in Paris; and the Textile Color Card Association of the United States (TCCA) in New York (Figure 2.1). A small selection of British color forecasts were also available, including those issued by textile dye houses and dyers’ associations in England and Scotland, and by the Drapers’ Organiser.5 Once their appetites for color information had been whetted by foreign forecasts, British businesses came to see that they needed predictions of greater precision on color trends within the markets of the British Empire. The plan to establish a council to create color forecasts for the British Empire was, in Jackson’s eyes, “significant, and an essential step in the right direction.”6 Although it focused on British needs, the BCC had been conceptualized with an eye to America, taking its major inspiration from the TCCA, which had been established in 1914. Both business-tobusiness organizations were created, to one degree or another, with the aim to standardize, coordinate, and predict color choices for manufacturers and retailers within their particular national contexts. This chapter examines the establishment, objectives, and operations of the TCCA and the BCC, exploring the inner workings of these organizations, essentially mirror-image twins, which together laid the foundation for color forecasting as it was practiced in North America and Europe for much of the twentieth century. Each organization took its main objective to be the rationalization of the inchoate sphere of color futures for a very specific context: the vast American multicultural market for the TCCA and the British Empire for the BCC. The goal was to reduce the uncertainty and risk associated with the misjudgment of color trends and to eliminate the waste that resulted from the inadvertent production of colors that did not sell. These early forecasting entities approached color management in complementary ways, with the Americans privileging systematic analysis and the British depending more on the personal touch of the design entrepreneur. Together, however, they advanced the business concept that color could be tamed, packaged, and publicized for the benefit of trade and commerce, an idea that embodied the Zeitgeist of the modernist moment in Western business culture.

When fabrics were fashion The four decades around the First and Second World Wars were a period, like the Victorian era, during which fabrics were synonymous with fashion.7 Although women’s ready-made clothing was gaining a toehold (particularly in the United States during the 1920s), the fashion industry still had one foot in the nineteenth century. Many ready-to-wear retailers also had extensive departments that sold unembellished millinery and even-larger departments that sold the fabrics and trimmings needed by dressmakers and home seamstresses to make basic clothing and the occasional silk dress for Sunday best. The shopping districts of the United States and the United Kingdom—called “Main Street” and “High Street,” respectively—had countless small shops that specialized in fabrics or in millinery (Figure 2.2). Whether they ran a large dry-goods emporium or a small hat store, shopkeepers who wanted to be on top of fashion needed to know what colors would be next in vogue. Shade cards from the French syndicates, the TCCA, and the BCC helped guide design and merchandising decisions in the textile and clothing industries, broadly defined to include businesses all along the supply

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FIGURE 2.2  The store of Adkins & Rice in Coventry, England, was typical of the countless millinery shops that stocked hats, gloves, scarves, handkerchiefs, and other fashion accessories in the early decades of the twentieth century. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk.

chain, from the makers of rayon fibers and shoe leathers to the manufacturers of handbags, suits, and gloves and the retailers who sold millinery, footwear, fabrics, and apparel. Color forecasting was a business practice born in response to innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution that made it possible for the European chemical industry to proliferate dyes, paints, and pigments in a seemingly limitless variety of hues. After Germany’s high-tech synthetic chemicals industry perfected methods for making reliable colorants and marketing them globally, the creative industries grappled with the challenge of how to manage the extensive, and somewhat unwieldy, palette. Some type of system

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was needed to keep track of what colors had been popular in recent shopping seasons, and more important, to anticipate what variations of those colors were likely to win consumers’ hearts in the upcoming shopping season. The retail dry-goods emporiums that ordered hundreds of yards of fabric needed to know what shade of pink was likely to be “in” and what shades were likely to be “out.” Profits depended on shopper satisfaction. The woman who wanted a cerise ribbon to embellish her new cerise Easter bonnet and match her new cerise gloves was likely to be exasperated by a dry-goods shop that only carried rose or purple. She walked out and marched over to a competing store where the merchandise had been better selected and was in sync with the latest vogue. Nineteenth-century French dye houses came to the rescue of textile mills, garment makers, and fabric retailers with beautiful shade cards that laid out fashionable color suggestions for the upcoming season. Historians have yet to unravel the mysteries of exactly who at the dye houses had responsibility for creating these cards, but suggestive evidence hints that the sales staff compiled them using records of recent best sellers, observations of people in the shops and at trendy resorts, and good old-fashioned salesman’s intuition. The Paris haute couture houses were eventually pulled into the loop, and style services like J. Claude Frères & cie issued special color cards with shades that had been approved by official trade bodies such as the Chambre syndicale des fleurs et plumes and the Chambre syndicale de la confection & de la couture in Paris (Figure 1.1). We know little about the internal workings of Paris-based firms like Claude and its major competitor, Bilbille & cie, which started producing business-to-business fashion tools in the nineteenth century, but their cards and reports were widely circulated in Europe and North America. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the system was well oiled, with the Paris style services exporting French color cards around the world. Every season, the design departments in Western textile mills sat on pins and needles, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new French shade cards. A typical textile designer’s color toolkit included dye marketing handbooks from Germany, popular books on color psychology, fabric cuttings from style services in Europe, folders filled with color chips from paint manufacturers, nomenclature guides written by experts in the natural sciences, and the French shade cards. The design departments had libraries of these materials, which they pored over when it was time to plan the next year’s product lines. Even with these resources, however, color choice was largely intuitive and subjective, and the task of selecting colors was a challenge to the designer’s patience.

America’s first color forecasters Starting in the First World War, American industry developed strategies for managing the chromatic chaos. The war put a damper on international commerce, cutting off America’s supplies of German dyestuffs and French color cards. American industries that produced style goods panicked at the prospect of having no reliable synthetic dyes and no fashionable color guidance from Europe. In the autumn of 1914, a group of concerned US businessmen in the millinery and textile industries took matters into their own hands and created the Textile Color Card Association of the United States as an umbrella organization for firms and trade groups that wanted to overcome trade uncertainties and practice self-determination in color. The visionary leader was Frederick Bode, a German immigrant and president

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39

of Gage Brothers and Company, a wholesale milliner with a factory in Chicago and sales offices in New York. The other founders included men from New Jersey textile firms such as Forstmann & Huffmann Company (a worsted mill in Passaic), Pelgram and Meyer (a silk mill in Paterson), and the National Ribbon Company, also in Paterson. The TCCA was a subscription service supported by membership fees from businesses. One of its main goals was to break away from the color dictates of French haute couture and create a distinctively American palette. This mission was embodied in the TCCA’s assertive slogan, “American Color for the American People.”8 The TCCA set up a process whereby a committee of men versed in the ins-and-outs of the textile and garment trades designed each new shade card. In the first instance, TCCA members from millinery companies, textile mills, and retail firms collaborated to create the Standard Color Card of America. “The Standard,” as it was called, was a foldout book showing the basic colors that were needed to make apparel and accessories that would sell at a popular price in the US market (Figure 2.3). The Standard was designed to have a lifespan of several years; it was used by clothing designers to order the matching fabrics, buttons, and thread needed to sew up garments, or by millinery buyers to specify the colors of ribbons, feathers, and other embelishments. Suppliers had a copy of the Standard on hand and were prepared to provide yellow ribbons that matched the yellow shade specified on the card. Having introduced the Standard, the TCCA turned to fashion, and set up a committee to design a seasonal color forecast (Figure 2.4). Like the Standard, the forecast was based on a “consensus of opinion” among TCCA members in the garment, millinery, and dry-goods trades. Created in 1915, the first forecast, the Spring Color Card for 1916, showed forty colors for the upcoming selling season, based on Paris color cards that had dodged the U-boats and safely made it across the Atlantic as well as the judicious analysis of past sales patterns in the United States.9 The color forecasts were used as planning aids by factories that made shoes, handbags, dresses, suits, and hosiery to lay out their edgier lines for the upcoming shopping season, and by buyers for upmarket big-city retailers like Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, and John Wanamaker to develop special promotions around fashion-forward colors. The impetus for the TCCA had been wartime exigencies, but upon the return of peace the organization was well positioned to grapple with the modernization of the garment and fashion industries, which had begun during the war and accelerated in the 1920s. American consumer society had rapidly expanded with the spurt of industrialization that followed the Civil War, but it experienced a great leap forward in the 1920s. Ever more factories and

FIGURE 2.3  Textile Color Card Association of the United States, Standard Color Card of America, 8th edition, revised 1928. This copy belonged to Margaret Hayden Rorke, managing director of the TCCA from 1919 to 1954. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 47; reproduced with the permission of the Color Association of the United States.

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COLOR FORECASTING IN THE US AND GB

41

FIGURE 2.4  Seasonal forecasts sometimes included suggestions on how to mix and match hues to create fashionable color harmonies. Textile Color Card Association of the United States, 1939 Fall Season Color Card of America. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 57; reproduced with the permission of the Color Association of the United States.

stores enticed middle-class consumers with stylish new products at affordable prices. The New York garment industry put chic ready-to-wear within reach of the average woman, Detroit automakers created “a car for every purse and purpose,” and the Delaware Valley chemical companies provided the basic raw materials, such as rayon textile fibers and quickdrying automotive lacquers. The Ford Motor Company had introduced mass production and created Model T, the first car for Mr. Everyman. But in the mid-1920s, Fordist mass production was eclipsed by flexible mass production as developed at the General Motors Corporation (GM). Most pertinent to this discussion, GM developed sophisticated methods for gathering sales information from its local dealers and used this data to forecast which car models would be in high demand in the future. Scientific management was one of the great business trends of the day, and efficiency experts such as the followers of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Herbert Hoover as the US Secretary of Commerce, and business consultant Roger W. Babson were called upon to help companies and industries streamline production and better digest information. As the world’s first economic forecaster, Babson not only helped Americans to think of “the economy” as a distinctive entity, but also popularized the idea that economic change and business cycles could be “predicted.” He was one of the few people to anticipate and forecast the Stock Market Crash of 1929.10 The TCCA, with its rational business outlook, thus found itself in good company during the 1920s. The efficiency craze spilled over to the creative sector, where a new generation of color experts emerged to codify and rationalize the palette and to advance the concept of forecasting colors for the American mass market. In Detroit, H. Ledyard Towle, an artistturned-adman-turned-colorist, helped GM to create attractive color schemes for the stylish cars that gave Ford a run for its money. Working alongside the flamboyant auto designer Harley J. Earl as the colorist in GM’s Art and Colour Section, Towle had access to some of the most advanced statistical analysis in American industry, including detailed monthly reports that documented car sales by region, price, model, and color. He used this forensic data on past sales—along with a good deal of intuition—to forecast consumers’ likely color preferences for next year’s models. His forecasts helped the GM Art and Colour Section create attractive color schemes for car bodies and interiors, and guided GM auto dealers as they planned showroom displays and dealt with the customers, including the growing number of women who often made the final decision on the look of the family car based on its appearance.11 In the textile industry, the mills that produced the most expensive fabrics also took up the gauntlet for style forecasting. Twice a year starting around 1923, Botany Worsted Mills, a leading American manufacturer of woolens and worsteds, published lavishly illustrated trend booklets that suggested the colors, fabrics, and silhouettes for ladies’ and children’s coats, dresses, and suits for the upcoming spring/summer and fall/winter seasons. For advice on trend directions, Hélène Volka at the Botany Fashion Service Department in New York depended on Marcelline D’Alroy, a “Fashion Analyst,” and on experts in the footwear, fur, and millinery trades.12 The Botany trend reports, however, seemed staid when compared to the path-breaking fashion analyses and fabric forecasts by the silk industry. The Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company led the way. With factories in Manchester, Connecticut, and a sales office in midtown Manhattan, Cheney Brothers was the largest and most influential silk mill in the United States, producing luxury fabrics that were exported and used by the haute couture houses in Paris. By the 1920s, however, the silk industry was buckling under severe competition from rayon, and Cheney put together an aggressive campaign to promote and advertise silk as the “must have” fabric of the decade.

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This effort was spearheaded by Henri A. Creange, a French immigrant designer who worked as the mill’s art director. Creange had thought deeply about the product lifecycle and the fashion system, envisioning a “Franco-American entente” that would unite the French taste for luxury with the American mastery of mass production. Starting in 1926, Creange collaborated with public relations guru Edward L. Bernays to publicize a series of Cheney color forecasts for the high end of the fabrics market, using stylish shade cards that were embellished with artistic graphics (Figure 2.5). Although the great Franco-American entente did not materialize, the promotional push resulted in some notable publicity.

FIGURE 2.5  Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company, Color Forecast Spring 1928 Cheney Silks. Courtesy Library of Congress; Edward L. Bernays Collection.

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Upscale stores like B. Altman on Fifth Avenue looked to Creange’s color predictions and devoted entire display windows to Cheney Silks.13 The TCCA crafted a special role for itself among the new color forecasters of the 1920s. The trade association homed in on the large, important, and growing mass market, and benefited from the expansive vision of its new managing director, Margaret Hayden Rorke (1883–1969). “Mrs. Rorke,” as she was widely known, became the world’s most influential color forecaster of the interwar years. It was under her auspices that the TCCA truly perfected color forecasting for the textile and fashion industries, and exported its methods to Europe. Among other things, Rorke encouraged the TCCA to take inspiration from Paris, and to adapt French colors to American needs. But her greatest accomplishment was to give polish to the TCCA’s standard color card and its seasonal shade cards, and to better link these practical color management tools to the rapidly changing fashion scene. Under her direction, the TCCA color toolkit was transformed into a color management system built around a triumvirate of resources—color standards, seasonal color forecasts, and occasional trend reports—that were specially suited to the growing demand for everyday fashion and the tastes of America’s multicultural mass market. Rorke started her long professional career as managing director of the TCCA in October 1919, when Frederick Bode and other men at the helm decided they could benefit from the “woman’s viewpoint.”14 The years right after the First World War were an era of unprecedented opportunity for the middle-class woman who wanted to pursue a career. As American consumer society blossomed, all types of businesses—advertising agencies, department stores, electrical utilities, magazine publishers, and consumer-product manufacturers—acknowledged that female journalists, copywriters, home economists, retail buyers, merchandise managers, and executives could help them get in touch with Mrs. Consumer. A dedicated follower of fashion who was always impeccably dressed, Rorke was also a stalwart suffragist who had published a pamphlet on women’s rights and a talented performer who played the piano and acted on stage and in film at a time when the movie industry was still located in New York. Rorke was the embodiment of the forwardlooking “New Woman” of the 1920s whose interests encompassed politics, family, career, and fashion.15 From 1919 to her retirement in 1954, Rorke evolved the TCCA’s distinctive approach to color management.16 Building on the work of the men who established the trade association, Rorke introduced methods for (1) gathering style information from Paris, (2) reinterpreting the Paris data within the context of American consumer society, and (3) packaging and disseminating Paris-inspired information to TCCA members and the American fashion business at large. In the mid-1920s, Rorke convinced the board of directors that the wartime dream to be independent from Paris fashion would be detrimental, given the rise of innovative French couturiers such as Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel who were breaking new ground with practical styles for the serious New Woman and the more hedonistic flapper. Under Rorke’s auspices, the TCCA routinely turned to London and Paris for inspiration. Despite its newfound interest in the Old World, the TCCA never abandoned its original mission to create hues to be used in mass production, and always took care to adapt the latest European color trends to suit the needs of American producers and consumers. Like all businesses, the TCCA found its way by trial and error, seeing what did or did not work and adjusting its expectations and modus operandi to achieve results. Rorke

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developed a method for forecasting colors, which, like those of Towle and Creange, was based on the judicious analysis of past trends and informed speculation about future trends. These efforts are documented in the TCCA’s extensive business archive, a unique resource that provides historians with the unprecedented opportunity to examine the processes of information gathering, analysis, and dissemination that undergird all forecasting activities. The archive not only holds copies of the TCCA’s published forecasts, but it also contains large runs of routine office files, including the memoranda, transatlantic cables, letters, swatches, and sketches that Rorke and her staff used to produce their forecasts. Creative businesses often discard office files for lack of storage, but the TCCA records were preserved by a postSecond World War initiative to document the history of color. The TCCA materials, now housed at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware (one of the world’s best business history libraries), appear to have no parallels in the archives of forecasting.17 This large collection of business records reveals the uncertainties of the fashion system that Rorke faced after becoming the TCCA’s managing director. In the early 1920s, European color information reached her willy-nilly, as shown by the circuitous route of reports on the London craze for a new hue called Princess Mary Blue. On February 28, 1922, HRH Princess Mary, daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, married Henry Charles George, Viscount Lascelles, at Westminster Abbey. Reville Ltd, a court dressmaker in Hanover Square in the heart of London’s upscale shopping district, made her trousseau. In the downward trickle of fashion, London journalists chattered about her new wardrobe, which included a traveling dress in a hue called Larkspur or Powder Blue, which the press renamed Princess Mary Blue. The more exclusive stores on Oxford Street, including Selfridges, promoted the new blue along with mauve and gray, the two other signature colors for the wedding. Rorke only learned about these trends third-hand, from American contacts with personal connections in London. Marjorie Holligan, the silk editor at Women’s Wear, the New York-based daily paper for the apparel industry that was later called Women’s Wear Daily, sent Rorke some fabric swatches from Selfridges obtained by a reporter in the London newsroom.18 Another source of information on Princess Mary Blue came from the American silk manufacturer Sidney Blumenthal & Company. One of Rorke’s contacts at Blumenthal forwarded her a letter from an insider at Reville. “All the shades I am sending you have been used for this wedding,” the informant stated in his letter to Blumenthal, “and the Swells seem to be taking a fancy to the Mauves. Kennings, for that is the buyer’s name, told me that he personally dislikes Mauves as they never do go well except for special occasions.”19 The fashion spy at Reville reported on which colors had met favor with some of the London manufacturers. “The millinery people here, in the wholesale, are favoring the Tans for the fall.”20 The fabric cuttings included with the letter were important for their provenance. “I do not know if you could make advertising capital out of it, but that piece of Larkspur I am sending you, has been cut from the actual pieces that the going away dress was made of.”21 This type of information was problematic for two reasons: it was impressionistic and came from a source that was not dedicated to the TCCA’s interests. The problem of imperfect information was even more acute with Paris, which generated an endless stream of fabrics, dress models, and accessories. No one knew which trends would cross the Atlantic to capture the imagination of American garment manufacturers. Paul Hyde Bonner, an executive at the Stehli Silk Corporation, got to the crux of the matter: “There

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are probably more than fifty thousand different models shown at each seasonal opening in Paris, of which only about two hundred are ever brought to this country or adapted for use here. Of this two hundred, probably only twenty ever become generally accepted.”22 It would be folly for the manufacturer to wait and design his lines after the high-end stores had selected their stock and the fashion magazines had reported on their favorites. “To wait and see which twenty of the fifty thousand will ‘take’ would mean missing a season, as the time elapsing between a Paris opening and a general American acceptance is about three months, or about the time it would take the silk manufacturer to make the material demanded by these twenty dresses.”23 One of Rorke’s greatest challenges was how to secure fast and accurate color and trend information from the European fashion capitals. She approached the TCCA’s board of directors, and soon had funds to hire someone to advise her “weekly via a Paris letter of general tendency in style and color; the sending of swatches; the cabling of information whenever needed, etc.”24

The Paris color scouts In the summer of 1925, Margaret Hayden Rorke went to Paris to see the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, to attend the couture shows, otherwise size up the fashion scene, and meet with her new color scout, A. Cardinet & cie. This Paris-based style service had an office at 13, rue d’Hauteville in the 10th arrondissement, an area thick with commissionaires, and was operated by Adeline Cardinet, a bilingual Californian of French parentage with experience in American retailing and overseas retail buying. Cardinet was assisted by her niece Estelle Tennis, a California art school graduate who was also fluent in French. In 1928, Tennis returned to the United States to serve as Rorke’s assistant at the TCCA office in New York, and in 1954 would succeed her as the managing director. During the 1930s, Rorke and Tennis had two color scouts in Paris. One was Bettina Bedwell, a American journalist for the Chicago Daily Tribune and wife of the Cubist-Expressionist painter Abraham Rattner, and the other was Adolphe Schloss Fils & cie, an established commission agent at 4, rue Martel in the 10th arrondissement. These two scouts worked for the TCCA until the Second World War. When the war broke out in 1939, Bedwell and her husband fled to the United States; she died there shortly after the war. The Schloss firm resumed its role as a TCCA color scout in the postwar era.25 What did a color scout do in Paris? Surviving letters from Bedwell to Rorke shed light on the routine. As a fashion journalist for a major international newspaper, Bedwell had press access to the couture openings and an extensive web of contacts among the garment manufacturers, milliners, glove makers, wholesalers, shops, and boutiques. From her home in the bohemian enclave of Montmartre, Bedwell went around Paris, studied the fashions, and returned to her office in the 1st arrondissement at 36, rue de Montpensier, adjacent to the Palais-Royal, to type the reports for Rorke. Over the course of the 1930s, she chronicled color trends at many of the leading couture houses—Chanel, Lucian Lelong, Edward H. Molyneux, Jean Patou, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Madeleine Vionnet—and documented the shades worn by chic women at ultra-chic venues. She sized up the customers at Les Ambassadeurs, a posh restaurant at the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, and

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studied the spring hats at the Longchamp horse races in the Bois de Boulogne. She also frequented the upscale Paris boutiques, picking the brains of the proprietors for their ideas on the hot new hues.26 Bedwell’s public persona was that of an American fashion journalist in Paris, and most likely no one among her professional contacts knew she was earning extra money by scouting out color trends.

Propaganda! How Parisian colors were adapted and promoted in New York The British journalist-editor Holbrook Jackson hit the nail on the head when he explained that color forecasting was largely a matter of “propaganda.” The great self-serving Paris fashion machine had long before mastered the art of promotion, establishing an aura of exclusivity around couture that was, ironically, popularly promoted as being de rigueur. For generations, the Paris couturiers and their suppliers in the French textile industry had determined the color trends, which were disseminated down market by the official shade card sold by J. Claude Frères & cie and similar intermediaries. “The battle of fashion colours is thus very largely a matter of propaganda,” Jackson explained, “and the best propagandist wins.”27 Jackson rightfully acknowledged the hegemony of the official shade cards approved by French trade bodies like the Chambre syndicale de la confection & de la couture, but this chapter is less concerned with the fashion imperialism of haute couture than with the TCCA’s groundbreaking color management efforts for the American mass market. Taking advantage of the TCCA’s location in the New York garment district, Rorke built an impressive propaganda machine of her own. She shared the latest Paris color news, adapted to suit the American context, with TCCA subscribers through several channels. Face-to-face interactions were vital. The TCCA office on Madison Avenue was open during business hours, functioning as an informal style laboratory. Subscribers could stop by and browse through the collection of books, shade cards, and swatches, or consult with Rorke and Tennis on the creation of new textile patterns inspired by Parisian trends. Although little documentation survives from these meetings, important evidence allows us to study other aspects of the innovation process. The TCCA archive at Hagley has a rich vein of documents that were used by Rorke and her staff to create the circulars, notices, and shade cards that were the organization’s major outputs during her tenure as managing director. Color tools like the seasonal shade cards did not erupt from Rorke’s creative imagination, but were the result of careful research in Paris, London, and New York. The process of obtaining and interpreting color information from Paris is worth examining at length for what it reveals about the rationality that undergirded American color management practices. The creation of color news for TCCA subscribers began with the analysis of the latest scout reports from Paris. Several times per week, a uniformed delivery boy dropped off the fresh cablegrams from Europe. Everyday in this era, telegrams and cablegrams, which are unfamiliar to our eyes, were exchanged as a matter of routine, providing quick business-tobusiness communications. A cablegram from Paris contained the latest trend information in shorthand codes that had to be deciphered. As soon as the cables arrived, Rorke and

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her staff sat down in the library, pulled out their swatch books and color cards, and began decoding cryptic descriptions such as “LELONG MIDSEASON ALL BLACK BLACK AND WHITE ALL WHITE STRONG DAY AND EVENING BLUES EXCELLENT MOUCHETTE CHASSEUR 23125 PERSAN 23111 BARBEU 23098 EXTRA DRY 23278 GERANIUM 23051 FOR DAY STOP.”28 A library of record cards like the one in Figure 2.6 were used by the TCCA staff to identify phrases in the cable such as “GERANIUM 23051.” The name and number referred to a particular color that was illustrated with a swatch in the collection of record cards. Once the text was decrypted, Rorke selected the most pertinent news for immediate dissemination to TCCA subscribers. Introduced by Rorke in 1926, the TCCA’s Broadcast was an occasional circular that was the early-twentieth-century equivalent of a text, a tweet, or an email (Figure 2.7). This short fact sheet was typed, reproduced using an early duplicating machine, and dispatched by post to three major constituents: (1) TCCA subscribers; (2) a range of newspapers from Women’s Wear Daily to smaller dailies around the country; and (3) trade journals such as the American Silk Journal. Utilitarian in appearance, the Broadcast provided TCCA members with up-to-the-minute color reports before the boats arrived with shipments of the new French shade cards or before masscirculation fashion magazines such as Delineator, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Women’s Home Companion published news of the shades. Newspapers like the New York Times reported on Paris fashion, but they emphasized the silhouette rather than the colors. The Broadcast was a no-frills expedient, a direct lifeline from the forecaster to her followers, providing them with rapid, if not Internet-instantaneous, information on emerging color trends.29

FIGURE 2.6  The TCCA office kept track of thousands of colors using a simple system of record cards that identified each particular hue using a swatch, a color name, and a cable number. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 2188, box 9; reproduced with the permission of the Color Association of the United States.

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FIGURE 2.7  This edition of the Broadcast informed TCCA subscribers of the colors that Eleanor Roosevelt would be wearing at the third inauguration of her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on January 20, 1941. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library, accession 1983, box 7; reproduced with the permission of the Color Association of the United States.

Following on from the cablegrams, the Paris scouts sent the TCCA lengthy typewritten letters that described some of the new color trends in detail. The letters were transported by steam ships and often took nine or ten days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. When a letter finally reached her, Rorke and her staff pored over it, matching the descriptions of

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the colors to those in the TCCA Standard, the TCCA forecasts, other shade cards, and the swatch collection. During one of her summer trips to Paris, Rorke had taken Tennis aside and given her tips on the art of color reporting. Written between 1926 and 1928, the younger woman’s letters provided the New York office with vivid details that were necessarily omitted from the cablegrams: the exact shape of the hat; the name, location, and reputation of the milliner; the social position of the wearer; and the bustling atmosphere of Longchamp racecourse. The envelopes often bulged with fabric swatches obtained from retail shops, wholesale warehouses, garment manufacturers, or surreptitiously, a vendeuse (saleswoman), at one of the couture houses. Sometimes the envelope contained a watercolor drawing of a couture outfit that Tennis had painted from memory, since it was forbidden to photograph or sketch models at the couture house. The narrative, the swatches, the sketches, and the occasional photographs of women in public places enhanced Rorke’s understanding of the French fashion scene, helping her to compare the latest Paris styles with those in New York. Her job was to interpret Paris color trends for TCCA members, linking European developments to news in Women’s Wear Daily, art exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and window displays at prestigious Fifth Avenue fashion stores such as B. Altman or Lord & Taylor. The Paris letters provided Rorke with information for quick dispatch in the Broadcast and for eventual use in her seasonal forecasts.30 The seasonal shade card, or forecast, was one of the most important instruments for information transmission within the TCCA system. The creation of a seasonal color forecast was a collective endeavor that involved Rorke as the orchestrator and a select group of TCCA members as the expert contributors. By the mid-1920s, members pressed the TCCA to create forecasts expressly geared to different sectors, such as leather or silk. Building on the design-by-committee method established by the founders, Rorke held special meetings wherein the leather specialists or the silk experts decided the colors for their respective seasonal forecasts.31 As shown in Figure 2.4, the TCCA seasonal shade cards sometimes offered suggestions for creating harmonious color combination. The TCCA system had plenty of room to accommodate spontaneity, particularly for color news that originated at the TCCA’s doorstep in New York. Besides communicating Paris news, the Broadcast was used to describe special exhibitions that might inspire new color trends. In addition, Rorke developed thematic color cards that were issued on the occasion of special events, such as the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago in 1933 and the New York World’s Fair in 1939.32 The TCCA color forecasting system was carefully developed to interpret European fashion trends and American cultural developments for manufacturers that made goods for sale in the US market. The Broadcast never copied French colors verbatim, but matched the scouts’ descriptions of French hues to recent TCCA forecasts. At first glance, the difference seems minor, but the sequence was significant, showing that Rorke privileged American tastes over French trends. Describing the Paris couture openings of February 1926, the Broadcast noted that “every house seems to be adopting blues of a lighter shade, such as Sistine (Spring 1925) and Empire Blue (Spring 1924) . . . Versailles blue (Spring 1926) is shown a little for sports, but is much stronger for evening.”33 The references to “Spring 1925,” “Spring 1924,” and “Spring 1926” refer to the seasonal forecasts issued by the TCCA. Thus, colors from Paris only mattered when they fit into the TCCA’s established palette, which Rorke had created by synthesizing earlier European trends, members’ input, and the ebb and flow of American taste.

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Imitation is the highest form of flattery The BCC was formed as a trade association to rationalize color selection for the British style industries, taking inspiration from the TCCA. Every summer, Margaret Hayden Rorke steamed across the Atlantic Ocean to attend the couture shows, catch up with her scouts in Paris, and visit the European mills that exported products to the United States and subscribed to her service to keep up with American color preferences. On one of these trips around 1926, she stopped in Manchester—the cotton textile center of the UK—to advise British industrialists on color management practices for textiles and fashion. By this time, “Mrs. Rorke” was well-known among the TCCA’s members throughout Europe, who held the Standard Color Card of America in high esteem and eagerly awaited delivery of the seasonal shade cards and Broadcasts. “If imitation is the highest form of flattery,” Rorke told the TCCA’s board of directors in April 1928, “then we should be proud of the fact that our system of standardization and coordination of color between industries is now being emulated by different industries in several foreign countries.”34 Britain took the lead. The British textile and clothing industry was fragmented and geographically dispersed. The production of cotton, rayon, and wool fabrics was clustered in the industrial North in the cities and valleys of Lancashire and West Yorkshire, while the manufacture of clothing was sited mainly in the East End of London, in Leeds, and, to a lesser extent, in commercial centers such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow. The retailers and the makersup (garment manufacturers) were beholden to the powerful wholesale merchants who distributed fabrics and fashions at home and exported them abroad from warehouses in the City of London, Leeds, Bradford, and Manchester; these warehouses doubled as ad hoc style laboratories.35 London had begun to demonstrate its ambition to be a fashion center, and trade journals such as Drapers’ Organiser were published there. Acknowledging the need for a British color forecast, the journal circulated one of its own to subscribers. First issued in June 1925, the Drapers’ Organiser color chart was a “forecast of the eight leading shades which will be fashionable during the Autumn and Winter of 1925.”36 As the journal’s editor Holbrook Jackson explained, the colors were “selected after careful consultation with leading fashion and colour experts” without any “attempt at standardisation,” which was “alien to British taste, and however much it may apply to other lands it can only have a limited appeal in this country.”37 Suppliers within the British fashion system—dyers, textile manufacturers, makers-up, and merchants—had input into the forecast, and arrangements were made to integrate the Drapers’ Organiser colors into autumn merchandise. Marshall & Aston, Ltd, a maker-up in Manchester, for example, stocked fabrics and sewed garments “in an extensive range of colourings, including the new shades predicted by ‘The Drapers’ Organiser’”38 (Figure 2.8). The Drapers’ Organiser shade card appears to have been Britain’s first attempt at coordinated color forecasting. According to Jackson, its purpose was to “limit as far as possible the haphazard buying of colours, by telling buyers in advance what the chief colours of the coming season will be.”39 If widely adopted, the forecast promised to relieve the “textile trade of one of the constant and expensive burdens of attempting to guess what will be fashionable from a bewildering variety of shades. The colour forecast, therefore,

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FIGURE 2.8  Wholesale clothiers used shade cards like the one issued by the Drapers’ Organiser to help them design apparel that would appeal to the style-conscious consumer. Marshall & Aston, Ltd, advertisement in Drapers’ Organiser (June 1925): 32. © The British Library Board, Lou.Lon. 230 (1925).

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may be looked upon as a trade instrument which will help all concerned to place orders for coloured goods with certainty, and therefore with economy.”40 Within a few years, the British textile industry was discussing the need for a broader color-coordination effort, one that encompassed the entire textile industry, from fabric dyers through fabric stores. In June 1928, the Drapers’ Organiser reported that the Bradford Dyers’ Association proposed to form a committee “to consider and prepare ranges of shades for general use.” The committee was to include textile manufacturers and merchants from Bradford and Manchester, clothing factories and clothing wholesalers, and retailers that sold fabrics and fashion.41 A year later, in July 1929, the Yorkshire Post reported that Rorke, who was in Paris and London for her annual tour, had again “been in communication with some of those interested in the project to form a British Colour Council, whose staff would give subscribers early information of world colour tendencies.”42 British industry soon had its own version of the TCCA. In October 1929, representatives from textile mills, tanneries, shoemakers, dye houses, retailers, and trade associations convened in London to form an organization that would “act as a prophet for all the trades allied to textiles . . . and will indicate each season what colours, and what shades of each colour, are to be fashionable.”43 One British newspaper praised the effort to focus on the “determination, co-ordination, and propagation of colour tendencies for the fashion and allied trades” which would help Britain “fall into line with other countries where there is co-operation between the dyeing, weaving, and fashion distributing trades generally.”44 In August 1930, the British Colour Council Ltd was incorporated to provide a subscription color service for the textile and fashion industries. The TCCA had been established to buck Paris and create “American Color for the American People,” and the BCC had similar goals. Its main ambition was “to place colour determination for the British Empire in British hands, and thus provide members . . . with early and authoritative information on colour tendencies.” Color information would be gathered “in the fashion centres of the world” and interpreted on behalf of British industry as shade cards and trend reports. BCC subscribers could use this information to plan their new palettes. Like the TCCA, the BCC sought to reduce the risks associated with color selection on the part of textile mills, garment factories, haberdasheries, and apparel retailers.45 As Rorke told the TCCA’s board of directors, “our advice and experience was sought for its guidance in patterning this . . . organization after our own.” She hoped that the BCC, which paid “fine tribute . . . to our Association’s foresight and organizing powers,” would lead to “helpful color cooperation . . . for the benefit of Anglo-American industry.”46 Although it was based in London, the BCC had strong ties to mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and thus bridged the divide between the cosmopolitan south and the industrial north. The founding members included Lord Ebury, who was associated with the Army and Navy Co-Operative Society, a retailer established in 1871 to supply everyday goods to military families. Other founders included men from the West Yorkshire woolen and worsted industries and the Manchester cotton industry. A London contingent included representatives from the Drapery Trust, the rayon giant Courtaulds, and Edward H. Symonds, managing director of the fashion house Reville, which made couture for Queen Mary and other royals. The BCC membership list was rounded out by factories that produced leather and leather goods, hosiery, silk fabrics, and thread and by retailers from around the UK.47

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In 1931, the BCC appointed Robert F. Wilson (1890–1957) as its first general manager, secretary, and, from 1934, “art director.”48 Trained at the Nottingham School of Art, Wilson had worked as a color instructor there until 1915, served in the military during the First World War, and then resumed teaching at his alma mater with a special focus on color in industry.49 At the BCC, Wilson worked at the organization’s office in Piccadilly, in the heart of London’s major commercial district for fashion. The BCC offices were in close proximity to dozens of apparel showrooms all around the West End, the wholesale woolen merchants of Golden Square, the bespoke tailors of Savile Row, and the upscale retailers of Regent and Oxford Streets. In the thick of London fashion, Wilson set about doing business much like Rorke did in her Madison Avenue office with the New York garment manufacturers a few blocks away. He established advisory committees to represent different interest groups, such as the silk trade, the fur trade, and the mercers, and met with them every week to discuss fashion trends and plan color predictions.50 He also frequently traveled north to the Manchester cotton mills and the Macclesfield silk mills to confer with manufacturers at their factories and showrooms.51 Under Wilson’s direction in May 1931, the BCC asserted British independence from the makers of French color cards by issuing its first forecast, a shade card for the upcoming autumn (Figure 2.9).52 The shade card had sixty autumnal shades with mellifluous names such as Chianti, Crock o’ Gold, and Indian Orange. With this “landmark” development in the fashion industry, British manufacturers were no longer beholden to the French for color predictions. “The British Colour Council forecast,” Lord Ebury stated, “has been designed to provide reliable information about fashion colours sufficiently in advance of the season to enable buyers to place their orders in good time with the minimum of risk.”53 One radio broadcast explained: “Now there has come into being in Great Britain a British

FIGURE 2.9  The British Colour Council emulated the Textile Color Card Association in the layout of its seasonal color forecasts. British Colour Council, 1933 Autumn Season Woollen Card. Courtesy Abraham Moon and Sons, Ltd.

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Colour Council, which has just issued its first colour card as a guide to the fashionable shades for next autumn, so that we shall no longer be dependent on cards issued by the French interests.”54 Before long, the BCC started to describe the French and the Americans as a threat to the British fashion industries. The TCCA, which had been much admired in Britain, was castigated as a rival. “It has been recognized for some time,” Wilson explained in June 1931, “by all interests connected with women’s fashions, garments and shoes in this country that cooperative effort will be needed to combat France and America.”55 Now, the BCC not only had to wage war against the “idea that any novelty must come from Paris,” but it also “had to fight . . . the American textile colour card organization, founded 16 years ago,” which some British manufacturers still held in high esteem.56 Nothing about color forecasting was straightforward, nor did color information move in one direction. As we saw, the TCCA’s colors were copied by Parisian manufacturers, reversing the trickle-down relationship between France as “the creator” and other countries as “the follower.” Similarly, the Paris fashion industry began to emulate the shades on the British forecasts.57 There were other ways in which the BCC paralleled its American cousin, the TCCA, even as it flip-flopped between emulation and envy. Foremost, Wilson introduced a handbook of basic colors that was comparable to the Standard Color Card of America. It took him eighteen months to create the first edition. When he solicited color samples, members sent him eighty different sky blues, sixty whites, and forty blacks. Like Rorke, Wilson sifted through the mountain of swatches and chose the best example of each basic hue. The British Colour Council Dictionary of Colour Standards—known simply as the “British standard colour card”—was published in 1934 and issued as a second edition in 1951.58 In concept and layout, the card was virtually identical to its American equivalent. Like Rorke at the TCCA, Wilson also worked with external partners on shade cards for special applications. In this vein, he collaborated with the London couturier Victor Stiebel and other members of the Fashion Group of Great Britain to create a cobranded color card for ladies’ fashions. There was a similar effort with the Rayon and Silk Association to create shade cards for the large artificial fiber manufacturers, British Celanese and Courtaulds.59 By the late 1930s, the BCC, like its American counterpart, was routinely producing forecasts for the British subscribers. This included the creation of special forecasts for different segments of the British fashion industries, such as the woolen mills and the menswear manufacturers.60 What was the influence of American color management practices on the actual colors in the British palette? Edward H. Symonds, one of the founders of the BCC, took this bull by horns when he compared American and British tastes. Fashion authorities around the world recognized that American penchant for bright colors stood in contrast to the British preference for subtle tones. What accounted for these differences? Symonds believed that Britain’s good taste in color could be attributed to the work of the BCC. “We pay a great deal of attention to color blending,” he told Women’s Wear Daily in 1936. “We solved this problem through cooperation of all fabric, dress and accessory manufacturers in the British Colour Council. Through this organization we have been able to maintain a color alliance . . . It saves millions in mark-downs annually to manufacturers and retailers.”61 This chapter has shown how American color practices were transferred to British industry and adopted to the local business context. In the Symonds interview from Women’s Wear

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Daily, we see a high-profile British fashion executive telling America’s major fashion paper that color management was a distinctively British phenomenon. Was Symonds’s amnesia real, or was his forgetfulness fabricated to make the BCC look good? Could Symonds really have forgotten that British industrialists had welcomed Margaret Hayden Rorke with open arms and praised the TCCA as the harbinger of rational color practice? One thing is certain. Rorke read all of the fashion papers, and we can only imagine her growing hot under her stylish collar after reading Symonds’s comments.

The significance and influence of the pioneer color forecasters From the 1910s to the 1930s, the TCCA pioneered the practice of color forecasting as a business-to-business activity for the American style industries. In the 1920s, other American enterprises ventured into color forecasting, offering alternative models. Like the TCCA’s managing director Margaret Hayden Rorke, they wrestled with the double-edged sword of French style leadership. America’s foremost silk maker, the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company, hired Henri A. Creange to add new patterns and colors to its fabric portfolio. The Frenchman’s ideas of color forecasting differed dramatically from those of Rorke. Creange was bedazzled by luxury and fantasized about merging the French penchant for craft and quality with American mass production. In contrast, Rorke wanted to reduce waste in manufacturing and distribution with the ultimate goal of cutting costs, lowering prices, and expanding American consumer society. She did this while building transatlantic connections to France and inspiring an emulator in Great Britain, the BCC, directed by Robert F. Wilson. Creange’s prescient vision appeals to us as inhabitants of a global world, but his grand vision for a Franco-American entente never materialized. It was too far-reaching, too cross-cultural, and too geographically impractical for the 1920s. The hardships of the 1930s dampened Creange’s enthusiasm, while the triumph of man-made fibers eroded the demand for fine silks. In contrast, Rorke’s nuts-and-bolts approach to transatlantic color forecasting survived the Great Depression and prospered into the postwar era. Creange, like Wilson at the BCC, was a tastemaker who saw color forecasting as a tool for reshaping consumer demand. Rorke had a more realistic vision. She never aimed to recast American color choices in a foreign mode; instead, she studied French colors and adapted them for American use, all the while developing color forecasts that helped to reduce the likelihood of color misjudgments and mishaps in American fashion. Along the way, she helped to advance the concept of “the ensemble,” whereby the style-conscious dresser could perfectly coordinate the color of her shoes, belt, gloves, and hat (Figure 2.10). French colors were useful to Rorke only as they fitted into the TCCA’s broader needs. The direct connection to Paris via a series of resident fashion scouts enhanced her cultural capital and augmented her stature as an international color authority. The principal objective of the TCCA and its emulator, the BCC, was to coordinate and predict color trends in ways that reduced uncertainty and minimized risk in the highly

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FIGURE 2.10  Margaret Hayden Rorke helped to pioneer the concept of ensemble dressing by creating design tools that allowed the American fashion industry to coordinate colors among different materials, such as leather and fabric. Here we see an outfit with a hat, gloves, and shoes, all made from different materials but in perfectlymatched colors. Airstep Shoes, advertisement from Life magazine, 1940. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk.

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fragmented garment and textile industries in the United States and Great Britain. In pursuing this aim at the TCCA, Rorke and her assistant, Estelle Tennis, evolved a sixth sense about color trends. Their work paralleled nascent efforts by large corporations to fathom American taste, but differed from them as well. Carmaker GM devised quantitative methods for tracking and analyzing the sales of automobiles by model, options, and colors. By the early 1930s, the Detroit auto giant was publishing charts showing the popularity of dark lacquer on cars and drawing cultural parallels to the Depression-era economy. But the TCCA was not GM, and the comparison can only go so far. The TCCA was a small trade association in an industry comprised of thousands of firms scattered throughout America’s industrial heartland, from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Philadelphia and Chicago, Illinois. The TCCA would have found it time-consuming, costly, and irrelevant to gather statistical data about the sales of fabric, straw, and leather. Such an endeavor was impractical, given the limited resources of the association and the changeling nature of the style industries. Fashions shifted at varying paces, sometimes rapidly, sometimes less so. One had to scurry around the shops of New York, London, and Paris to keep up, rather than feeding numbers into an adding machine. The new profession of color forecasting that emerged in the interwar years was aesthetic, intuitive, and reflexive. The creation of a color forecast involved making judgments— educated guesses, if you may—based on years of practical experience. It required the forecaster to distinguish passing fads from enduring style trends. Outlandish or extreme color had no place in America’s vast, highly segmented mass market, or in the conservative British clothing market where the production of ready-to-wear had yet to fully take off. Rorke was fully aware that fads shaped fashion hues, and she used the Broadcast and the occasional thematic shade card to keep her members abreast. But she cared more about long-terms trends, and dedicated her long and productive career to the development of a systematic approach to color forecasting whose legacy is still with us today. The pioneering color forecasters of the modern era—Margaret Hayden Rorke, Henri Creange, Robert Wilson, and H. Ledyard Towle—have been long forgotten, but their ideas and methods have endured. The TCCA changed its name to the Color Association of America (CAUS) in 1955, and is still in operation today.62 CAUS competes in a forecasting arena that has become far more crowded than it was in the days of Mrs. Rorke, with many of the organizations discussed in this book vying for a piece of the action. The Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company no longer exists; it was absorbed in 1955 by the textile giant J. P. Stevens and Company, which liquidated the assets and sold the remainder of the firm to other interests.63 It was impossible for high-quality luxury silks to find sufficient business in the era of casual dressing, particularly as synthetic fibers came to dominate the field after the Second World War. The British Colour Council spiraled downward after the death of Robert Wilson. The BCC’s fate was tied to that of the British textile trade, particularly the Manchester-based cotton industry, which entered a steep decline in the 1960s. Around 1970, the foundering BCC merged with the Council of Industrial Design (a quasi-public trade body dedicated to advancing product design and improving taste), which spent much of the ensuing decade deliberating over the proper role of color in British design.64 Thirty years later, in the New Millennium, the design team at GM was still using color forecasts, but, like many global companies, it relied on external organizations such as the

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Color Marketing Group to provide the predictions.65 Whether they acknowledge it or not, contemporary trade organizations such as the Color Marketing Group, color services like Pantone, and trade fairs such as Première Vision create color standards and forecast color trends for the global business environment using some variation of the techniques perfected by the color forecasters of modern times.

Notes 1

Holbrook Jackson, “Colour Determination in the Fashion Trades,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 78, no. 4034 (March 14, 1930): 493, 503.

2

Ibid., 506.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid., 504.

5

Ibid., 506.

6

Ibid.

7

For more on the themes in this chapter, see Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012).

8

Ibid., 77–8.

9

Ibid., 78–83.

10 Walter Friedman, The Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 12–50. 11 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 114–38; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “The Importance of Being True Blue: The DuPont Company and the Color Revolution,” in Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877–1960, ed. Elspeth Brown et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27–50; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “True Blue: DuPont and the Color Revolution,” Distillations (Fall 2007), accessed December 26, 2016, www.chemheritage.org/distillations/magazine/true-bluedupont-and-the-color-revolution. 12 The Trend: Spring & Summer 1925 (New York: Botany Worsted Mills, 1925), n.p.; The Trend: Fall and Winter 1925–26 (New York: Botany Worsted Mills, 1925), n.p., both ref. 746.92 TRE, Archive of Art and Design, National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (hereafter cited as AAD). 13 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 147–62; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “The Colors of Modernism: Georgia O’Keeffe, Cheney Brothers, and the Relationship between Art and Industry in the 1920s,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 228–46. 14 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 91–2. 15 Margaret Hayden Rorke, Letters and Addresses on Woman Suffrage (New York: Devin-Adair Co, c. 1914). 16 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 92, 278.

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17 Papers of the Color Association of the United States, accession 1983, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE (hereafter cited as CA-HML), and Papers of the InterSociety Color Council, accession 2188, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE (hereafter cited as ISCC-HML). 18 Marjorie Holligan to Margaret Hayden Rorke, February 27, 1922, box 8, CA-HML. On Reville, see Amy de la Haye, “Gilded Brocade Gowns and Impeccable Tailored Tweeds: Victor Stiebel (1907–76), a Quintessentially English Designer,” in The Englishness of English Dress, ed. Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin and Caroline Cox (New York: Berg, 2002), 147–57. 19 R. P. Symons, London, to Sidney Blumenthal & Co., New York, February 27, 1922 (quotation), box 8, CA-HML. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 174. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 176. 25 Ibid., 76–82, 273–4, 278. 26 Ibid., 182. 27 Jackson, “Colour Determination in the Fashion Trades,” 504. 28 Cablegram, Cardinet & cie to TCCA, October 25, 1926, in Cardinet scrapbook, 1926–7, item 21, ISCC-HML. 29 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 178–9. 30 Ibid., 177–8. 31 Ibid., 93, 166; TCCA seasonal color cards for silk, woolens, gloves, hosiery, and shoe leather, items 56, 60, 65, 68, 74, ISCC-HML. 32 A Century of Progress Colors Issued by the Textile Color Card Association of the United States, Inc., with Permission of A Century of Progress International Exposition, Chicago, 1933, shade card; Broadcast, “Aqualon Pastels Launched at the New York World’s Fair 1939 Incorporated,” March 22, 1938, and Aqualon Pastels shade card, all in item 16, ISCC-HML. 33 Broadcast, February 20, 1926, in Green Scrapbook: Broadcasts, January 1926– February 1927, CA-HML. 34 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 187–8. 35 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), chaps. 3–4. 36 The Drapers’ Organiser & Dry Goods Export Journal, Colour Forecast for Autumn 1925, shade card inserted in Drapers’ Organiser (June 1925), n.p. 37 Holbrook Jackson, “British Colours for British Fashions,” Drapers’ Organiser (June 1925): 35. 38 Marshall & Aston, advertisement in Drapers’ Organiser (June 1925): 32. 39 Jackson, “British Colours for British Fashions.”

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40 “The Autumn Colours: Forecast by ‘The Drapers’ Organiser’,” Drapers’ Organiser (June 1925): 43. 41 “The Drapers’ Parliament,” Drapers’ Organiser (June 1928): 37. 42 “Colour and Fashions,” Yorkshire Post, July 2, 1929. 43 “Council of Colour Prophets,” Nottingham Evening Post, October 3, 1929; “Colour Factor in Fashion,” Yorkshire Post, October 10, 1929. 44 “British Colour Control,” Derby Daily Telegraph, June 8, 1929. 45 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 78; British Colour Council Ltd, Certificate of Incorporation, No. 250217, August 16, 1930, in folder: British Colour Council Finance Section, Design Council Archive, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK; “Guidance on Colour Questions,” Manchester Guardian, March 31, 1931. 46 “Annual Report of Margaret Hayden Rorke, Managing Director of the Textile Color Card Association of the United States, Inc.,” (April 17, 1930), 8, box 1, CA-HML. 47 Julia Finch, “Army & Navy Brand Consigned to History,” Guardian, September 29, 2004; British Colour Council, Certificate of Incorporation, 4–8. 48 “Colour Council: Nottingham Artist Appointed General Manager,” Yorkshire Post, January 27, 1931; “Colour Council: The Appointment of Mr. R. F. Wilson,” Yorkshire Post, February 3, 1931; “Standardised Colours: Card and ‘Dictionary’ Issued,” Yorkshire Post, June 28, 1934. 49 “Colour Council: Nottingham Artist Appointed General Manager”; “Mr. R. F. Wilson,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 105 (March 1, 1957): 302. 50 “Autumn Colours,” Yorkshire Post, March 4, 1931. 51 “Cotton and Colour,” Manchester Guardian, November 2, 1932. 52 “Autumn Colour Schemes,” Nottingham Evening Post, May 1, 1931. 53 “Colour Card for Britain,” Yorkshire Post, May 2, 1931. 54 “Why Not British Dyes?” Nottingham Evening Post, June 11, 1931. 55 “Town and Country Notes,” Northampton Mercury, June 26, 1931. 56 “Textile Designs and Modern Spirit: Mr. R. F. Wilson on Colour Difficulties,” Yorkshire Post, November 19, 1931. 57 “The Colour Council,” Manchester Guardian, January 9, 1934. 58 “The British Standard Colour Card,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 82 (December 29, 1933): 200–2; “A Dictionary of Colours,” Manchester Guardian, July 7, 1934; The British Colour Council Dictionary of Colour Standards (London: British Colour Council, 1934), item 228, ISCC-HML. 59 Clipping, “Eight Colors Selected for British Promotion,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 19, 1938, in AAD/1994/1/8, Scrapbook: American Press Clippings, Victor Stiebel Press Cutting Albums, in AAD; “British Agree on Standardization of Knit Rayon Colors,” Women’s Wear Daily, August 24, 1939. 60 Wool Card, Spring and Summer 1939 (London: British Colour Council, 1939); Wool Card, Autumn and Winter 1939–1940 (London: British Colour Council, 1939), both in item 232, ISCC-HML; and Colours for Men’s Wear: Autumn and Winter 1939–40 (London: British Colour Council, 1939), item 233, ISCC-HML. 61 “British-U.S. Interchange of Abilities Urged,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 29, 1936.

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62 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution, 278; Color Association of the United States, accessed January 17, 2017, www.colorassociation.com/. 63 University of Connecticut, University Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, “Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company Records,” accessed January 17, 2017, http://archives.lib.uconn.edu/islandora/object/20002:MS19840026. 64 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “The Color Schemers: American Color Practice in Britain, 1920s–1960s,” in Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 65 Author’s observations and interviews at the semiannual meeting of the Color Marketing Group, Boston, MA, autumn 2000.

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3 TOBÉ COLLER DAVIS A Career in Fashion Forecasting in America Véronique Pouillard and Karen Jamison Trivette

I

n September 1938, fashion forecaster Tobé Coller Davis urged clients who subscribed to her Fashion Report from Tobé (Figure 3.1) to take a good look at the recent Paris collections presented in August. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, American fashions had, to a large extent, gained independence from the style leadership of Paris. Creative talent flourished with American designers such as Elizabeth Hawes, Claire McCardell, Hattie Carnegie, among many others. Yet Davis, who sold trend reports to one high-end department or specialty store in each medium-to-large American city, thought that Paris was still a force to be reckoned with: “As always the Paris couture outdid itself in the creation of beautiful evening gowns . . . As a matter of fact, most of the really exciting new fashions were launched in the evening field.”1 Davis was an excellent communicator. The exclusive trend reports that she developed for her clients were printed in Arial font on blue onionskin paper (Figure 3.2). Some pages even imitated the layout of a cablegram. All of these design decisions were made to convey to her clients that the trends described by the Fashion Report from Tobé were fresh, hot-offthe-press, immediate, exclusive—and worthy of the client’s undivided attention. Season after season, Tobé Coller Davis and the three dozen employees of her small Manhattan firm, Tobé, Inc., prepared the trend reports that were avidly read in many American and in some European cities by risk-averse retailers. The Great Depression had hit the West hard and the task of whetting the appetite of the American middle-class for fashion was not easy. By 1938, Davis had established herself as the best American expert on Paris fashions. While American design had gained prominence, there was still a rationale for watching Paris. “It must be admitted that in cold words on paper these do not sound as new as they really are,” Davis wrote. “Full skirts, tiny waists, big puff sleeves—all of these sound strangely reminiscent of the early July collections in New York. But when you see them, you realize what a very deep stamp the Paris Openings have left on our evening fashions. It is as if everything had been touched by a giant artist’s hand and magnified and intensified.”2 Davis watched Paris on behalf of her American clients, who did not always have the time or the budget to cross the Atlantic Ocean. She reported to them directly and her vivid prose virtually transported them to the Paris openings. She was an actor who remained in the shadow of the big designers, but her work as a trend forecaster was nonetheless necessary to

FIGURE 3.1  Cover page of January 27, 1944, Fashion Report from Tobé. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA; © The TOBE Report.

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FIGURE 3.2  Page from September 8, 1938, Fashion Report from Tobé depicting fur embellished coats from Molyneux and Lelong. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA; © The TOBE Report.

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the development of the fashion system as an international industry. In order to understand how often-anonymous actors working behind the scenes contributed to the industry, this chapter focuses on the biography of consultant Tobé Coller Davis.

Starting on one’s own Taube Coller Davis, who was professionally known as Tobé or Miss Tobé, was born on June 12, 1888, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was the only daughter of Oscar A. Coller and Taube Silberberg; only six days after Taube’s birth, her mother died. When his daughter was three years old, Oscar Coller remarried to Sara Rich. The couple had three children after Taube.3 Davis arrived in New York City from her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1914. This was after completing a course in home economics at a Midwestern college.4 While it is not known exactly where Davis studied, at the time she would have been a student, home economics programs were popular in the United States. According to the New York Times, it was in the early twentieth century that such programs to “base housekeeping firmly upon scientific principles” began to flourish. There was even established the American Home Economics Association in 1908 to help professionalize the field, which not only schooled young women in homemaking but prepared them for careers in education, manufacturing, and retailing.5 Davis’s first job in New York was answering letters for the National Cloak and Suit Company, which paid her twelve dollars a week. Based in New York City, the National Cloak and Suit Company specialized in ladies’ tailoring and was one of the leading mailorder firms in the country. It disseminated trendy and relatively affordable clothes from the New York City fashion epicenter to the entire American market. The National Cloak and Suit Company opened its doors in 1888 “to address the clothing needs of women.” The National was said to have “valued customer service to a level that many retailers did not.” In fact, the National adopted the Marshall Field expression, “the customer is always right.” This ethos must have had shaped Davis’s later approach to her profession, given her heightened concerns with the customer experience.6 Although she did not remain with the National for long, the organization of the business, and its focus on everyday fashion, no doubt had an important influence on Davis. Not long after this position, Davis became a New York-based secretary for Felix Lacks, a London-based ostrich-feather dealer. At that time, ostrich feathers were going out of fashion as an embellishment for ladies’ hats, and Davis helped Lacks to find more profitable ventures. In this capacity, she worked on various projects related to domestic and international trade in fashionable merchandise, such as opening a hat store in Chicago and selling soap and towels to South America. Davis then moved into sales; however, her first experiences were not successful. She sold hats at the fashion specialty store B. Altman for twenty-two dollars a week but was fired from her position. She then went on to sell hats at R. H. Macy & Company and was fired from that position as well. A bit later, Davis went to work at Hickson’s, a successful dressmaker and novelty shop which from the mid-1920s was the official retailer of the Parisienne couturiere, Madeleine Vionnet, in New York City.7

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Along with her first professional experiences, Davis learned about matters of line, style, color, and the economics of the fashion world. Financed by her husband and a friend, she started her own small shop in the mid-1920s. Davis was successful with sales during an era when independently owned shops had difficulty balancing their budgets. It was during that same period of time that she changed her name from Taube to Tobé, and became known as Miss Tobé, or as Mrs. Tobé Davis.8 During most of the 1920s, Tobé worked for Franklin Simon & Company, a New Yorkbased chain store founded in 1902 that specialized in women’s fashions and furnishings. With owner Franklin Simon (1865–1934) and his business partner Herman A. Flurscheim, Tobé learned the principles of her trade, especially regarding fashion retailing and consumer psychology.9 Franklin Simon & Company featured a series of specialty shops under one roof; as such, it was a more high-end, exclusive, and tightly focused retailer than the department store, which by this time sold an array of merchandise, from hats to pianos, and tried to be everything to everybody.10 Simon thought that stores needed something other than adept buyers and merchandising staff to be successful and, thinking that Tobé had the requisite qualities to rethink retailing, he advised her to create her own job within the firm. Tobé’s approach was from the point of view of the customer; she walked through the store, examining its operations, read advertisements, and rode the elevators alongside the customers.11 Simon also sent Tobé abroad to examine trends in Europe, where she observed the retail scene as well as fashionable shoppers. She brought new expertise and new designs back to New York and started experimenting in merchandise coordination; for example, she considered Franklin Simon’s hat department in relation to its coat selection. She also made sure that suits retailed at Franklin Simon were inspired by Paris and London, including the influence of men’s tailoring.12

The foundation of Tobé Fashion Director In 1927, Tobé took the decisive step and founded her own firm under the name Tobé Fashion Director, a fashion consulting service based at 551 Fifth Avenue in New York.13 At the start, there was only Tobé, an idea, and a secretary.14 Tobé sold her knowledge on fashion and trends to retailers in the form of reports and consulting services. Along with the color forecasters discussed in Chapter 2, she was among the early generation of professionals in the United States to develop expertise in fashion consulting. She demonstrated that the business of fashion entailed not only selling garments and accessories but also selling ideas. A precedent to this can be found in the development of Madison Avenue’s famous advertising agencies. These agencies sold neither a product nor media space, but worked as intermediaries between the manufacturer and the media.15 After a few months, Davis incorporated her fashion service as Tobé, Inc., to capitalize on the immaterial economy of fashion.16 The original idea for Tobé’s consulting firm originated in her collaboration with Felix Fuld, a vice-president at the L. Bamberger and Company department store, who according to Tobé “wanted to harness my fashion knowledge to his business.”17 Tobé’s salary was

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already impressive at the time, and Fuld could not justify paying her fees on behalf of his store alone. He encouraged Tobé to work as the fashion head for a group of seventeen stores led by L. Bamberger and Company. Tobé then realized that she could do the work independently and was inspired to incorporate her firm as Tobé, Inc. The new firm thus started with a group of twenty-four stores as clients, which she described as “a smaller, more personal nucleus.”18 While Tobé believed that her strength was in her knowledge of merchandise, her retail clients were interested in the direction of fashion. Tobé, Inc. worked diligently to deliver that information. Among the firm’s early clients were Stern Brothers (or Stern’s) of New York City; L. Bamberger and Company of Newark, New Jersey; Jordan Marsh & Company of Boston, Massachusetts; Charles A. Stevens of Chicago, Illinois; and The Blum Store of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.19 Between 1927 and 1932, Tobé, Inc. expanded considerably, growing from three to twenty employees and from twenty-four to one hundred clients.20 The consultancy did not advertise, and grew as new clients signed up for its fashion reports. In fact, Tobé boasted to her clients, “We’ve never sent anyone out to sell our service.”21 Tobé indeed had many collaborators and employees, yet her policy was not to advertise her expertise; rather, she built the business as a customized service to each client. In 1928, when Tobé had just started her consulting firm, she became a member of the small group of women including Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Head, and Elizabeth Arden, who founded the Fashion Group International. In the ensuing decades, the Fashion Group was the most influential association of professionals in the fashion industry of the United States. Originally composed only of women, the group eventually welcomed men and grew to include thousands of members and dozens of chapters all over the world. The original aim of the Fashion Group was to foster women’s careers and ambitions and urge them to develop their own professional paths. Tobé further developed her interest in women’s career options by joining forces with Julia Coburn in September 1937 to establish the Tobé-Coburn School for Fashion Careers in New York City.22 Working closely with her own assistants had led Tobé to recognize the need for formal training in the fashion business. The Tobé-Coburn School employed teachers with retail experience to train young women in many of the elements that Tobé herself had learned by trial and error.23

Defining fashion One question raised by the new developments of the commercial discipline of fashion forecasting was how to understand and define the consumer’s needs. The historian William R. Leach has examined how American business executives contributed to the creation of needs and to the development of consumer desires. There was a consensus among Tobé’s clients and colleagues that, while fashions were still often imported from Paris, it was vital to select from Paris haute couture the designs that could be adapted to affordable American versions. These adaptations would be made at price points suited to various strata of society. When taking the American consumer into account, Tobé and her clients determined that the lifetime of a defined fashion should be about three to five years as compared to fads,

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which had a shorter lifecycle. One pioneer of such fashion lifecycles was Henri Creange, a visionary textile designer and color forecaster who worked for the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company. Creange laid out his theories for the mass production of style goods in the 1920s with reference to the product lifecycle.24 Neiman Marcus, a prominent American retailer who continuously used Tobé’s services, made a distinction between three different concepts: fashion, style, and fad. Here is how Marcus defined them in a lecture delivered upon invitation by Tobé: The word fashion is used loosely by those both in and out of the trade. Frequently it is used interchangeably with the word style . . . A style is any particular and individual article made differently from another article. Fashion is a process of change in the development of styles, which for success must involve progressive acceptances or sanctions by individuals, or groups of individuals, in our society.25 Tobé’s work entailed watching, interpreting, and explaining to clients the relationships among fashion, style, and fads. As she explained: To bring these definitions down to earth, a designer of dresses, or sports shirts, or shoes, creates a whole group of new designs, or styles. Before these designs can be considered to be a new fashion, they will have to be accepted (that is, bought) by a group of discriminating purchasers, and subsequently by other purchasers, and by still other purchasers. If the velocity of purchasing is large enough numerically, it becomes a new fashion. If the successive waves of buyers don’t follow up the first purchases, the style becomes what is known as a fad, something like a missile that fizzles soon after the take-off.26 The balance between the reasonable pricing of a product and the yearning of the American consumer for variety was where the experience of Tobé proved to be essential to help American retailers. Tobé defined the new profession of fashion consultant as a person who developed tools to understand what the consumer wanted now and what he or she would buy next. Her work was therefore intuitively based on a Zeitgeist approach to the economy of fashions, or, the idea that fashion captured the cultural essence of the era from which it sprung. Such a view on how trends took shape has been conceptualized by academics writing on the theory of fashion, from James Laver to Barbara Vinken.27

Fashion Reports from Tobé The famous Fashion Reports from Tobé, which have been continuously published by the firm since 1927, were an important part of Tobé’s work. They were delivered year-round on a weekly basis to clients who subscribed to her services. Bound in pale blue onionskin paper in the first years, then in pink with separate merchandise classifications printed each on its own colored paper, the reports were profusely illustrated with photographs, drawings, and fabric swatches. Each report was fifty to one hundred pages long, and during the interwar period the cost of a subscription to the weekly report would range from $500 to $3,000 per year, the exact amount of which depended on the sales volume

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of the client. Over time, the reports came to feature narrative descriptions, photographs, fairly crude sketches or renderings, and reproductions of advertisements. Like fashion trade publications such as Women’s Wear Daily, the reports were organized by branch of the trade: ready-to-wear, coats and suits, dresses, girls and teens, junior news, college shop, lingerie and negligees, rainwear, sportswear, accessories, bags, belts, gloves, hats, jewelry, and neckwear. The Fashion Report from Tobé, however, differed from trade publications in its content. The report did not aim to inform clients about common topics found in the press, such as the state of the fashion and garment industry, the value of consumption, tariffs and currency fluctuations, and the circulation of experts in the industry. Rather, the content of Tobé forecasts was entirely centered on aesthetics as translated from Paris to America, the largest consumer market of its time. Today, the historical reports provide a wealth of information for the fashion historian. As such, it is likely that they will become increasingly used as source material for research because they coincide with the growing interest of fashion historians for a better understanding of the culture of consumption.28 The front matter of the Fashion Report from Tobé included a table of contents and prefatory items such as letters from clients, notices of openings, and segments such as “Headline for Highlights” and “A Page for the Boss.” Poised between the consumer and the firm, Tobé developed excellent contacts within the fashion business sphere. In the 1930s, Tobé had her own column in the Fashion Report from Tobé; the “A Page for the Boss” column was used by Tobé to reflect on the state of the industry and the history of her business. Every column ended with an enthusiastic message: “All this, plus the very hard work and long hours of twenty people build this weekly report and service for you! Use it! It’s a dynamo that stimulates! You need it to grow on, in 1934—and watch us grow too, inspired by your help and appreciation.”29 Throughout the depression decade of the 1930s the report maintained a steady customer base of about a hundred corporate clients (Figures 3.3 and 3.4). In 1939, stores based in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia were subscribers to the Fashion Report from Tobé.30 The method developed by Tobé to conduct her business was deeply linked to the way she understood the relation between producer and consumer. Fashions had to address the consumer’s needs, and it was useless to try and sell merchandise that did not cater to the consumer’s expectations. She therefore conducted forecasting according to a clientcentered, or bottom-up approach.31 Tobé liked to keep her finger on the fashion pulse, which she did by going out, entertaining, and visiting new places. Her teams of fashion experts and other employees did exactly the same thing.32 When Neiman-Marcus paid $1,200 a year for Tobé’s services, the store knew that it could expect to receive a weekly report with information and inspiration cabled fresh from Paris in the smallest detail and yet digestible at the same time. The website for the contemporary business summarizes how Tobé developed her business model. “The Fashion Report from Tobé delivered news to major retailers on not just fashion shifts, styling references, and design details but also consumer desires, lifestyle influences, and head-to-toe wardrobing. More importantly, Tobé offered the retailer insightful analysis and strategic and tactical recommendations on how to implement these ideas.”33 The Tobé consulting agency made a simple agreement with each client. For example, in the contract she signed on March 31, 1928 with Neiman Marcus, we see that Tobé offered

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FIGURE 3.3  A Macy’s clipping in the January 4, 1934, Fashion Report from Tobé from the New York Herald Tribune on January 2 of that same year, depicting Amelia Earhart Sportswear exclusively sold at R. H. Macy & Company. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA.

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FIGURE 3.4  Page 21 from January 4, 1934, Fashion Report from Tobé discussing the Amelia Earhart shop at Macy’s. Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA; © The TOBE Report.

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to render a fashion service . . . including investigation of current and coming fashions, using the services of herself and her own organization, and paying all salaries and expenses of such organization, including European expenses. Miss Tobé is to co-operate with the buyers of the Neiman-Marcus Company when they are in the New York market and where possible while in the European market.34 Tobé extended the reach of the trend reports by offering fashion forums for important clients. These forums evolved to become fashion shows in May 1931. Tobé would feature one show for a single store in each city serviced by the firm. The shows grew to be quite popular, especially in New York City, where they took place at a large hotel to accommodate 500 to 600 attendees. “The shows are generally preceded by Tobé’s forecast for the new season with a review of current events and trends in social and economic life,” wrote the author of one fashion textbook. “Then follows a presentation of the important garments from the wholesale market. Buyers are provided with the names of the manufacturers and the prices.”35 Tobé’s service also analyzed retailers’ problems by regularly visiting the stores she worked with in the New York City area. She held meetings for member stores and buyers offering diagnoses on the state of her clients’ firms. She considered solutions to problems such as a bad retail location, badly chosen sales staff, and the realities that buyers might not know their customers well enough or that the stock could be wrong. During the interwar period, another New York-based consultant, Amos Parrish, offered a similar service under the name “fashion clinic.”36 Tobé offered a complete consulting service, spending “her days meeting with and advising retailers and manufacturers. Evenings were devoted to seeing and observing the newest, most inspiring and interesting fashions in art, style, and culture. During her overseas travels, she was among the first to report from European fashion shows via transatlantic cable.”37 An imitation cablegram was used for the reports to give the client a sense of urgency on the new visual trends translated in clear line drawings and fluid English. Textile samples were often attached, especially just after the big Paris shows of August and February. For the reader, that is, the American garment industry or retailing professional, Tobé’s reports were the highest quality available in this type of service, and the most appropriate to translate and transmit faithfully the Paris trends to the American market.38

Character and lifestyle of a fashion consultant New approaches to business history have reinvigorated the concept of entrepreneurs’ biographies, which is relevant to our story of Tobé. Aside from fashion entrepreneurs, in the New York fashion industry of the interwar period, journalists like Edna Woolman Chase and Carmel Snow rose to prominence. More recently, the acclaimed documentary film, The September Issue, had offered a portrait of another fashion media leader, Anna Wintour, showing the image of an iron lady at the head of Vogue magazine. Yet Tobé, who was less

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in the spotlight even though she was an important actor in the fashion industry, comes out as a different personality. She was less dramatic than the fashion media moguls of her time and of today, although she was clear that tension could arise in her line of work. “There are many careers and compensations in the fashion business,” she wrote. “There is a drama in it that you will find in almost no other. It’s exciting, challenging, and a wide-open field.”39 Tobé’s work was often associated with her own personal and creative imprint. Collaborators described Tobé as a very efficient professional and one who loved elegance and exuded good taste. Such traits were also reflected in Tobé’s office environment and in her home, which was well organized and exquisitely furnished. Observers noted that the atmosphere in Tobé’s office was busy but serene, due to organization and balance. An unpublished report of 1939 kept in the Fashion Institute of Technology Library’s Special Collections and College Archives offers an intimate look at the personality and the psychology of Tobé, and helps us understand how one female director of a consulting agency in the interwar period managed her business. The document gives a glimpse in Tobé’s private life and day-to-day organization. A pleasant and quiet character, Tobé was described as a very organized person, who managed to communicate her qualities and calm to her associates very well. She also worked intensely, waking up at six o’clock every morning, first working in her bed for a couple of hours. She would then spend the day in her office or visit client stores in the New York City region. By the late 1930s, Tobé had twentyfive assistants; an important part of her work consisted of going through the assistants’ reports and articles, making comments and always requiring greater concision and clarity. She marked printed copies with comments like “Not clear,” “You don’t know enough about the subject,” and “Too long, say it in three lines.”40 Tobé finished her workday at six o’clock in the evening, would take a half-hour break in her bed before going out or entertaining. She was especially interested in the arts of the stage and in classical music. Tobé never seemed to stop working, constantly observing the scene and the public for inspiration. Her personal income annually was between $50,000 and $100,000.41 On Saturdays, she left her New York home precisely at one in the afternoon with servants and dogs for her second residence, a Victorian house in Rye, New York. She filled the home with friends until her return to New York City on Monday morning at 8 a.m. Guests were always welcome but knew that, if Tobé’s door was closed, then she was sleeping and did not want to be disturbed.42 According to The Rag Race, Bernard Roshco’s 1963 classic work on the New York fashion business, the consultant Tobé “was able to build an enormously successful career as a fashion intelligence agent and prognosticator. Her firm gathered and evaluated information from manufacturers, stores, and designers and passed the information on to the clients on coming trends.”43 In this sense, Tobé’s services were not limited to prediction but included prescription as well.44 A driving force behind the success of Tobé’s business was the need for manufacturers to avert risk when choosing fashion designs to reproduce for the American mass market. Should fashion manufacturers and designers bet on the wrong designs, then they would end up with unsold stock that was increasingly impossible to sell as time passed. The business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. underlined that over-stock was a real danger for American department stores.45 The historians William Leach and Nancy Green have demonstrated the growing importance of fashion forecasters in helping the industry to avert uncertainty.46 The color forecaster Margaret Hayden Rorke at the Textile Color Card Association of the

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United States helped manufacturers and retailers determine which colors were likely to be “in” or “out” in upcoming seasons as a means for better selecting their designs and their stock.47 Similarly, Tobé’s service, especially as expressed in her forecasting reports, allowed retailers to follow fashion trends that were likely to sell and therefore avert the risk of dormant stock. Fashion forecasting required understanding parameters that were more complex than they might have seemed. The producers worked on seasonal rhythms that demanded forecasters to prepare their report with an 18- to 24-months’ window for the forecasted trends to reach the client.48 According to retailer Stanley Marcus, If we had only one fashion at a time to contend with, we wouldn’t have too difficult a problem; but at any particular time there may be a number of trends in varying stages of development. Some of them might be reaching the peak; others would be just beginning; and still others would be in an ascending or descending stage. All of this may sound extremely complicated, and it is; but it is possible to learn the criteria upon which fashion understanding can be developed. Fashion forecasting is more complex and requires certain innate sensitivities. To get the proper understanding of these fashion movements, there is no substitute for the experience gained from an internship in selling and buying. The customer is the buyer’s best teacher, just as she is the designer’s best inspiration.49 Research on this behind-the-scenes world of fashion forecasters demonstrates that, in the late 1920s, several visions of this expertise developed, coexisted, and competed in the American market. Among this group the best known were Tobé, Amos Parrish, and the otherwise famous public relations expert, Edward Bernays, who was also a nephew of Sigmund Freud. According to William Leach, one of the first historians who investigated the history of forecasters, which he depicted as “brokers,” Parrish was the pioneer among them.50 Parrish held workshops called the “Amos Parrish Clinics” that were attended by hundreds of American retailers at a time. Parrish was convinced of the quasi-scientific accuracy of the technique of fashion forecasting, and claimed that it had eliminated “much of the guesswork” in the industry.51 It seems that most initiatives by this small group of forecasters followed similar paths. Tobé’s approach was characterized by an excellent understanding of the trends coming from Europe, and especially from Paris. Furthermore, Tobé had a great ability to communicate such trends and make them intelligible for American manufacturers and retailers. In September 1929, Tobé held the first of a long series of Fashion Forums that she convened in New York City for American retailers. Six weeks in advance of the forums, Tobé would travel to France where she made observations and collected trend information. She invited experts to speak to the retailers along with her own contributions. During the first forum, speakers included Eileen Cummings from Saks Fifth Avenue, and Clayton E. Gibbs, a former manager at L. Bamberger and Company, who Tobé had recruited to direct the home-furnishing division of Tobé, Inc.52 Similar events were held by other groups around this time, including the Fairchild Seminar, initiated in 1929 as a division of Fairchild Publications. This group was founded in 1892 and was home to the main trade newspaper in the fashion industry, Women’s Wear Daily.53

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The first Fairchild Seminar took place the week of April 8, 1929. It was held at the Hotel Commodore in New York City, now the site of the Grand Hyatt at 109 East 42nd Street. The sessions were a forum in which noted merchandising authorities addressed attendees, namely, executives from the textile and apparel industries as well as “buyers, merchandising managers, and others associated with retail stores.” The sessions were sponsored by the Fairchild Analytical Bureau, a division of the publishing company. The focus of the seminar was on new methods of applying statistical data “to the control of style” and in the formation of “buying policies.” Speakers included Q. F. Walker, an economist for R. H. Macy & Company, Inc., who addressed the seminar on “Applying Outside Statistics to Department Store Merchandising.” Other speakers included D. M. Nelson, the general merchandise manager at Sears, Roebuck & Company in Chicago; Edwin A. Godley, a retail store consultant with S. D. Leidesdorf & Company in New York; and Hilding Anderson, a statistician-economist at Case, Pomeroy & Company in New York. Attendance was limited to one hundred people.54 During the Great Depression, a debate developed among a number of forecasters, close observers, and clients on the efficiency, nature, and mission of fashion forecasting. Some forecasters, like Parrish, believed in quasi-scientific, mathematical understanding of fashion prediction, while others, like Tobé, developed a creative approach that anticipated the practice of trend-hunting.55 In other domains, too, the accuracy of the work of forecasters was vigorously debated during the Great Depression.56 It is when the economy reached a nadir in 1932 that the number of Tobé clients totaled more than one hundred and remained steady throughout the decade.57 Several factors explain how Tobé overcame the economic crisis and did well during this difficult period. She had always had a good sense of aesthetics and of the market, and her goal was to offer beauty to every consumer, including those who suffered in times of economic crisis. Tobé also knew how to engage with the media; from early on, she used the radio, notably to connect to her American audience from the Paris shows.58 In the depression years, she started creating movie features, working with Pathé News and releasing the footage in all the RKO theaters in the United States.59 The most important explanation for her success was the fact that she had an exceptional ability to decipher the problems of retail stores. According to the 1939 report in the archives of the Fashion Institute of Technology, “If they follow her advice, a department that’s been in the red can be pulled out in one season.”60 Even more than foreseeing what consumers would want to wear, such an expertise was precious, especially in times of economic crisis. Color forecasters such as Margaret Hayden Rorke at the Textile Color Card Association and the fabric forecaster Henri Creange had been visiting Paris and bringing back color and fabric news to New York since the early 1920s. In an era when “fabrics” were “fashion,” they were the pioneer forecasters in the American style industries. Tobé may have looked to their success and built on it. She claims to have been the first American fashion forecaster to go to Paris and return with fashion trends for a department store. The Fashion Report from Tobé was established as the most accurate translation of Paris fashion trends for American consumption. Tobé’s goal was to work as an interpreter for the moderately priced dress business, rather than importing “model gowns” for the New York elites. In this sense, she contributed to bringing fashion to the masses and was acknowledged as the first person to put forth the theory of “what Park Avenue wears

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today, the rest of the country will wear tomorrow.”61 Her work resulted in long-lasting relations with her clients. Three of the original four clients of Tobé were still in contract with her in 1939.62

Tobé during the postwar era Paris had been shut off from the American fashion buyers, media, and forecasters during the Second World War. The focus of the Fashion Report from Tobé during the war years was decidedly patriotic, with references to “war work” bags (Figure 3.5) for “women who are doing volunteer war work and need lots of room,” to the promotion of “Victory Corsages” by Lydia in victory colors of red, white, and blue.63 Against all odds, it took Paris very little time to regain its place after the war as the world leader in all things fashionable.64 The Fashion Report from Tobé reflected this reality, with highlights from Paris embedded within the section called “Front Page Fashions by Tobé,” plus a dedicated “Paris Report” appended at the end. This is not to say that reports of activity from abroad did not exist before the end of the Second World War, but this dedicated segment appears later in the series. Couture collections were from then on systematically covered by designer name, with extra space allocated to outstanding collections, or fashion revolutions, highlighting important changes in the design of clothing. Specific examples of coverage reveal how the Fashion Report from Tobé treated new activity from Paris in the postwar era. The entry describing the Dior collection of 1947, which featured the Eight and the Corolla lines that became known famously as the “New Look,” and the entry for the Saint Laurent collection of 1962, are relevant examples of how Tobé brought Paris fashion revolutions to Seventh Avenue. The coverage was colorful and extensive, including several pages for each collection and comprising a large proportion of the report. The text was full of vivid imagery as no images accompanied the articles. Indeed, during the postwar period, Paris couturiers offered access to their collections, but they expressly forbid the release of sketches and images for one month after the shows.65 Rather than waiting, Tobé followed the rule allowed by the Paris couture that permitted descriptions of the collections to be published immediately. The reader would have a vivid picture from the descriptions to imagine the silhouettes. Garment district expert Bernard Roshco noted that Tobé, like other forecasters, “came to occupy a central place in the transmission of trends between the Parisian laboratories of design and the fast growing mass production of fashion, a phenomenon particularly active in the New York City area.”66 That said, the Fashion Report from Tobé was “shifting away from an exclusive focus on Paris by the 1950s and devoting more space to women’s fashion in New York City.”67 Tobé catered primarily to American department stores and to a lesser extent some European stores. In France, her work was rarely discussed in the press, and only in the postwar era was her expertise acknowledged by the French fashion industry. In the context of the postwar reconstruction of Europe, the textile industrialists of France went in search of knowledge in the United States through Productivity Missions set up within the framework of the European Recovery Program, or the Marshall Plan. In May 1955, the

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FIGURE 3.5  Page 8A from January 15, 1942, Fashion Report from Tobé discussing “war work bags.” Courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY, USA; © The TOBE Report.

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French government sent a group of French industrialists to the United States for a tour of industry and to document the fashion press and media. The French experts noted the coordination of fashion in the American market: colors and designs tended to match much better across various lines and products in the US than it was then the case in France. Garment production was more mechanized than in France, and clothing designs were more versatile. For example, separates—garments coordinated by color and style so that they can be worn in different combinations—were common in the American market but relatively unknown in France. The visitors also noted the key role played by fashion consultancies, like those run by Tobé, Amos Parrish, and the Press Merchandizing Service.68 This type of service did not yet exist in France but would develop in the 1960s, with a new crop of innovative Frenchwomen who created style consultancies.69 The question of whether the 1960s French stylists were directly inspired by Tobé’s work remains an open question. However, the 1955 report by the French Productivity Mission did mention Tobé as a key actor in fashion system of the United States.70 Tobé had served clients outside of the United States for several decades and she was now being acknowledged by experts from the French government. Tobé’s influence, however, remained much more important in the United States than in France. Her role as a businesswoman was also remarkable. The fashion and beauty industries are known for providing countless women with the opportunity to develop flourishing careers and to attain leadership positions that were still off-limits in many other fields of activity. Consulting, however, was still a male-dominated profession, and, as a consultant, Tobé built a network and accessed a world where women were still a minority. From the outset, she showed a great sense of leadership, as demonstrated by her “Page for the Boss—by Tobé” in her weekly report. This flair for leadership aided in the development of Tobé’s famed “Bosses’ dinners” in New York, where she hosted the crème de la crème in American retail. By the mid-1950s, retailers would pay as much as $1,000 a day for Tobé’s advice. By then, she had thirty-seven assistants to help her serve her clients. The core of service was still the Fashion Report from Tobé, which was delivered to more than 250 stores each week. Her analysis was prized because it efficiently merged a strong aesthetic sense with an informed approach to merchandising in both wholesale and retail markets. She also gave advice on promotional techniques, as her report featured a weekly story on the window displays of New York stores. In addition to the reports, her offices prepared a weekly digest of the most important fashion trends for two thousand subscribers in smaller American cities, and a bimonthly report for manufacturers on fashions and fabrics.71 The prolific Tobé also wrote a weekly column on fashion entitled “Tobé Says,” which appeared in more than forty newspapers in the United States and Canada, including the Herald Tribune. Her influence kept growing and, from the mid-1950s, she gave a yearly award to an outstanding merchant. In the fashion business, the Tobé Award for Creative Retailing was considered the equivalent to an Academy Award. In 1957, a lecture series was established at Harvard Business School in honor of Tobé for the students in the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. The purpose of the series was to foster “an increased awareness of the challenge of careers in the retailing field. For some time the importance has been recognized of attracting into retail careers more top-level graduates of colleges and graduate schools.”72

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The series was directed by two Harvard professors in business administration. The first lecture was given by Harold D. Hodgkinson, a former chairman of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, then president of William Filene’s Sons Company, Boston’s leading fashion retailer, who spoke about the “New Intellect in Retailing.” The lectures took place in Baker Library, a landmark building on the Harvard Business School campus. The texts of the lectures were subsequently published in small volumes for use in other MBA programs. Lectures covered all areas in retail with insights on the various forms of retailing, on creativity in marketing, and on the importance of fashions in various domains, especially in clothing, interior decoration, and cars, mainly in the United States, and to some extent in Europe.73 “The Business of Fashion” lecture, in the first series of lectures of 1957, encapsulated Tobé’s own thoughts on the topic. She pointed to three driving forces behind fashion trends, those being economics, sociology, and the arts and taste, especially modern and contemporary art forms. In terms of economics, she pointed to the growing middle class as a powerhouse for fashion purchasing. As for sociology, she pointed to the growing shift regarding where consumers lived—more and more, the avid shopper lived in suburbia and had a suburban lifestyle to support. “Modern art surrounds us,” Tobé stated, adding that the dissemination of culture was then at its highest pitch. She defined fashion as a complex interplay of art and commerce: “Fashion doesn’t just happen . . . It needs three dynamics to translate a social, economic, or artistic current into the clothes on your back: design, direction, and distribution.”74 Direction was where Tobé came into the picture. She explained that her business functioned mainly like journalism, with herself and her associates acting like the “reporters and interpreters of the fashion world speaking to the fashion-makers and the fashionsellers.” She considered her team members to be “opinion-molders,” a term that flourished with the development of public relations, especially with the expertise of Edward Bernays.75 Bernays had tried to develop fashion forecasting as well, during the late 1920s when Tobé started her office, but he did not pursue a specialization in this direction. Bernays’ approach was based on a top-down promotional understanding of markets and on the monitoring of the media regarding the publicity given to his clients in fashion and retail. This approach failed to entirely satisfy Bernays’ clients, and in turn, the public relations counsel pursued other specialties. In contrast to Bernays, Tobé worked from the bottom up: chasing trends in the street, documenting the way creative people dressed and watching culture in general.76 Her team acted as a “liaison between our retail clients—the department store and specialty shop, and their resources—the manufacturers.” Their job was to “tell the makers what the sellers are doing and vice versa. Most of all, we interpret and evaluate for each what is happening to fashion itself.”77 In addition to economic, social, and art trends, Tobé and her associates spent “a good deal of time poring over non-fashion journals,” trying to “pick the significant trends that will change our lives—and hence our fashions.”78 “Shifts in international news” were also clues they watched for composing the reports.79 Her team of fashion forecasters followed what smart people experienced—the theater, the opera, social gatherings, smart restaurants, films, and even television—and “digested, sorted out, evaluated, and then disseminated” the information through their weekly fifty-page report, “our contribution to journalism,” in Tobé’s words.80 The report allowed her clients to “shop Fifth Avenue stores and the Paris

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showings without budging from their desks.”81 Subscribers to the report could “read about the fads as well as the foundations of fashion without spending much time or effort in research.”82 With three decades of experience directing her own forecasting firm, Tobé reflected on the major goals of the fashion industry: “Essentially fashion distribution boils down to the art of making the customer utter the three most precious words in our American economy—‘I’ll take it!’”83 She remained open-minded about the relationship between fashion and enterprise: “Fashion is neither superficial nor superfluous. It is indispensable to and inseparable from a business system which seeks to accommodate itself to the needs of our daily lives.”84

Conclusions In 1960, United States Senator and future President John F. Kennedy appointed Tobé to the National Committee of Business and Professional Men and Women.85 Tobé Coller Davis died on December 25, 1962. After her passing and according to her will, an aggregate of one-third of Tobé & Associates, Inc. stock would be offered to three senior associates— Helen Wilde, Marjorie Dean, and Joan Harwood.86 These women acquired the stock and were appointed to leadership positions within the firm. Another three associates, Katherine Hafner, Edith Gilman, and Clayton Gibbs, also assumed some measure of ownership and took on directorships.87 The legacy and impact of Tobé, who was considered the greatest influence on retail in her time, and of her company live on in both an online environment that covers the past five years of the Fashion Report from Tobé, and in print form, which is still available only by subscription.88 To get a sense of the service as it exists today, Leslie J. Ghize, Executive Vice President of TOBE, now a division of the Doneger Group, provided insight on the functioning of the firm whose name is now spelled in all uppercase letters and without an accent. In all, there are nine products available to the trade within a subscription package. Today’s report resembles nothing like the historical volumes. While this departure was somewhat expected, it was encouraging to see a reference to archival coverage in a TOBE column entitled “From the Archives.” Also noted was contact information for how to access archival material held at TOBE, which includes every report dating back to 1927.89 Fees for the service “can reach six figures for large, multi-chain department stores,” Ghize explained. “Generally, fees are based on a client’s sales volume for women’s apparel.”90 Today, the leaders at TOBE consider the collective of products and services a “consumer culture think tank.” According to Marybeth Martorana, Business Development for TOBE, the reports serve as a “lightning rod for creativity beyond fashion” extending its reach to other consumables.91 All this is a result of a company overhaul in 2012 and a refined nuance of the original firm model.92 As we saw in the lecture by Stanley Marcus, fashion forecasting was at the core of the mid-twentieth-century American fashion industry. Forecasters had to master different dimensions, notably the rhythms of fashion cycles and the anticipation of consumers’ demands. At the core of the work was research and documentation. Tobé Coller Davis and her employees spent a large part of their time researching and documenting trends. This research demanded as much a flair for aesthetics as it demanded a market perspective.

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Notes 1

“Paris Amends the Fall Evening Dress Fashion Story,” Fashion Report from Tobé, September 8, 1938, 1D.

2

Ibid.

3

“Tobé Coller Davis,” last modified September 26, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Tob%C3%A9_Coller_Davis.

4

Betty Emmons, “Tobé–Fashion Forecaster,” Today’s Woman, May 1949, 41.

5

“Where They Make Housekeeping a Learned Profession,” New York Times, September 4, 1910.

6

Jennifer Brannock, “The ‘National’ Style Book—1911,” accessed August 30, 2016, http://www.lib.usm.edu/spcol/exhibitions/item_of_the_month/iotm_mar11.html.

7

Betty Kirke, Madeleine Vionnet (Tokyo: Kyuryudo Art Publishing, 1991).

8

Gene Boyo, “A Soft Voice Rings Loud in Fashions,” New York Times, December 19, 1954.

9

Stanley Marcus, “Merchandising Fashion,” in The Tobé Lectures in Retail Distribution at the Harvard Business School (Boston, MA: Harvard University, 1959), 103.

10 Boyo, “A Soft Voice Rings Loud in Fashions.” 11 Typescript on Tobé’s biography, c. 1939, Tobé Coller Davis papers, US.NNFIT. SC.338, Fashion Institute of Technology |SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library, Special Collections and College Archives, New York (hereafter cited as Tobe-FIT). 12 Ibid. 13 Norma M. Rantisi, “The Ascendance of New York Fashion,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28 (March 2004): 94–5. 14 Boyo, “A Soft Voice Rings Loud in Fashions.” 15 Pamela Walter Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 16 Olivier Bomsel, L’économie immatérielle. Industries et marchés d’expériences (Paris: Gallimard, 2010). 17 “Felix Fuld, Merchant and Philanthropist, Dies at Age of 61,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 22, 1929, accessed June 2, 2016, http://www.jta.org/1929/01/22/ archive/felix-fuld-merchant-and-philanthropist-dies-at-age-of-61. 18 “We Talk About—Ourselves!” Fashion Report from Tobé, January 4, 1934, 19. 19 Ibid. 20 “Tobe, Fashionist, Adds Six New Accounts,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 3, 1932, 20. 21 “We Talk About—Ourselves!” 19. 22 Valerie Wingfield, Fashion Group International records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, MssCol 980, The New York Public Library, New York. 23 Typescript on Tobé’s biography. 24 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012).

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25 Marcus, “Merchandising Fashion,” 105. 26 Ibid. 27 James Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988); Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). 28 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 29 “We Talk About—Ourselves!” 20. 30 Boyo, “A Soft Voice Rings Loud in Fashions.” 31 William R. Leach, Land of Desire. Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994); Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-toWork: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Véronique Pouillard, “The Rise of Fashion Forecasting and Fashion Public Relations, 1920s–1940s: The History of Tobé and Bernays,” in Globalizing Beauty: Consumerism and Body Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kühne (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 151–69. 32 “TOBE,” accessed August 31, 2016, http://www.tobereport.com/scripts/tobe-resume. pdf; typescript on Tobé’s biography. 33 “TOBE,” accessed August 31, 2016, http://www.tobereport.com/scripts/tobe-resume. pdf. 34 Original contract between Tobé Coller Davis and Neiman-Marcus, March 31, 1928, Tobe-FIT. 35 Bernice Chambers, Fashion Fundamentals (New York: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1947), 69–70. 36 Boyo, “A Soft Voice Rings Loud in Fashions.” 37 Ibid. 38 Marybeth Martorana, interview by Karen J. Trivette, New York, May 4, 2016. 39 Typescript on Tobé’s biography. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Bernard Roshco, The Rag Race: How New York and Paris Run the Breakneck Business of Dressing American Women (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1963), 25–6. 44 Karen J. Trivette, “Fashion’s Future via Fashion’s History: Introducing FIT Library’s Special Collections and College Archives and Touching on the Tobé Fashion Report” (paper presented at History and Future of Fashion Prediction conference, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, October 17, 2014). 45 Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977), 53–5, 209–33. 46 Leach, Land of Desire; Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work. 47 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution. 48 Pouillard, “The Rise of Fashion Forecasting and Fashion Public Relations, 1920s–1940s.”

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49 Marcus, “Merchandising Fashion,” 113–14. 50 William Leach, “Brokers and the New Corporate, Industrial Order,” in Inventing Times Square. Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russel Sage and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 99–124. Another, and more currently used term to describe such a category of fashion professionals is the word “intermediaries,” see Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers. 51 “Fashion Forecasting Success, Says Parrish,” Women’s Wear Daily, August 6, 1929, 5. 52 “Tobé Forum to Interpret New Apparel Styles,” Women’s Wear Daily, August 28, 1929, 1. 53 “Style and Trade to be Forecast at Seminar,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 19, 1930, 1; Véronique Pouillard, “Fashion for All. The Transatlantic Fashion Business and the Development of a Popular Press Culture during the Interwar Period,” Journalism Studies, 14 (2013): 5, 716–29. 54 “To Show Use of Statistics in Style Control,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 18, 1929, Section 1, 1 and 20. 55 Freda Permisohn, “Definite Forecasting Seen as Possible for Short Periods,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 19, 1929, 13, 22. 56 Walter A. Friedman, Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 57 “Tobé, Fashionist, Adds Six New Accounts,” Women´s Wear Daily, June 3, 1932, 20. 58 Typescript on Tobé’s biography. 59 “Tobé Works with Pathé on Picture,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 19, 1934, 31. 60 Typescript on Tobé’s biography. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 “Are You Cashing in on the ‘War Work’ Bags?” Fashion Report from Tobé, January 15, 1942, 8A; “Have You Seen the Beautiful New ‘Victory Corsages’ by Lydia?” Fashion Report from Tobé, January 27, 1944, 13A. 64 Trivette, “Fashion’s Future via Fashion’s History.” 65 Véronique Pouillard, “Recasting Paris Fashion: Haute Couture and Design Management in the Postwar Era,” in The Enterprise of Culture. The European Fashion System around the World, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Véronique Pouillard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018 forthcoming). 66 Roshco, The Rag Race, 25–6. 67 Norma M. Rantisi, “The Ascendance of New York Fashion,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 1 (March 2004): 95. 68 AFAP (Agence Française pour la Productivité), “Les Relations entre les Industries et la Presse de Mode aux Etats-Unis,” May 1955, French National Archives, AJ/81/64. Also in L’industrie du vêtement féminin, 138 (May 1956): 22. 69 Thierry Maillet, “Histoire de la médiation entre textile et mode en France: des échantillonneurs aux bureaux de style (1825–1975)” (PhD thesis, EHESS, 2013); Sophie Chapdelaine de Montvalon, Le beau pour tous (Paris: L’Iconoclaste, 2009). 70 AFAP, “Les Relations entre les Industries et la Presse de Mode aux Etats-Unis.”

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71 Boyo, “A Soft Voice Rings Loud in Fashions.” 72 Milton P. Brown and Malcolm P. McNair, foreword to The Tobé Lectures in Retail Distribution (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 1959), v. 73 Ibid. 74 “Advanced Retail Management I,” in The Tobé Lectures in Retail Distribution at the Harvard Business School (Boston, MA: Harvard University, 1957). 75 Ibid. 76 Pouillard, “The Rise of Fashion Forecasting and Fashion Public Relations, 1920– 1940”; Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 77 Advanced Retail Management I, Tobé Lecture Series, 1957. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 “TOBE,” accessed August 31, 2016, http://www.tobereport.com/scripts/tobe-resume. pdf. 86 “Tobe Firm to Carry on Under Her Associates,” Women’s Wear Daily 105, no. 126, December 28, 1962, Section 1, 1 and 14. 87 “Tobe Firm due to be Acquired by Six on Executive Staff,” Women’s Wear Daily, January 10, 1963, 2. 88 Typescript on Tobé’s biography. 89 Leslie J. Ghize, interview by Karen J. Trivette, New York, fall 2014. 90 Ibid. 91 Marybeth Martorana, interview by Karen J. Trivette, New York, May 4, 2016. 92 Marybeth Martorana and Leslie J. Ghize, interview by Karen J. Trivette, New York, June 8, 2016.

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PART TWO

GOING INTERNATIONAL

4 FROM WINDOW DRESSER TO FASHION FORECASTER David Wolfe of the Doneger Group Tells How He Got Started in Trends

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 he Doneger Group is a world-leading consulting business that provides the fashion and retail industries with information on global market trends and merchandising strategies. With offices on Seventh Avenue in New York, this family company is headed by Abraham “Abbey” Doneger, the second-generation owner-operator. Creative director David Wolfe joined the firm in 1991 to launch D3 Doneger Design Direction, a color and trend forecasting service. Although the firm has numerous competitors in trend forecasting, few of them have successfully combined trend services and merchandising services.1 Merchandising is a tradition at Doneger. Founded in 1946, the firm started off as the Lasersohn-Doneger resident buying office, serving womenswear retailers around the country that needed a lifeline to the Seventh Avenue garment industry. Rather than sending someone to New York to pick out several dozen dresses, a store in the Midwest would telephone the buying office and ask them to place the order. In 1973, Abbey Doneger took over the business from his father (the sole owner since 1964, operating as Henry Doneger Associates) and initiated a program of growth through acquisition. The firm purchased eighteen companies between 1980 and 2006, including merchandising competitors that provided a toehold in the department-store business and other firms that provided access to the menswear and childrenswear markets. Two of its notable acquisitions were the retail reporting service Tobé in 2005 and the trend service Here & There in 2006.2 Abbey Doneger helped the firm transcend the outdated image of a resident buying office to become a modern consultancy that specializes in fashion merchandising, advising, and trend forecasting. Today, the company helps clients develop collections, but does very little buying on their behalf. When Davie Wolfe arrived, the Doneger Group (thus renamed in 1989) was providing fashion advisory services to 900 American stores.3 In 2005, the majority of its customers were independent specialty stores, although in recent years the client base has evolved with the retail landscape and includes national chains such as Target and overseas customers,

David Wolfe, interview by Regina Lee Blaszczyk, New York, November 28, 2016, for The Enterprise of Culture Oral History Programme. Blaszczyk selected the excerpts from the transcript, edited them, and wrote the historical introduction.

particularly in Latin America. In this transition, Doneger has gone from being a user of trend forecasts to being a producer of trend forecasts. The firm creates printed trend reports and color cards, but it also has a Web portal that gives subscribers access to digital information.4 Wolfe has played an important role in Doneger’s diversification into trend forecasting. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, during the Second World War, he grew up in Ashtabula, a nearby town on Lake Erie. A talented artist, he began copying the fashion sketches in local newspaper advertisements and subscribed to Vogue with youthful dreams to become a fashion illustrator. A trip to a modeling agency in New York City with his sister convinced Wolfe that his future indeed lay in fashion. Back in Ohio, he pursued his ambition at Carlisle’s, a small department-store chain. “I absolutely had what I think is the best training anyone could possibly have for what turned out to be my career,” he recalled. For a while, he worked as Carlisle’s window dresser. “I did the concepting of the windows, choosing the clothes and working with the display department. I wrote advertising copy and wheedled my way into doing the fashion illustration because I thought the freelance illustrator they were using in Chicago did not understand fashion.” At Carlisle’s, David met his wife-to-be, Sheila, a British woman who worked as the cosmetics buyer. Recognizing his unusual ability with a sketchpad, Sheila had great hopes for her future husband’s career and encouraged him to develop his artistic talent. In 1964, the lovebirds departed for the UK, where the 1960s were just starting to swing. Sheila nudged David to go around to some bigwigs to show off his sketches. Dressed in Carnaby Street gear with his portfolio in hand, Wolfe visited Anne Knight, a legendary merchandiser at Fortnum & Mason, “the most chic store in the world.” The timing was fortuitous. Knight had just fired her advertising agency, signed a contract with British Vogue for a new ad campaign, and finalized a deal with the French fashion designer Emanuel Ungaro to be the first store to carry his new ready-to-wear line. That same day, Wolfe found himself on a plane to Paris on his way to sketch Ungaro’s designs and launched a lucrative career as one of London’s most desirable fashion illustrators. He was soon hobnobbing with the beautiful people and earning about $150,000 per year. This chapter draws on an oral history with David Wolfe at the Doneger Group offices in New York, conducted by Regina Lee Blaszczyk in November 2016. The edited passages from the interview follow Wolfe as he explains how he entered the new field of trend forecasting with IM International (a company discussed in Chapter 5) and how he fared with another London-based trend agency, The Fashion Service, before landing at the Doneger Group. *** Regina Lee Blaszczyk (RLB): What made you shift from illustrating to forecasting? David Wolfe (DW): One of my problems, I think, is I couldn’t ever focus on one aspect. I liked writing. I liked sketching. I liked designing. I liked performing. I liked giving lectures. Forecasting solved that problem. In effect, when I created my own fashion forecasting job, it suited me perfectly because it allowed me to do all of those things. I was great friends with the London editor of Women’s Wear Daily, a woman named Jo-Ann Jenkins. She was really, really very savvy about fashion, and she was a little birdlike lady—and terrific. I loved her. She was very aware that I had Sheila’s two daughters, and we had our daughter at that time. Lots of people liked the fact

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that I was a young dad and they were all trying to find me jobs so that I would be sure to feed the children. She was one of them. We became social friends, and she was responsible for me going to all these half-baked parties that I never really joined in with but that I observed. I would do sketches of who wore what at Annabel’s [an exclusive member’s-only nightclub in Mayfair, established in 1963, which caters to royalty, pop stars, and film stars]. Jo-Ann said, “Okay, I’ve met this woman named Leigh Rudd. She starting a company, and she’s looking for an illustrator. Do you want to see her?” I said, “Oh, sure,” and so I went and met Leigh, who had just split with her business partner, Nigel French. In terms of dividing their assets (which I don’t think were very much at all), he agreed that she could have the name “IM International.” When she hired me as her illustrator, I thought that was so funny. I said, “Well, what do you do when people ask you what IM stands for?” She said, “IMage and IMagination.” I thought, “Oh god, this is IMpact. This is crazy.” Leigh was working out of a rented apartment on Cadogan Square, and she said, “I want to start this newsletter.” She had all kinds of notes—little scribbled things. She had freelance kids running around, and it was a shambles [Figure 5.6]. I said, “Sure I’ll do it. Give me all the stuff.” I remember going home that night and putting together the first IM retail report because I was used to organizing information, and this stuff was very much like that. She and Jo-Ann became close friends, and Jo-Ann quit her job for Women’s Wear Daily and joined Leigh as a partner. They were like an oil-and-water kind of combination, but it was a great idea and Jo-Ann had a lot of contacts. They created a nice little report, and I illustrated the first couple of months. But being me, I had to get more involved than I should have. I would illustrate each issue in an evening because I was the fastest illustrator in the world. I helped them organize the flow of the book and that sort of thing. IM International Design really was like a design handbook, but it was a heartbeat ahead of any news that was happening in America. As customers became more comfortable with the European scene, they would appear in London and want to go shopping with someone. So IM International became more of a consultancy, but not as formally as things are these days. RLB: So we’re in the period 1967 to 1977. In America, the department stores were still somewhat healthy; they hadn’t quite hit a crisis level. But in New York, you start to see the emergence of the first brands. For example, Ralph Lauren and Anne Klein are important figures by the early to mid-1970s. Were those figures influencing you, or making demands on you in any way? DW: For a long time, we didn’t even come to the New York collections because they were so insignificant. But then I realized that it would help me fine-tune my timing if I could see what the American market had picked up from Europe or from their own forecasting services. It was a confirmation of “Oh, I’m on the right track” or “It looks like too many people are doing tartan, so that’s going to decline next season.” RLB: If we look at forecasting in the United States in the 1970s, we can see that Condé Nast had the House and Garden Color Program.5 That program was spearheaded by the color stylist Faber Birren, and it was based on quantitative data. Did quantitative efforts like this have any influence on you?

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DW: Something that I don’t believe in is mathematically created forecasting. I don’t think that can happen. I may be hopelessly old-fashioned or naive, but I do believe that there has to be, at least, a soupçon of creativity in it. You can’t just look at the buildup of sales and say, “Okay, the pussycat blouse is going up, up, up—and so let’s double our order for next year.” No, it can either go up, it can be flat, or it can start to decline. The decline can be overnight—a crash—or it can be a slow decline. So I think you have to factor in all of those things. I think that people who are trying to do forecasting as a numbers game can do basic merchandising, but they can’t really factor in something like the insanity of the Gucci phenomenon right now which is purposely ugly and purposely challenging all our established aesthetic. I was aware that lots of people were trying to use quantitative data, and it seemed, to me, parallel to the general problem that every forecast company had. They were forecasting what the designers had just done in Europe. To me, that’s not a real forecast. So many people were doing it that way that it became a reality. They killed the golden goose. RLB: Can we talk about The Fashion Service? DW: The name of that company, I thought, was brilliant because we wanted to do a generic kind of “brown bag” trend forecast and make it absolutely fashionable but realistic. We kind of succeeded but it was a real, real big challenge. The Fashion Service [TFS] kind of overlapped with IM International, which was getting ready to move to a presence in America because Leigh Rudd, who was always very, very ahead of the world by several laps, understood that American fashion was going to be an important, global source and she wanted to take the company to New York. I was not ready to move to New York at that point, so I gathered a group of people that I considered the most talented and created The Fashion Service. The person who was handling our finances was Michel Arnaud, who happened to be the runway photographer for British Vogue. His wife was Linda Bellarian, a New Yorker that I had great respect for. I pirated her from the Echo scarf company to come and work with me in London. We had a couple, including the man who had been editor of International Textiles, John Barry, and his wife. I put together a team that I thought was terrific. At the beginning, I continued to work much as I had been doing at IM International. I simply sat down with a blank sheet of sketch paper and drew something. As time went on, the artwork for TFS got very, very precious, and the croquis I did for them are probably the best work I ever did [Figure 4.1]. In effect, by the 1990s, we knew that packaging, marketing, and that kind of stuff was were the action was at. TFS produced a trend book, a color forecast, and a fabric report. Our customers were some of the bigger companies, including the emerging brands. Our clients also included retailers with private labels because we could supply the missing creativity. They were merchants creating lines, and as merchants, they only knew what sold and what didn’t sell. They couldn’t even make good educated guesses about what would sell. I think I’m a born teacher, and I love trying to explain to people how to make things work. I would have long meetings about the fashion pendulum, and how it goes back and forth but keeps moving ahead as it goes back and forth. One of the

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FIGURE 4.1  David Wolfe’s sketches for “Nomads,” the North African ethnic trend. From The Fashion Service, Forecast, winter 1990 issue. Collection of David Wolfe; courtesy of the Doneger Group.

things that was so interesting to me was to see a cause and effect because that is what fashion people have trouble understanding. We had the Christian Lacroix poof skirt, and it was selling like hotcakes until 1987 when the stock market crashed. The bubble burst, and you couldn’t give away a poof skirt. RLB: Was The Fashion Service a successful business? Did you continue to operate your own freelance illustrating business at the same time? DW: I had to because TFS didn’t make enough money. Unfortunately, I have never been interested enough in money to track it. It seemed to me that we weren’t making much money because we didn’t take any salaries. That’s one of the things that people don’t understand about the forecasting business. It’s very, very expensive, or it was, to gather all the information you need. It’s very easy now because of the Internet. I spend most of my time looking at stuff online, and I do a better job than I’ve ever done in understanding what’s going on. RLB: Where did you do your reconnaissance missions in the 1980s? DW: We were still going to Saint-Tropez at that point, every summer. For the collections, I would go to Paris once a month from London to observe but not actually to buy. We started to go to Asia, but that was usually when we would get somebody who was going to pay for it because the cost was almost prohibitive.

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The years 1975 to 1985 were probably the busiest and most productive times with the most travel. I was traveling thirty-five weeks of the year. I would make a lot of appearances. I was the spokesperson to the fashion groups and to the seasonal shows in New York and in Los Angeles and that sort of thing. We would offer a very opinionated view of the collections, and take that on the road to the secondary markets like Chicago and Dallas. We would meet with the staff at Marshall Field [the large Midwestern department store based in Chicago], and make a presentation. We would spend an entire day with Target [a major discount retail chain based in Minneapolis]. That was the formula that became more and more important because we were able to tailor the information specifically to the customers. That was the difference between the beginning and the end. At the beginning, people understood what to do with the information. I think the actual job descriptions changed. I think the responsibility to produce numbers attracted a different kind of person. As time went on, we suddenly found ourselves—and it is still this way today—having to handhold and really say, “Right, that blue sweater that you told us sold so well last summer is going to be replaced by a blue/green sweater. Be ready for it.” RLB: What happened to The Fashion Service, and how did you find your way to Doneger? DW: TFS divorced me. I was financially strapped all the time we were doing TFS because my personal expenses just kept going higher and higher with children’s school fees and all that kind of stuff. I was doing a lot of freelance work and then I got the idea, because TFS didn’t do childrenswear and I thought maybe there was an opportunity to do a children’s trend forecasting thing. I announced that I was going to do that and it was not going to be part of TFS. They evidently took umbrage and, without any discussion or anything, they simply pulled the rug out from under me and said, “We don’t want to work with you anymore.” So I tried to find the assets of the company, which were not a lot I’m sure, but there must have been something, and it was at that point that I realized that I had been gypped really. The friendships all fell apart. The partners then fought with each other, and it got to be really ugly. When TFS was just about to close down, Abbey Doneger bought it. One of the freelance things I’d been doing was to work a couple of days in the month with Florence Newcomb, the fashion director of the Doneger Group. I got to know the players, and I was fascinated with the company because I knew, if I wanted to make money, I had to become an expert on mass marketing and discount marketing. As I started to research, I realized that Doneger worked with all of them, so I had access to them. I always told everybody that joining Doneger was the best thing that could happen to a fashion forecaster because you’re suddenly playing with a full deck. I had actual factual figures and information about what was selling, what wasn’t selling, and what people were planning on selling. For every other forecasting company it’s not the same because they aren’t privy to the privileged information, so all they can do is shop. If they see a rack of pink blouses, how do they know whether the pink blouses didn’t sell at all or did they sell so well that they were pulled in from another store and all that kind of real, in-the-trenches information. I find it fascinating, but it can’t replace creativity. In the early 1990s, the Doneger Group still had a lot of mama-papa store clients. Doneger did the same things they’re doing now. But now we do it mostly for giant conglomerates, and we also travel a lot to work with people. We’re getting bigger and

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bigger in South America and the Middle East. We do what I think of as consultancies; very, very special things like a special PowerPoint presentation for a client, just predicated on their business, their needs, and their track record. RLB: Was there a moment when the trend forecasting business started to change and lose its excitement or become more competitive? DW: I think it became overcrowded and people ceased to trust creativity. I think that’s really what happened. God—and I remember this phrase because I just thought it was so asinine—they wanted “proven newness.” Clients wanted a trend to be forecast based on something that they’d already experienced, so it had a selling track record that they could rely on. This was the Americans, mostly, and behind America would be Milan and then Paris. London, I think to this day, is still the most fertile ground for innovation and creativity.

Notes 1 Jean Palmieri, “Flying without Buying,” Daily News Record 35, no. 7 (2005): 144; David Moin, “Doneger Group at 60 Adapting Is Key,” Women’s Wear Daily, November 6, 2006.

2 Ibid.; “In Brief: Doneger Addition,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 18, 2006. 3 Trish Donnally, “Dress for Success in the ’90s Means Wearing a Little Dress,” Baltimore Sun, November 28, 1990; Moin, “Doneger Group at 60.”

4 Palmieri, “Flying without Buying.” 5 On the history of the House and Garden Color Program, see Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012), 237–40.

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5 WHAT DO BABY BOOMERS WANT? How the Swinging Sixties Became the Trending Seventies Regina Lee Blaszczyk

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n 2005, Women’s Wear Daily, the major newspaper for the American fashion business, evaluated the impressive buying power of the Baby Boomers. This generation was entering the “empty nest” phase of the lifecycle and had more disposable income than ever before. The Baby Boomers were at the peak of their earning potential and their mortgages were paid off. The reporter wondered if Baby Boomers would spend their money on fashion—as many of them had done for the past fifty years.1 The Baby Boomer generation is most often identified as the population cohort born between 1946 and 1964 and is divided into two groups: Leading-Edge Boomers and Trailing-Edge Boomers. The first group, the Leading-Edge Boomers, consists of people born between 1946 and 1953, while the second group, the Trailing-Edge Boomers, was born between 1954 and 1964. Leading-Edge Boomers were in their teens and twenties during the 1960s. They experienced the Vietnam War, the modern feminist movement, the birth of environmentalism, the transformative music of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and the fashion revolution that sprung from the King’s Road and Carnaby Street in London.2 Some of the Trailing-Edge Boomers were preteens in the late 1960s; they experienced the tail end of these events and entered young adulthood from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. As they came of age during the most prosperous era in history, the Baby Boomers created a vast market for youth-specific merchandise, including pop records and teen fashions. Their tastes were highly individualistic, and their expectations wreaked havoc with tradition, particularly in clothing and fashion. Baby Boomers loved nothing better than to mix-andmatch a bit of the old with a bit of new, creating their own looks and subcultural styles, such as the surfer boy and the bobby-soxer or the Mod and the hippie. Their overarching preference was for casual, informal looks that suited their active lifestyles.3 This chapter examines the rise of youth fashion in the United States and Great Britain in the mid-twentieth century with reference to its influence on the methods and techniques of trend forecasting. Bookshelves of fashion history are filled with stories of “Swinging London,” with an emphasis on the design and retailing innovations of leaders such as Mary Quant and John Stephen. This brief study takes another approach. It zigzags across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and North America to examine women’s teen fashion in the Anglo-American context and to consider how British style was received in the United States. Ultimately, it homes in on the hidden story of intuition among the innovators of

the London Look, and considers the important role of intuition to a new breed of fashion forecasters that emerged during the Swinging Sixties. In many respects, it revisits a subject close to the hearts of the pioneer American and British color forecasters H. Ledyard Towle, Margaret Hayden Rorke, and Robert F. Wilson, the main actors in Chapter 2. Here we see how a new generation, who were well aware of statistical market research, opted to trust their raw instincts as they anticipated new fashion futures on behalf of their customers.

American merchandising and the teenage consumer By the early twentieth century, American retailers were internationally renowned as cutting-edge merchandisers. This reputation stemmed in part from the innovations of merchandising pioneers such as John Wanamaker, Marshall Field, and the latter’s protégé, Harry Gordon Selfridge, who transplanted American showmanship to London. By the 1920s, some prominent New York stores had established in-house style bureaus and vested them with the responsibility for fashion forecasting. One such store was Lord & Taylor, a fashion retailer on Fifth Avenue, which had a bureau of fashion and decoration to assist the buyers in selecting merchandise. Dorothy Shaver, the farsighted merchandiser who later became the Lord & Taylor’s president, cut her teeth as a stylist at the bureau. It was the bureau’s responsibility to keep up with current developments, link them to fashions of the past, and forecast trends that were likely to ring true with consumers. The buyer and stylist worked together as one mind. With the bureau’s fashion forecasts in hand, the buyer’s job was simplified, and he or she was better positioned to select goods that would sell.4 American retailers also applied their merchandising skills to new market niches. The young female fashion consumer first emerged as a market segment in the interwar years, and American stores developed special methods for gathering information about her.5 The Second World War was a boon to this effort, as demonstrated by the collegiate and teen-oriented merchandising programs at two major retailers: the Jordan Marsh Company, a department store, and William Filene’s Sons Company, a specialty fashion store, both in Boston (Figure 5.1). During the war, as men left higher education to join the military, middle-class women filled their slots in colleges and universities, and the demand for collegiate attire soared. Filene’s had a small shop near Wellesley College outside of Boston and a Young Bostonian Shop in the flagship store in Boston that targeted this group, but there was room for more. In 1941, a new Filene’s College Shop was opened in the downtown store. The College Shop hosted special fashion “clinics” wherein college-age consumers met with store merchandisers to explain their fashion preferences.6 High-school girls emerged as another group for target marketing and informal consumer research. The Jordan Marsh Company created Jordan’s New Fashion Center, which catered to teenagers with age-specific fashion shows, beauty advice, and the Marsha Jordan beauty contest. Each year, the newly crowned winner received a fresh wardrobe and joined the store’s teen fashion advisory council, which helped Jordan’s buyers and merchandisers understand tastes and trends among high-school students. In 1945, Filene’s started a similar teen program. The girls on Filene’s High School Fashion Board participated in the

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FIGURE 5.1  The Jordan Marsh Company targeted teen consumers with fashion clinics like this one for college girls co-sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. Cover of program, Jordan Marsh Presents the Mademoiselle College Clinic, August 1945. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk.

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Annual High School Fashion Show and Coke Party, modeling clothes that were illustrated in Seventeen, a new fashion magazine for teens, while drinking Coca-Cola. These efforts were expressly designed to allow store buyers and merchandisers to develop face-to-face relationships with the new teen consumer group and gather information about their needs and expectations.7 Over the next two decades, the young consumer grew in importance as the two cohorts of Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 entered their teen years. By the late 1950s, children born during the war and the first of the Leading-Edge Boomers had matured into teen customers. Retailers increasingly catered to this demographic group with “junior departments” that sold dresses, suits, and coats in youthful styles and sizes.8 The easy-going apparel style known as “sportswear,” promoted by American garment manufacturers and stores like Lord & Taylor in the interwar years, gained further impetus from the burgeoning teen market. The Baby Boomer enjoyed putting together odd bits—a pleated plaid skirt, an Orlon acrylic sweater, black-and-white saddle shoes, and grandmother’s funny old bracelet—to create her own unique style. American teenagers were devoted to music, sports, helping their mothers in the kitchen, and most especially fashion. On behalf of Seventeen magazine, one market research firm, the Eugene Gilbert Research Company, completed a survey on “The Teen-Age Girl: 1960.” The United States had 9.75 million teenage girls, representing 10 percent of the female population. They spent $3.2 billion annually on clothes, accounting for 20 percent of women’s apparel purchases.9 The back-to-school market was crucial. In September and October 1960 alone, teenage girls spent some $719 million on clothing; in the same period a year later, sales increased by nearly 20 percent.10 By this time, manufacturers and retailers began to divide the youth market into three entirely separate customer groups: the pre-teen (age 10–13 years); the teen (age 14–17); and the college student (age 17–19).11 By the mid-1960s, everyone in American retailing was chattering about the importance of the teen market. In 1965, Women’s Wear Daily cited a report on this group by the National Education Association in Washington. It seemed that money was burning a hole in teenagers’ pockets. In 1963, the 22.5 million teens in the United States—about 12 percent of the population—spent $11 million of their own money (earned in part-time jobs and given to them as allowances) on “goods and services designed to satisfy their special needs and whims.” One economist at the US Department of Labor commented: “There’s no doubt about it. The teenager is an important force in the economy, both in terms of what the youngsters spend on their own and also in the ways they influence family spending decisions.”12

Famously, the British youth quake On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the British fashion business was slower on the uptake with the teen market, but by the 1960s and early 1970s London was setting the pace with new styles and with new methods for psyching out teenage desires. As British ready-to-wear expanded in the interwar years, the manufacturers of women’s garments offered the famous “tailor-made”—a type of factory-produced two-piece suit or coat, form-fitting, and often in

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tweed—in sizes for “ladies” (adults), “matrons” (seniors), and “maids” (teens and preteens).13 During the immediate postwar years, Fashions and Fabrics (formerly Drapers’ Organiser, the London-based trade journal discussed in Chapter 2), highlighted the importance of the teen consumer, showcasing merchandising techniques from New York stores.14 But the necessity to rebuild the war-weary nation, and the continuation of clothes rationing for some years, focused British clothing retailers like Marks and Spencer Ltd (M&S) on the design and production of practical everyday fashion for the whole family.15 The emphasis was on good value, on clothing that was built to last, rather than on cutting-edge style. Design innovation came, famously, from young London entrepreneurs who recognized the yearning for more individualistic attire among young consumers. Two major countercultural shopping districts—Carnaby Street, near Piccadilly, and the King’s Road in Chelsea—are legendary in fashion history, and only a few salient details need to be recounted here.16 In 1955, two eccentrics who had met at Goldsmith’s College School of Art—the fledgling designer Mary Quant and her business-oriented husband-to-be Alexander Plunket Greene—and a third partner, Archie McNair, opened a boutique called Bazaar on the King’s Road.17 Catering to the artsy crowd in Chelsea who wanted something fresh after having endured Utility clothing and rationing coupons, Quant initially stocked her store with “imports from Italy and Austria which were really newsy,” but then convinced the London wholesale clothiers to make women’s apparel and accessories of her own design. By the time Women’s Wear Daily first reported on Quant in 1959, she was supervising the production of a thirty-person workshop, managing an eleven-person office, and watching over an enlarged retail operation. A second Bazaar sat across the road from Harrods in Knightsbridge, and, like the original store, it offered the “Chelsea Look” to “British Beatniks.” The merchandise, which came to define the “Chelsea Girl,” included tweed knickerbockers with opaque silk stockings, a straight dress made from the striped wool fabric normally used in menswear, well-styled tailored suits, smart leather coats, handmade kid handbags, and “the cutest lingerie.” When queried about her sources of inspiration, Quant said her ideas came from “all the things happening around me.” Her trousers, for example, were influenced by everything from little girls’ gym tunics to clergyman’s attire to cowboy’s leg coverings. The clothing worn by people in the park, in the theater, and in films all fed into her thinking. Most importantly, wrote Women’s Wear Daily, Quant was brave enough to throw “Paris . . . out the window.”18 Back in the United States, American womenswear manufacturers and retailers had trouble keeping up with the fast-moving London scene. To be sure, a youthful casual aesthetic for clothing had been developing on the West Coast since the interwar years, and that industry’s major trade association, the Men’s Apparel Guild in California (MAGIC), created trade journals, trade shows, advertising campaigns, and retail promotions to advance the “Made in California” look, mainly in menswear with some attention to womenswear.19 Despite this effort, many department stores around the country fell short on youth promotions because they were stretched on resources. Postwar prosperity allowed more people of different ages, ethnicities, and incomes to join the ranks of American consumer society, and as a result new market segments emerged. In womenswear alone, all types of consumer groups—misses, matrons, brides, debutantes, society women, outsized ladies, career women, college girls, teens, and preteens—clamored for special attention and contributed to the tremendous financial squeeze on department stores.20

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Large urban department stores, which had enjoyed their heyday in the 1920s as luxury shopping destinations, were in midst of a long slow decline, struggling to compete in an evolving retail environment that downplayed service and style in favor of lower prices.21 Fierce competition came from specialty fashion chains such as Lerner Shops (now New York & Company) and The Limited, national giants such as Sears, Roebuck and Company, and the no-frills discount stores that had cropped up on cheap land in the suburbs and on the outskirts of smaller towns. Many urban department stores opened branches in the suburbs, either large stand-alone stores or anchors in the new enclosed malls that were heralded as the future of American retailing. In this context, merchandising practices that had been innovative in the 1920s and the 1940s were out of date by the 1960s. Teenagers would rather listen to records or go to a drive-in movie than attend fashion clinics or compete in a department store’s beauty pageant. Harold Udoff, president of the Atlas Buying Corporation or ABC—a company that sourced merchandise on behalf of retailers to achieve scale economies—thought most American sportswear departments to be “relics of the past and not parts of the contemporary scene.” He encouraged stores to set up sportswear sections geared to the teen culture of self-expression. He believed that Baby Boomers were “adventurous” consumers who went for “the bold, the striking, the offbeat.” It was imperative that retailers catch on and catch up.22 Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Greene were quick to assess the gap between the American fashion scene and British youth culture on visit to the United States around 1960.23 Their first exposure to American fashion insiders was an encounter with the nation’s leading fashion forecaster, Tobé Coller Davis. As we saw in Chapter 3, in 1926 “Miss Tobé,” as she was known, had established a New York-based fashion-reporting agency that served retailers around the country, and in the postwar years she had a near monopoly on fashion prediction in America. The Tobé empire was built on transatlantic connections between New York and Paris, and pivoted on the re-interpretation of haute couture styles for readyto-wear retailers, mainly the family-owned department stores that dominated the central business districts of most cities and large towns. The major chains, including Federated Department Stores (of which Filene’s was a part), subscribed to the Fashion Report from Tobé and to foreign advisory services. In addition, stores in the Federated chain looked to the Associated Merchandising Corporation (a buying organization established by Filene executives earlier in the century) to study the market and provide fashion forecasts for apparel, accessories, and home furnishings (Figure 5.2). The AMC fashion forecast illustrated and described ready-to-wear trends for the upcoming season as an aid to helping stores plan displays, merchandising activities, promotions, and newspaper advertisements. “In the background of 7th Avenue fashion is not only the Voice of PARIS, with an occasional reference to Spain,” noted the 1956 AMC forecast, “but the American way of LIFE and CULTURE.” The American lifestyle was epitomized by American sportswear, and the AMC forecasters stressed this point.24 By 1960, the sun was setting on the last golden age of haute couture, but Miss Tobé still held Paris in the highest esteem, promoting French fashion in reports to her subscribers and in her syndicated column for the New York Herald Tribune. Those with connections in the New York fashion industry had directed Quant and Plunket Greene to Miss Tobé, alerting the bright-eyed Londoners to her “enormous power” to make or break a trend. Quant detailed the meeting in her autobiography: “We went to see her, taking the few things we had brought with us. We found a little, round frog sitting on an

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FIGURE 5.2  The Associated Merchandising Corporation, a buying organization for a group of major department stores, provided members with fashion advice, here spotlighting ladies’ sportswear that fused European and American styling. AMC Fashion Forecast, Fall & Winter ’56: Women’s, Misses’, Children’s, Men’s and Boys’, Home Furnishings (New York: Associated Merchandising Corporation, 1956), 7–8. Courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library.

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FIGURE 5.2  (continued)

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extraordinary great dais in the middle of a huge office, surrounded by countless specialized experts.”25 The demands of the large American market required Tobé’s forecasting service to track trends for a wide range of apparel and accessories stocked by the department stores and dress shops that constituted its major customers. Quant continued, There was a shoe editor . . . scarf editor . . . jewellery editor . . . underwear editor . . . handbag and glove editor . . . and so on and on. She had somehow acquired the amazing power of a dictator. Manufacturers would go and show her what they were producing and if she liked the things, they were made. She would recommend them to the hundreds of stores who bought her services and she would write them up in her column.26 The doyen of American fashion consultants did not take well to the young Brits who appeared on her doorstep, uninvited. Quant recalled, “Tobe [sic] did not like us one little bit. She looked at our stuff. Then she said one word, ‘Crap!’”27 Belittled, Quant felt like taking the next plane back to London, but Plunket Greene thought the “whole setup was so phoney” and “refused to take her seriously.” The blow was softened when a few of Tobé’s minions followed the couple out of the office and “said they simply loved the things we had shown (‘they were just darling’) and how sad they were that Miss Tobe didn’t approve.” The next day, Plunket Greene bought a copy of the New York Herald Tribune to read Tobé’s column. “It was really a load of rubbish,” Quant wrote. “Things like . . . ‘Tobe says white gloves are always lovely in the spring . . .’ etc. etc.”28 Middle-aged American women—the wives of businessmen, physicians, and politicians— still relished “The Establishment” look and wore white gloves for lunch dates at the country club, as demonstrated by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who was always perfectly attired in French or American couture. Some teenagers had gloves for dress-up occasions, such as Sunday church service or the high-school prom (Figure 5.3). But ensemble dressing— the raison d’être of the Textile Color Card Association of the United States, the subject of Chapter 2—was being relegated to the dustbin of fashion history. No self-respecting Chelsea Girl worried about exactly matching her shoes to her hat, that was for sure. Quant “stopped worrying” and turned her back on Tobé.29 Despite the setback with Tobé, Quant’s designs impressed the editors at Seventeen, which promoted her work, and attracted the attentions of forward-minded managers at the J. C. Penney Company.30 This retailing giant had started as the Golden Rule dry-goods store in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 1902, and mainly served rural markets in the Western part of the United States until after the Second World War. By early 1963, Penney’s was a national chain with 1,684 units in forty-seven states and a sales volume of more than $1.7 billion.31 In a strategic decision to develop more business in large metropolitan areas and their suburbs, Penney’s managers hoped to introduce international fashion through exclusive designer tie-ins.32 Quant was among the first of Penney’s European discoveries. By 1962, Quant was the rising star of youthful women’s fashion on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In the eyes of Women’s Wear Daily, she was the “lodestar of young British rtw [ready-to-wear] designers,” her influence widespread in Britain and “gaining in America.” In London, Fortnum & Mason, the “top snob Mayfair store,” stocked the entire

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FIGURE 5.3  When Mary Quant visited the United States for the first time, she was surprised to learn that American women were expected to wear white gloves for dressup occasions. F. B. S.: French Boot Shop of New Rochelle, Spring and Summer 1961 (New Rochelle, NY: French Boot Shop, 1961). Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk.

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line of Quant’s ready-to-wear, some seventy models. In New York, Lord & Taylor ordered “over 100 units” from her collection as a trial run. Most importantly, Penney’s asked Quant to design a line of Chelsea-style clothing for teenagers who shopped at some of its larger stores in major metropolitan areas.33 Introduced to the press at the British Embassy in Washington in September 1962, the teen wardrobe consisted of two jumpers, two suits, three blouses, a vest, a pair of shorts, and a pair of slacks, all in junior sizes, and all massproduced in England under Quant’s supervision and imported to the United States. The new line of fashions, all color-coordinated in black, white, and red, was sold in a select group of Penney’s stores—sixty-three stores in large suburban areas—commencing in October 1962.34 In the fall of 1963, Penney’s introduced its third Mary Quant collection, aimed at the back-to-school market. In the spring of 1964, the retailer offered a fourth collection in stores and in its first spring/summer mail-order catalog, featuring Quant’s ultra-Mod shells and her romantic ruffled look for dresses and blouses.35 With home sewing being a popular teen hobby, the Butterick Company created patterns for four Mary Quant outfits: a coordinated skirt, jumper, blouse, and skirt; two day-to-evening dresses; and a cocktail sheath dress in short and long models (Figure 5.4).36 When The Beatles visited the United States in early 1964, American girls not only swooned over the good-looking boys but also coveted the Mod clothes worn by John Lennon’s wife, Cynthia, a quintessentially British “bird”: blonde and demure. She wore a back-buttoning slicker from Mary Quant’s Wet Collection that caused a sensation. The designer’s London office was reportedly besieged with letters from America asking for the raingear.37 Because of their fame in the United States, Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Greene were nicknamed the Beatles of fashion, but they were not the only ones. For some time, various branches of the British fashion industry had been trying to expand exports, mainly to the United States. The couturiers in the Fashion House Group of London did their best to stir up foreign business during London Fashion Week. Starting in 1957, the Apparel and Fashion Industries Association had sponsored London Presents, an invitation-only export show for buyers from the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Norway, Canada, and the Netherlands.38 By the mid-1960s, the big push began to pay off. The United States experienced a British fashion invasion, as all kinds of British fashion producers vied for a piece of the American pie: retailers like Burberrys and Wallis Shops, established designers like Digby Morton, and newcomers like the young designer Roger Nelson.39 Nelson, for one, had won the Reldan-Digby Morton Fashion Travel Award from the Royal College of Art and the prestigious Yardley Award as the “outstanding young British designer.” He traveled around the United States promoting his version of the London Look to the twenty-four department stores in the Associated Merchandising Corporation under the auspices of the Reldan-Digby Morton fashion company and the Yardley perfume company.40 The British government created spin with spectacles such as the “London Look” fashion show on the liner Queen Elizabeth, docked in New York harbor, during Buyer’s Week in November 1965.41 Throughout the postwar period, Europe looked to America for economic salvation, first because of the reconstruction dollars that poured into war-torn nations via the European Recovery Program, commonly known as the Marshall Plan, and then as a

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FIGURE 5.4  Mary Quant helped to introduce Mod styling to middle America when she designed Butterick Company patterns for girls who liked to sew. Butterick pattern no. 5007, mid-1960s. Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk; reproduced courtesy of The McCall Pattern Company Inc. and Mary Quant.

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potential export market for manufactured goods. Great Britain, like the other European nations, desperately needed American dollars to pay back loans and to buy food and raw materials. The British government strongly encouraged the exportation of British-made goods to the United States. The textile industry was the nation’s largest exporter, and its most important source of foreign currency.42 As part of the textile industry, fashion exporters like Mary Quant were bringing coveted dollars into the British economy, while building the reputation for Mod fashion and further stimulating the American appetite for British designs. Across the English Channel, the French ready-to-wear industry began to crawl out from the shadow of haute couture and enjoyed a 10 percent increase in sales between 1961 and 1962. In the latter year, French ready-to-wear manufacturers, working under the umbrella of the Fédération des industries du vêtement féminin, started gunning for a larger share of the US market. They added a special American section to the Paris ready-to-wear showings in November 1962 and held a “French Fashion Week” in New York and San Francisco in January 1963.43 By 1966, a British maker-up called Steinberg and Sons, which sewed apparel for brands like Alexon (a favorite label for department stores and high-street dress shops), Mary Quant’s Ginger Group, Youngest Norman Hartnell ready-to-wear, and others, looked to establish a subsidiary with Jean-Claude Gaubert, a young Paris designer whose clothes had proven popular with the Gimbel Brothers’ department store in the United States.44 All eyes were fixed on the rapidly expanding American market. Penney’s had demonstrated that hip European fashion could find a market among young Americans. Between 1963 and 1966, riding on its success with Mary Quant, Penney’s initiated contracts with Mitzou Izquierdo of Madrid, a Spanish couturier known for her innovative use of leather; John Michael Ingram, the menswear designer-entrepreneur who dressed London “peacocks”; and two French designers—Victorie, previously a mannequin for Christian Dior and the directrice for Yves Saint Laurent’s couture house, and Ariel, who had spent a year as an exchange student in New Jersey—as part of the expansion of the Young International Designer Collections.45 The plan was to launch each line in the European city that inspired it. In tribute to Victorie and to Ariel, in January 1967 Penney’s feted the young Parisians with a pre-launch party at Maxim’s, the outré Art Nouveau restaurant just up the street from the Place de la Concorde.46 Despite the enormous publicity, not everyone approved of the new youthful fashions. By mid-1966, Women’s Wear Daily had soured on Penney’s young international theme, thinking that the whole affair lacked originality and spontaneity.47 Tobé Coller Davis died in 1962 before Mod fully flowered, but other members of the fashion establishment shared her distaste. According to the fashion columnist at the Financial Times, Continental retailers faulted British merchandise on two fronts; it contained “far too much fashion and not enough clothes” and, evoking the “mutton-dressed-as-lamb” metaphor, it was “too determinedly youthful.”48 The celebrated New York sportswear designer Bonnie Cashin, who was in London for a retrospective exhibition of her drawings, lashed out against young Britons for their “shrill” designs. The infuriated fashion editor at London’s Sun newspaper retaliated: “She talks like a middle-aged American tourist tut-tutting miniskirts through her rhinestone spectacles.” Londoners had heard this type of criticism before, and would “go on hearing it so long as American fashion is ruled by—don’t they call them oldsters?”49

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Apex 1966 By 1966, Mary Quant and her Carnaby Street counterpart, John Stephen, the father of Mod menswear, were at the top their game as fashion creators and boutique innovators. Quant was generally recognized as the inventor of the miniskirt, although, as is often the case among creative people, others came up with similar designs around the same time and also staked their claim as the first.50 Quant was awarded the Order of the British Empire, an OBE, for her contribution to exports, which dovetailed with the ambitions of Prime Minister Harold Wilson to capitalize on London as a pop and fashion center. With characteristic boldness, Quant went to Buckingham Palace in a cream-colored minidress that fell seven inches above the knee, and a matching beret in place of the traditional hat, to receive the award from HRH Queen Elizabeth.51 The London Look seemed to be everywhere in America: in fashion magazines, television commercials for Yardley of London, and retailers high and low (Figure 5.5). In August 1965, John Stephen licensed one prominent Midwestern retailer, the Dayton Company, to run a Mod shop bearing his name and selling his merchandise at its department store in downtown Minneapolis. On opening day of the new John Stephen boutique, one-fourth of the stock “was snapped up by Mod-hungry teenagers—both male and female.”52 After the press lavished praise on Dayton’s, other American stores joined the fray and began to stock British Mod styles. In May 1966, two large American department store chains—R. H. Macy & Company and the May Company—announced a deal with Joseph Gold of Pall Mall to open “Lord John boutiques” in a hundred locations, selling coats, jackets, shirts, and knitwear from Britain.53 By this time, the Mod look had truly penetrated the mass market, where no-frills retailers fed the aspirations of working-class consumers. In the autumn of 1966, one schoolgirl in a New England mill city—the author—bought a coveted pair of white leather go-go boots, à la André Courrèges, from a now-defunct discounter called Zayre, and a Simplicity pattern for sewing her first pair of bellbottoms in a flower-power fabric. In London, teens who could not afford the boutique prices of the King’s Road got their Chelsea Girl miniskirts from C&A Modes, which paid cash to the makers-up in the East End for knock-offs of the latest styles, selling them at rock-bottom prices to fashionhungry consumers who bought a mini one week, a shell top the next, a crocheted cap the third week, and vinyl boots at the end of the month to complete the look. As the boutiques of the King’s Road and the Kensington High Street generated edgy womenswear styles and makers-up of the East End copied them, the cycle began anew.54 But as Women’s Wear Daily noted in mid-1966, Mod London, the city made into a globally famous fashion center by Quant and Stephen, had started to lose some of its luster. “Swinging London” was now “merely a term for the travel agent to use as once he used to sell the ‘changing of the Guard’ at Buckingham Palace.” The names of Quant and fellow designers Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin (Foale and Tuffin) and John Bates (who created memorable outfits for the actress Diana Rigg to wear as Emma Peel in the TV show The Avengers), Queen fashion magazine, the Beatles, and the hair stylist Vidal Sassoon (who gave Quant her distinctive fringed bob), were household words among young fashion consumers, their achievements legendary.55 Quant and Stephen were the doyens of Swinging London, poised to share their wisdom on the youth market as they contemplated their next ventures.

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FIGURE 5.5  By the late 1960s, British Mod styling had influenced mass-market designs, as shown by this advertising booklet for knitwear patterns. Easy-to-Make Fashions in Rav-on 50% Antron 50% Sayelle (Illinois). Collection of Regina Lee Blaszczyk.

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Forecast 1968 In London in the autumn of 1967, Mary Quant and John Stephen participated in a panel on the “Mod, Mod World” at a five-day executive seminar, sponsored by the US-based Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, on a prescient topic: “Forecast: 1968/World in Perspective.” The audience of 130 businessmen, publishers, editors, and politicians from America and Britain heard the two young entrepreneurs give their perspective on the famous London youth quake. Stephen attributed his success on Carnaby Street to “creating a want, not just fulfilling it. The young are always looking for newness and excitement. We directed their search for clothes, helped them find excitement in the way they dressed.” Quant spoke from her experience in womenswear, accessories, and cosmetics. She believed that British designers had been able to innovate with young fashions because the UK was a relatively small market and little capital was needed to start a business.56 While celebrating entrepreneurship, Quant chided the establishment for wearing fashion blinders, targeting market researchers in particular.57 Back in 1956, the British market researcher Mark Abrams had begun to publish reports on two new demographic segments: working-class consumers and young consumers. Before the war, middle-class consumers, which made up only 30 percent of the UK population, accounted for about two-thirds of all clothing purchases. By 1955, however, mid-market shoppers were playing second fiddle to working-class consumers, which as the “backbone of the market” accounted for 60 percent of apparel purchases. Another striking change was the rise of young consumers, aged fifteen to thirty-four. Although these youngsters totaled just over a third of the British population, they purchased 40 percent of men’s shirts and ties, and 50 percent of ladies’ lingerie and nylon stockings.58 By the late 1950s, some high-street multiples, such as Littlewoods and Dorothy Perkins, were stocking younger fashions.59 The makers-up benefited from the demand for younger styles. Gaunson, a London maker of men’s and boys clothing for multiples, mail-order houses, and independent shops, quadrupled its profits between the period 1952 to 1956 and the period 1960 to 1961 because of “greater attention paid to the lucrative teenage market.”60 Abrams, meanwhile, continued to plug away on the statistics. Speaking at a management conference in 1958, he discussed Britain’s 4.2 million “wage-earning teenagers,” which constituted “an important, prosperous, but difficult market for manufacturers to serve.” After contributing a portion of their earnings to the household, teens spent nearly onefourth of their discretionary income on clothing and footwear, with the rest of the money going to alcohol and tobacco; candy, soft drinks, and snacks in cafes and restaurants; magazines, paperback fiction, pop records; and admissions to cinemas and dance halls.61 Predominantly working-class in character, the teenage market was larger than ever, and Abrams predicted it was likely to increase by 20 percent between 1959 and 1969.62 In 1960, he reported that Britain’s teenage girls, broadly defined as those aged twelve to twenty-five, were spending one-third of their money on clothing and footwear.63 More British makersup turned to the teen market, among them L. Harris (Harella) Limited, a Yorkshire-based ladies’ wear manufacturer, retailer, and exporter (known for the label “It’s a Dream . . . It’s Harella”) which in 1960 introduced a line called “Young Harella.”64 Number crunching made for good copy in the Financial Times, the most important British business paper. But in Quant’s eyes, formal market research, with its focus on cold,

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hard facts, was ill equipped to help the fashion industry psyche out the desires of the young consumer. Abrams’ statistical reports highlighted important shifts in purchasing patterns, but did little to explain why British youth were spending their money on clothes. Carrying the torch of objectivity, market research was not concerned to explore or explain the highly public character of teen life, their inner desires, and the social imperative to dress the part. “It didn’t spot this movement on the part of young people,” Quant said, “because I think research can only give a yes or no answer, telling whether people are buying or not.” In her eyes, the same was true in the United States, where market researchers generated demographic reports on the size of the youth market, but did nothing to help manufacturers and retailers get inside the head of the consumer. “Because marketing in America is so big, and so much money is at stake,” Quant observed, “there seems to be the tendency to play it safe.”65 Playing it safe was anathema to Quant and the other entrepreneurs of the King’s Road and Carnaby Street. Creating edgy new fashion that would satisfy young consumers was risky business. But the pioneers of the London Look had an advantage over the clothing designers who worked for the makers-up in the East End or the merchandise selectors at high-street retailers like M&S. Put simply, they were young people supplying even younger people.66 This meant that they were not only in sync with the tastes of the target market but also were fearless in the face of risk. This approach stood at odds with the modus operandi of establishment figures such as the British sociologist Mark Abrams and the American sportswear designer Bonnie Cashin. Intuition—the touchy-feely approach valued by earlytwentieth-century forecasters like H. Ledyard Towle, Henri A. Creange, and Margaret Hayden Rorke—had served London’s young entrepreneurs well as they forged a path to the teen market in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The intuitive approach had its advocates among business consultants, most notably Ernest Dichter, director of the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Embodied in the fictional character of Dr. Faye Miller in the TV series Mad Men (2007–15), the real-life Dichter was the go-to man for American and European businesses who wanted to get in touch with the hidden desires of consumers. Trained in Freudian theory and market research in Vienna, in the late 1930s Dichter had moved to the United States, where he set up shop as a consultant who applied psychology to the mysteries of consumption. His work for Detroit automakers attracted the wrath of the Left-leaning journalist Vance Packard, whose 1957 bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders, lashed out against the manipulative methods of Madison Avenue advertising agencies and turned Dichter into a corporate celebrity. Never one to shirk from publicity, Dichter had his satisfaction when Packard’s book raised the hackles of American business and brought in more clients. A consultancy to the fiber giant E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company allowed Dichter to examine the inner workings of the fashion market, looking for consumers’ hidden desires. The London dandies who relished Carnaby Street styles had already been labeled peacocks, but no one connected the avian metaphor to broader cultural trends and psychological motivations until Dichter came along. In a February 1966 speech delivered to American menswear manufacturers on behalf of the DuPont Company, he coined the term “peacock revolution” to describe radical changes to demand driven by a new type of male consumer who had developed a personal taste for expressive, colorful clothing.67

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In her 1966 autobiography (which was excerpted in Vogue that August) Quant extolled Dichter’s theories about the role of fashion in society. She appreciated his understanding that clothing was not only a “tool of competition in the sexual sense but it is also a tool to compete in life outside the home.”68 In Dichter’s view, consumers used clothing to build personal confidence, express their inner selves, and make an impression in the world. His peacocks—the blue-collar American men who purchased brightly colored shirts and tightfitting trousers—flashed their fancy feathers to showcase their individualism. They were real-life versions of the fictional Tony Manero, the flashy dresser immortalized in 1977 by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, a decade before the movie hit American theaters. The last thing these peacocks wanted was to fit in, as did the quintessential organizational men epitomized by the Mad Men characters Donald Draper and Roger H. Sterling Jr. To one degree or another on both sides of the Atlantic, a rising tide of individualism had begun to reshape some fashion niches. The entrepreneurs in the bohemian enclave of the King’s Road were on the leading edge of this development. More and more independentminded consumers scoffed at the elitism of the Paris couture houses and the establishment outfits of the First Ladies. The consumer was in the driver’s seat, whether she was a bona fide Chelsea Girl or a Boston co-ed who preferred Beatnik styles to Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hats. Both Quant and Dichter understood that first-hand observation and good old-fashioned intuition were the best tools for the business seeking to conquer markets that were consumer-driven. By 1968, they were not alone.

How long will Mod last? The big question was how the mainstream clothing industry—the manufacturers and retailers of mass-market fashion—could harness the bottom-up trends for profit. By 1968, most people in the fashion business agreed that Paris was no longer the world’s one-andonly trendsetter. The fashion correspondent for the Manchester Guardian noted that creativity now depended less on the genius designer and more on “the melting pot,” with America, Italy, and Great Britain (especially London) each making “healthily disrupting contributions.” The boutique explosion in London, Milan, New York, and Paris, combined with the rise of French prêt-à-porter and early designer ready-to-wear brands such as Daniel Hechter in Paris, led many observers to see that couture was on its last legs.69 Boomers with independent taste rolled their eyes at the thought of dressing up. Besides not having enough money for couture, couture spin-offs, or prêt-à-porter, young consumers preferred to do their own thing—on a budget. They assembled their own personal look by blending styles and periods. In turn, retailers were befuddled by the new express-yourself mode, which could not be shoehorned into neat merchandising categories such as “misses” or “juniors.” In their assessment of the American fashion scene, John Stephen and Mary Quant criticized US manufacturers for not fully comprehending or adequately supplying the burgeoning youth market. In their eyes, American clothing designers were an unadventurous lot, playing it too safe with the “largest untapped market in the world . . . youth fashions.”70 As we saw, British fashion excited some young Americans, but the market was so vast that imports could not entirely satisfy the hunger. American garment manufacturers struggled

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to keep up with the ever-changing London Look. In the trade journal Apparel Manufacturer, an executive from Pacific Trail Sportswear shared his frustrations with 1966, “a year of significant change in the outerwear and sportswear industry.”71 He elaborated on the impact of Mod styles: “Whether a manufacturer is concerned with formal wear or dungarees, he has been influenced by the nebulous term, ‘MOD.’ The influence of Mod has varied in the different regions of our country, but it can be generally stated that Mod has been a highlysuccessful new fashion look.”72 The big question for this California apparel manufacturer and the American clothing industry generally was the duration of the trend. “How long will the Mod look last?” he asked. “How long will it be a major selling factor?”73 The pace of model changes was daunting, but clothing manufacturers admitted that faster fashion was here to stay. As the 1960s drew to a close, even stalwart numbercrunchers had come to accept the perpetual motion machine. In the Apparel Manufacturer in 1969, Harold J. Leedy of the Meinhard-Commercial Corporation, a firm that provided financial forecasting to the textile-apparel industry, got to the crux of the matter. “Anyone asked to forecast the outlook for the 1970s in the areas of fibers, fabrics, finished apparel or financing, can do so with the blithe assurance if he knows the answer to one simple, sixword question: What does the American consumer want?”74 Wearing his number-cruncher’s hat, Leedy reflected on the evolution of the American lifestyle from 1959 to 1969 to predict “further changes are inevitable during the next decade, indeed that these changes almost certainly will be even broader in scope and depth than those that have taken place in the ’60s.” Using menswear as an example, he pointed to the demise of the gray flannel suit as the standard office uniform, the widespread acceptance of brightly colored shirts, and the recent introduction of leisure knitwear suits made from easy-care synthetics, all of which fit into Dichter’s peacock revolution. Looking ahead to 1979, Leedy saw a bright future for the clothing industry, predicting that “the American consumer ten years hence will be increasingly affluent, highly mobile, leisure-minded, better-educated and highly prone to spending money on consumer goods.” But Leedy readily admitted that his forecast, based on an analysis of past sales figures, only described the likely trajectory of consumer expenditures. Consumer desire perplexed even the most seasoned and thoughtful statisticians, leaving the great riddle still unsolved: “the question of what the consumer will want.”75

The new fashion forecasters Determining the direction, pace, and lifespan of trends was indeed vexing. Not everyone in the American fashion industry was a dour “oldster” who frowned on European styles. With the availability of jet travel, more American retail buyers were crossing the Atlantic to attend the ready-to-wear shows in London, Paris, and Milan, but, given the hectic pace at the collections, it was almost impossible to distill much of anything useful from the endless stream of new models generated by countless fashion houses. Apparel designers, fabric buyers, garment manufacturers, and department stores desperately wanted a concise summary of what was happening in the ateliers, shops, and hip neighborhoods of Europe.

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They needed guidance on which catwalk models, boutique merchandise, and street styles would mature into fashions that Baby Boomers would want to wear in the years ahead. There was an imperative to update the approach used by established color forecasters and fashion reporting agencies. Old-style retail and textile reports, like those issued by Miss Tobé’s company after her 1962 death and by sampling companies like Bilbille & cie, focused on high-end Paris silhouettes, fabrics, and colors, rather than on the young scene. A new type of international style service was needed to guide businesses that wanted to sell ready-to-wear to Baby Boomers, rather than to adapt couture models for a shrinking body of socialites. In 1968, the Manchester Guardian pointed to a few “clever, clever people” in Paris who were on the right track: “Denise Fayolle who heads the team that designs for France’s Prisunic” (a discount chain created by the Printemps department store in 1931) and “Maimé [sic] Arnodin who is probably the world’s most listened to colour chartist (her biyearly colour forecast sells for £500).”76 The American penchant for the London Look and the common language of the two nations gave the British a definite advantage over the French. Style forecasting was not new to the UK in the 1960s, but, as is often the case, a young generation of entrepreneurs found a blind spot among their parents’ generation, and, in an effort to modernize, they created anew something that had been common among their grandparents. Each generation invents business solutions to address pressing needs of the moment, and along the way they sometimes unknowingly revisit, update, and improve on the methods of their forebearers. Such was the case with fashion forecasting. Enter the British wholesale cloth merchants, who had once been in charge of predicting style changes within the UK. By the time of the youth quake, it was widely recognized that Great Britain had the most highly developed textile-fashion system in Europe. Before the Second World War, the powerbrokers had been the large wholesale merchants who had lorded over their fabric kingdoms from large warehouse-showrooms around St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City of the London. The wholesale textile showrooms (whether in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, or Manchester) had functioned as ad hoc style laboratories, where fabric buyers and ready-to-wear designers could look through the stock and brainstorm with fellow fabric experts about likely trends. This was all done face-to-face, and no one thought to formalize the process with published reports.77 Wartime bombing, however, had destroyed many of the London showrooms, undercutting the traditional distribution system and undermining the merchant’s influence as a tastemaker and forecaster. Still, the merchants took great pride in their function as fashion intermediaries. In 1945, the chairman of Jeremiah Rotherham & Company, one such wholesaler, explained the important role of merchants in forecasting styles: A wholesaler’s function is to anticipate the requirements of the retail trader, by placing orders a long time in advance, to carry a representative stock, to forecast the trend of fashion and run risks of a fluctuating market . . . This enables the retailer to be in a position to make early display of seasonable goods to meet the demands of the consumer public.78 As some observers began to question the need for middlemen (whose presence added to the cost of the goods), the chairman of Pawsons and Leaf, another merchant house,

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justified them as a vital “link in the chain between producer and consumer.” The job of the wholesaler was “to anticipate the normal requirements of retailers by placing orders a long time in advance” and “to hold representative stock, to forecast the trend of fashion and run the risks involved.”79 However, by the time of the youth quake, the power of the wholesale merchants, and their role as style forecasters, had diminished. The British fashion system was rapidly modernizing with the rise of the high-street clothing multiples. To reduce costs, retailers such as M&S and C&A Modes were sourcing their ready-to-wear directly from the clothing manufacturers who, in turn, purchased their cloth straight from the mills. This modus operandi sounded the death knell for the wholesale textile merchants, and with them, the traditional way of anticipating style changes. While the British Colour Council (Chapter 2) still provided guidance on fashion shades, there was little need for other types of fashion prediction within the home trade. In the 1960s, every maker-up and retailer sought to create their own distinctive style, hoping to attract consumers who wanted something different. The international market was another story. The demand for London fashion reports was initially met by British journalists, who, like Bettina Bedwell in 1930s’ Paris (Chapter 2), moonlighted as fashion scouts for overseas manufacturers and retailers, or who created style newsletters for sale to foreign subscribers, mainly in the United States.80 Before long, specialized style services emerged to feed an international market that was desperate for forward-looking information on the British fashion scene. These companies produced style reports, color forecasts, and newsletters expressly oriented to global customers. Little of this ephemeral material has survived in historical archives, with the exception of the large forecasting collection in the Gladys Marcus Library at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. In this recently processed archive, historians can study thousands of fashion forecasts from buying organizations such as the Associated Merchandising Corporation, from trade associations such as the International Wool Secretariat, and from influential British trend forecasting companies that emerged out of swinging London. One such company was Nigel French Enterprises, which was discussed in Chapter 1; another was IM International.

IM International and the importance of intuition The creative environment of the King’s Road in Chelsea was the birthplace of IM International, a trend agency that was built on intuition. In 1968, a young female entrepreneur named Leigh Rudd had just ended a business partnership with the merchandiser Nigel French, and established Lee Rudd Associates, Inc., a trade publisher that initially produced style reports and then segued into the new field of trend forecasting.81 Born in London to an American father and a British mother, Rudd had dual citizenship, and after studying English for two years at Douglass College, the women’s branch of Rutgers University in New Jersey, she got a scholarship to the Tobé-Coburn School of Fashion in New York. After graduation, she secured jobs with Bonnie Cashin and then John Weitz, one

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of Seventh Avenue’s great menswear designers.82 Around 1966, Rudd interned with André Courrèges in Paris, and in this capacity she was exposed to the designer’s ideas, business methods, and futuristic designs. More importantly, Rudd assembled trend information on behalf of the foreign clients, and when she got a positive response, she recognized that businesses were ready for a new type of fashion reporting.83 In particular, the United States was hungry for information on European styles, and Rudd, with her experience in London, Paris, and New York, was strategically well positioned to provide it. Back home in London, Rudd followed her instincts and ventured into the business of publishing fashion reports, first with Nigel French, and then on her own as Lee Rudd Associates. The name IM International, created by Rudd around the time of her collaboration with French, was used by Lee Rudd Associates in all publishing and branding.84 “IM” was an inversion of the initials for Mission: Impossible, a popular American television series on the CBS network from 1966 to 1973 about the exploits of secret agents in the fictional Impossible Missions Force.85 From its establishment in 1968 to its closure in 1988, IM International offered a businessto-business subscription service that delivered rapid-fire news on the European fashion scene to clients around the world, mainly in the United States. Rudd was assisted in this effort by a creative team of thirteen to fifteen people plus a small support staff.86 Initially, the IM team operated out of London with agents in Paris, Italy, Scandinavia, and New York, but by early 1971 it was running a permanent office in the Seventh Avenue fashion district in order to better reach the market in the United States, which was the largest audience.87 The young American fashion illustrator David Wolfe, the subject of an interview in Chapter 4, was a key member of the London team from the get-go (Figure 5.6). In the early 1970s, the firm evolved a portfolio of products that included, but was not limited to, (1) a monthly hundred-page fashion report called IM International Designs; (2) a semiannual color forecast; (3) a semiannual fabric report; (4) a number of thematic newsletters; and (5) newsflashes on the collections. Eventually, the portfolio was expanded to include designers’ workbooks, 35-millimeter slide sets with highlights from the collections, videos on European fashion developments, and other information materials. The company also offered one-on-one meetings with clients to advise them on how they might adopt their product lines to capture emerging trends. Who subscribed to this fashion information service? The client list has not survived, but Rudd remembers that most of the early customers were in the United States. The range of customers demonstrates the size and complexity of American consumer society and the businesses that catered to it. The major fiber manufacturers, such as the Monsanto Chemical Company, the Eastman Chemical Company, and E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, were subscribers, as was Mattel, Inc., the toy maker famous for Barbie, the teenage fashion model doll.88 Clients also included major textile companies such as Burlington Industries, Concord Fabrics, and Lowenstein Fabrics, and volume apparel manufacturers such as Bobbie Brooks, Anne Klein, and Ellen Tracy. Among retailers, the main customers were major stores such as R. H. Macy & Company, Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, the May Company, and Federated Department Stores, and buying offices such as the Associated Merchandising Corporation. London retail clients included Harrods and Selfridges. Later on, upmarket clothing designers like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Gianni Versace subscribed; they not only used the published reports but also met with David Wolfe for one-on-one brainstorming sessions on trends.89 All along the fashion supply chain, businesses wanted to get inside the

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FIGURE 5.6  Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe at IM International, c. 1970. Reproduced with the permission of Leigh Rudd.

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consumer’s head and anticipate what the lucrative young market wanted next. Retail buyers could get a sense of things from their visits to the European collections, but companies needed information from someone with their feet solidly planted on the ground in Europe. With the bold confidence of youth, Rudd and the IM team took on this “Impossible Mission.” Apparel designers were visual thinkers, and they relished the idea of receiving beautifully illustrated reports on boutique and street styles, which served as springboards for their own imaginings. Rudd, Wolfe, and the other members of the creative staff acted as America’s eyes and ears in young London, helping customers around the world to track new looks as they emerged. Who knew that London art students would start wearing discarded Utility fashions they found in the flea markets of Chelsea and Kensington? When would the geometric Mod look be eclipsed by something else, and what hot new style would replace it? Wolfe explained that “Americans were so hungry for this information and nobody was feeding it to them, not the magazines, not Women’s Wear Daily.”90 With a young staff based in Europe, IM International could “tell them who the designers were that were important, where they should eat if they come to London, what the kids on the streets were wearing.”91 The firm catered to the great need among American customers to know more about European styles. “It was like magic,” Wolfe remembered. “America was so far behind the fashion timetable . . . This was like raining gold, and they could make profitable business decisions based on these little reports.”92 The early editions of IM International Designs were definitely more like fashion reports than forecasts, describing the clothes and accessories seen around London and Paris. For London, it was designers like Mary Quant and Ossie Clark, and shops like Biba, Bus Stop, Feathers, Fifth Avenue, and Just Looking. For Paris, the reports focused on designer brands and boutiques such as Cacharel, Dorothée Bis, Gudule, Daniel Hechter, and Sonia Rykiel, the queen of knits.93 In a December 1969 assessment of the spring/summer London collections, the report described Mary Quant’s Ginger Group line and noted her shift from Mod styling to a softer aesthetic. “She wanted to make clothes like layers of an onion, so they can be peeled off or added on,” IM International Designs wrote. “And because Mary Quant has always been a pioneer, an original thinker, she has taken the layered look one step further and mixes prints, dots and stripes so that they can be seen through as they move.”94 This was reporting, rather than predicting. Trend reporting on London fashion gradually morphed into the more sophisticated, highly intuitive mode of trend forecasting. In retrospect, Rudd and Wolfe joked about having turned the noun “trend” into a new verb, “trending.”95 Little hazard was involved in describing the merchandise in the shops, but it was risky to size up street styles and speculate what trend might be a mainstream hit nearly two years in the future. This task required a good deal of foresight, or intuition. Rudd had always considered herself to be a “fish out of water,” and educated guesswork suited her just fine. Wolfe remembered, America was still copying Paris, which was behind London. So we had to wake America up to focus on London as the epicenter. But we weren’t the only people who understood what was going on. We suddenly had competition for the IM report . . . There were lots of people reporting what was going on. So we had to figure out a way to be a heartbeat ahead.96 Rudd was particularly astute at “understanding the undercurrent, the subtext” of the culture, while Wolfe brought his talents as an artist and his experience as a retailer to the

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table. Together, they landed on the idea of selling the future. Wolfe said, “We . . . realized that people would pay us even more money to know what was going to be happening in London.”97 By 1970, IM International Designs was “ramped up” to “become a fashion forecast” (Figure 5.7).98 Line drawings by Wolfe and other staff artists showed street styles and

FIGURE 5.7  In a break away from the reporting style shown in the AMC Fashion Forecast, IM International described and illustrated “trends” and “directions” as a guide for buyers and designers seeking to get a leg up on future fashions. IM International Designs (July 1970), 26. Collection of David Wolfe; reproduced with the permission of Leigh Rudd.

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emerging looks that were likely to resonate with the two key market segments, subsequently named the Leading-Edge Boomers and Trailing-Edge Boomers. Wolfe explained, “Somehow fashion was so important then; it no longer is most people’s number one priority. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I think there was something going on, with the Boomer generation being so interested in the way they presented themselves to the public. Fashion really mattered so much.”99 How were trends identified? How did they evolve? Cultural change, Rudd explained, determined the trends. The creative team labored under extremely tight deadlines to produce IM International Designs and the other information bulletins that provided subscribers with illustrations and descriptions of the edgy young clothes in Europe. Everything started with looking, analyzing, and brainstorming. The creative staff had to be on their toes, in the know about what was happening in the wider culture. They were always out and about, sizing up people in the shops, the streets, the resorts, and the clubs for early indicators of change. The team took its cues from the broader culture, not from the collections. They went to the shows with solid ideas about future trends and used the runway as a barometer to determine if the designers were on the same wavelength. If “vintage” was a theme developed by the IM team in a brainstorming session around a table in London, they wanted to know which, if any, designer had also picked up on it.100 The IM team thus went to the collections with a firm vision of how fashion would look in the future. When time came for the prêt-à-porter and ready-to-wear shows in Paris or Milan, the creative staff traveled as a group, with photographers and messengers in toe. The team attended the shows—sometimes three per day—and worked long hours in their hotel suite to analyze and distill the collections into pithy reports for the subscribers. They were always keen to see which designers were “on trend.” To create a sense of immediacy, the messengers hand-delivered daily news flashes of collection highlights to clients who were in town for the shows or sent them by airmail to their home offices around the world.101 This strategy helped the customers connect the dots between what was on the runway and the trends that already been identified in IM International Designs. One of the company’s first great successes in trend forecasting was a look called “Hard Times,” which was introduced in the August 1970 edition of IM International Designs as “anti-fashion”—“confrontational clothes, clothes for the revolution, pioneer clothes . . . work clothes.”102 “As the Boomers became more and more mature, they started seeing the dark side of the world,” Wolfe recalled. Looking back, Rudd vividly remembered the moment. The American rock musical Hair was running in the West End, and an anti-establishment, “pre-revolutionary” feeling was in the air. Society was moving toward big cultural changes. The inspiration for Hard Times was Rudd’s “heartfelt feeling that we were about to become disenchanted with that sense of fun that ruled London and rippled out to the rest of the world.” Wolfe said, “And we came up with this then outrageous idea that people would start wearing worn-out jeans. That sounds like a big yawn today, but it was absolutely revolutionary.” The initial trend forecast for Hard Times predicted the teen craze for workman boots, T-shirts, kerchiefs, battle jackets, overalls, aprons, and tattered blue jeans.103 By the time Hard Times was identified as a future trend, the fashion market started to show signs of the fragmentation that is characteristic of our own era. By September 1971, IM International Designs predicted that a great fashion divide would materialize in 1973 (Figure 5.8). The two major groups were the “Sophisticated ’70s Woman” for Leading-

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FIGURE 5.8  In September 1971, IM International predicted a split in the fashion market among Baby Boomers as the older members of the cohort matured into Sophisticates and the younger group became Teenagers. The company tracked the trend as it unfolded, as shown in this page from IM International Designs (April 1972). Courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library; reproduced with the permission of Leigh Rudd.

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Edge Boomers who were off the youth kick and into their jobs and families, and “Hard Times Culture” for Trailing-Edge Boomers who wanted to look “involved and interested” by wearing jeans and an army shirt.104 Wolfe said, “I think we were very prescient because the economy did tank, just in time for our trend. We had picked up negativity in terms of the economy.”105

From reporting to trending Margaret Hayden Rorke died in 1969, seven years after the other female pioneer of American forecasting, Tobé Coller Davis. We saw “Miss Tobé” frown on Mary Quant’s designs, and we can speculate that “Mrs. Rorke,” with her love of fabrics and color, would have felt more at ease in the cavernous prewar wholesale warehouses of the City of London rather than in the cozy boutiques of the King’s Road in Chelsea. For her part, Rorke had applied modernist rationalization to the inchoate sphere of color, creating standards, reports, and forecasts that became the American fashion industry’s go-to source for color basics until new organizations came along and invented their own “one best way” for harnessing the rainbow. But Rorke, the consummate system builder, was a dedicated follower of ladylike fashion, as shown by photographs of her with perfectly coiffed hair, a carefully tilted hat, and a silk dress. Like H. Ledyard Towle and Henri A. Creange, Rorke had sufficient fashionbusiness smarts to know that the best color forecasts were born of the marriage of systematic study and intuition. Among the forecasters in the style industries of the modern era, no one was more outspoken about the value of intuition than Towle. As we saw in Chapter 2, during Towle’s years at the General Motors Corporation, the world’s leading automotive colorist had access to the world’s most sophisticated apparatus for collecting and analyzing quantitative data on car purchases. He knew which models and colors of GM car sold best, and he used this historical information as the springboard for his color forecasts. But when asked to explain the scientific basis of his color harmonies, Towle put on his painter’s smock, pulled out his easel, and stated that he preferred to follow his artistic instinct. Rorke and Creange operated in a similar way. These early-twentieth-century forecasters publicly bowed to system building, while dearly, and often secretively, cherishing the hunch. The young fashion creators behind the swinging London fashion scene claimed to prize raw instinct above all else, but the most successful among them were also savvy businesspeople. By 1969, Mary Quant had shuttered her three London boutiques and channeled her energies into other projects: designing products for J. C. Penney, Bonnie Doon hosiery, and other American manufacturers; expanding her line of cosmetics and accessories; diversifying into home goods; and generally building a global brand.106 Looking back on her career, Leigh Rudd proudly said that IM International was run “like a corporation,” whose employees worked long hours to produce design reports, color forecasts, and newsflashes on deadline.107 Just as the popular culture and the industrial boom of the 1920s had stimulated the American demand for ready-to-wear and created the color-conscious shopper, the postwar era had spawned its own peculiar fashion market. As the historian Marc Levinson has explained, the postwar period was “an extraordinary time” in terms of economic growth.108 Unparalleled industrial expansion and the population

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explosion laid the groundwork for the peacock and the peahen revolutions and created a generation of Baby Boomers intoxicated by pop culture, films, music, and inexpensive clothes. London-based fashion creators and forecasters capitalized on this excitement and further stimulated consumption with their products and their enticing spin. In this heady moment, there was no great need or want to bring quantitative analysis to bear on the question of demand. The white go-go boots and the calico granny dresses sold themselves. The postwar economic miracle was followed by a cooling-off period that began with the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, and that lingers today in erratic growth, political extremism, and cultural uncertainty.109 Perhaps these are the real “Hard Times” spotted by IM International in 1970 and catalogued as various permutations by the creative staff in subsequent years. Over the course of the 1970s, the fashion business became more serious, more corporate, and more international. It was transformed from a youth-inspired industry driven by London teenagers to the designer-led fashion business of 1980s and 1990s. In March 1978, the IM Report highlighted “internationalism” as the upcoming trend for spring 1979 (Figure 5.9). Internationalism is the style that just around the corner. It’s a faceless fashion we already see in airports around the world, in their decor, their signs, even in the faceless people who pass through them. It’s a fashion that’s cultured without country; a style speaking an international language that every woman can understand, and pick up, from Toronto to Tokyo and beyond.110

FIGURE 5.9  By the late 1970s, IM International picked up on the rise of designer brands and a new “Internationalism,” as exemplified by the Italian ready-to-wear of Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace. IM Report (March 1978). Courtesy of Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library; reproduced with the permission of Leigh Rudd.

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IM International began to report less on boutiques, street styles, and sunbathers in SaintTropez and more on ready-to-wear designers in London, New York, Milan, Paris, and Tokyo. In the context of internationalism, the name of the brand, rather than the distinctiveness of the look, would come to be the defining element. Did IM International invent trend forecasting, as Lee Rudd and David Wolfe have remembered?111 To be sure, the firm moved from producing fashion reports to creating trend forecasts at a crucial moment in the history of the profession. The company started off with an emphasis on the youth market and London styles, but over the course of its lifetime it adapted to the evolving needs of maturing Baby Boomers. The question of authenticity is perennial in the creative industries, where intellectual property is the currency. For this book, however, the more compelling question is whether or not fashion forecasts and trend predictions are self-fulfilling prophecies. We leave it up to readers to decide for themselves. By 1979, IM International had 1,500 clients in the retailing and manufacturing sectors of twenty-nine countries, all seeking information about what maturing Baby Boomers wanted.112 In turn, Leading-Edge Boomers were in their thirties and looking for fashion that suited adult life without being fuddy-duddy. The sustained popularity of the collegiate look, which had come into its own in the 1920s, cannot be understated, particularly for its influence on the distinctive American style called sportswear.113 By no coincidence did a new heritageinspired country look, in part pioneered by Ralph Lauren and his company Polo Ralph Lauren, come into its own during the trending 1970s. Gentrified sportswear became the lowkey “preppy” style that hallmarked the American contribution to international fashion.114 Back in October 1972, IM International had spotted the “Deliberately Dowdy” trend—a classic British country look that everyone understood and could wear with confidence—and predicted volume sales among Baby Boomers.115 In this vein, Rudd had picked up on the nascent desires of working women for practical office clothing and forecasted this trend as the wave of the future.116 This prediction, like many others by the “Impossible Mission” team, was certainly spot-on. If she were alive, Margaret Hayden Rorke would have smiled knowingly. In the business of fashion forecasting, intuition always paid off.

Notes 1

Meredith Derby, “The Indulgent Boomers,” Women’s Wear Daily, December 30, 2004.

2

Ibid.

3

On Boomer America, see Regina Lee Blaszczyk, American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), Part III.

4

“Buyer and Stylist Not Rivals, He Says,” New York Times, November 25, 1928.

5

For example, see “New Junior-Miss Section in Chicago Supplies Latest Vogues to Young Girl,” Women’s Wear Daily, February 4, 1926.

6

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “The Rise and Fall of European Fashion at Filene’s in Boston,” in European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Véronique Pouillard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), chap. 7.

7

Ibid.

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8

Eugene Gantzhorn, “Junior Sportswear Sales Up 13% in Department Stores,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 26, 1960.

9

“U.S. Teen-Age Girls Spend $3.2 Billion Yearly on Clothes,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 26, 1960.

10 “Teens Look to Main Floor for Facts of Fashion,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 8, 1962. 11 “The Three Stages of Teens,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 5, 1961. 12 “Teeming Teens,” Women’s Wear Daily, December 14, 1965. 13 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), chaps. 3–4. 14 “Teen-age Technique,” Fashions and Fabrics (January 1946): 32–3. 15 Blaszczyk, Fashionability, chap. 5. 16 See, for example, Alistair O’Neill, London: After a Fashion (London: Reaktion, 2007). 17 “Alexander Plunket Greene Dies,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 10, 1990. 18 “Two Shops Offer ‘Chelsea Look’ for British Beatniks,” Women’s Wear Daily, August 19, 1959; “Quant’s Story Reflection of London Look,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 24, 1966. 19 William R. Scott, “California Casual: Lifestyle Marketing and Men’s Leisurewear, 1930–1960,” in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 173–4. 20 Blaszczyk, “The Rise and Fall of European Fashion at Filene’s in Boston.” 21 Jan Whitaker, Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006); Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 22 “15–19-Year-Old Customers,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 1, 1960. 23 “Chelsea Look Continues,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 27, 1960. 24 AMC Fashion Forecast, Fall & Winter ’56 (New York: Associated Merchandising Corporation, 1956), Forecasting Collection, Gladys Marcus Library, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York (hereafter cited as FC-FIT). 25 Quant by Quant: The Autobiography of Mary Quant (London: V&A Publishing, 2012), 94. Quant’s Autobiography does not give specific dates for her visits to the United States, which presents challenges to the historian. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 94–5,100–4. 31 J. C. Penney Company, 1962 Annual Report, 1, 13. 32 Mort Sheinman, “Giant Fashion Step Taken by Penney’s,” Women’s Wear Daily, October 3, 1962; Ronald D. Michman and Alan J. Greco, Retailing Triumphs and Blunders: Victims of Competition in the New Age of Marketing Management (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1995), 32.

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33 “The Eye,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 31, 1962; “The Arrogant Arrogant from Chelsea,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 19, 1962. 34 “U.K. Designer Mary Quant in Penney Tie-In,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 19, 1962; “A Young Spring,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 27, 1962; J. C. Penney Company, 1962 Annual Report, 6–7. 35 “The Dresses,” Women’s Wear Daily, August 9, 1963; “New Penney Book Features Fashions by Mary Quant,” Women’s Wear Daily, January 28, 1964. 36 “To Plug Mary Quant,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 28, 1964. 37 “Eye: Beatle Echo,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 3, 1964. 38 “World Buyers See London Fashions,” Financial Times, November 14, 1961. 39 “London Is the Off-the-Peg Paris,” Financial Times, May 17, 1961. 40 “A Beatle of the Fashion World,” Financial Times, September 15, 1965; “Roger Nelson’s Young London Look,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 13, 1965; “That London Look,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 24, 1966. 41 “Fashion Show in New York Aboard Cunarder,” Financial Times, November 5, 1965. 42 Blaszczyk, Fashionability, chap. 5. 43 “The Eye,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 31, 1962. 44 Sheila Black, “Fashion: No Place for the Amateur,” Financial Times, January 28, 1966. 45 “The Younger Set,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 9, 1966; “Penney for Your Thoughts,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 29, 1966; Veronica Horwell, “John Michael Ingram Obituary,” Guardian, July 3, 2014, accessed December 28, 2016, www.theguardian. com/fashion/2014/jul/03/john-michael-ingram; J. C. Penney Company, Annual Report for the Year 1964, 13; J. C. Penney Company, Annual Report 1965, 6; J. C. Penney Company, Annual Report 1966, 7; J. C. Penney Company, Annual Report 1967, 7. 46 Evelyn Livingstone, “Fashion Domination by Youth Continues,” Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1967. 47 “Penney for Your Thoughts.” 48 Sheila Black, “Fashion the Servant, Not the Master,” Financial Times, July 4, 1964. 49 “Now, Now Girls,” Women’s Wear Daily, December 12, 1966. 50 Valerie Steele, Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 51 “Eye: A Proper Dress,” Women’s Wear Daily, November 16, 1966; Caroline Evans, “Post-war Poses,” in The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk, ed. Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman and Caroline Evans (London: Yale University Press and Museum of London, 2004), 125. 52 “The Minneapolis Mods,” Look, November 30, 1965; David Sheridan, “Dayton’s Finds Money Where the Action Is,” Minneapolis Tribune, n.d. (quotation); and Hope B. Simon, “Stores Singing Yea-Yea About US-Bred Mod Styles,” Daily News Record, September 23, 1965; clippings in scrapbook: “John Stephen of Carnaby Street London W1 Dayton’s,” in John Stephen Papers: AAD/1998/5/22, Archive of Art and Design, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Dayton’s effort was the first of several North American collaborations on the part of John Stephen that I will explore in future publications.

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53 “Macey’s [sic] £1/4M. ‘Mod’ Clothing Deal,” Financial Times, March 29, 1966. 54 Blaszczyk, Fashionability, chap. 5. 55 Carol Bjorkman, “Carol,” Women’s Wear Daily, August 12, 1966. 56 “Stephen, Quant Rap Makers for Caution in Youth Market,” Women’s Wear Daily, November 1, 1967; “Group W’s London Junket Is On World Perspective,” New Courier (Pittsburgh), November 25, 1967; “At London Meeting,” Roselle Register (Roselle, IL), November 17, 1967. 57 “Stephen, Quant Rap Makers.” 58 Mark Abrams, “Spending on Clothes,” Financial Times, October 6, 1956. 59 “The Littlewoods Organisation,” Financial Times, May 14, 1959; “Dorothy Perkins Limited,” Financial Times, August 26, 1959. 60 “Issue Comment: Gaunson,” Financial Times, February 9, 1962. 61 “Management Conference: Teenagers Spend £1,480M. a Year,” Financial Times, November 28, 1958; Mark Abrams, “The £900M. Teenage Market,” Financial Times, February 11, 1959. 62 “Teenage Market Growing,” Financial Times, August 1, 1959. 63 Mark Abrams, “Teenage Spending—£3m. a Day,” Financial Times, January 29, 1960. 64 “L. Harris (Harella) Limited,” Financial Times, July 11, 1961. 65 “Stephen, Quant Rap Makers.” 66 Ibid. 67 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “Ernest Dichter and the Peacock Revolution: Motivation Research, the Menswear Market and the DuPont Company,” in Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture, ed. Stefan Schwartzkopf and Rainer Gries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 126–39. 68 “‘The Young Will Not Be Dictated To’ by Mary Quant,” Vogue, August 1, 1966, 87. 69 Phyllis Heathcote, “Bang, Bang, Bang—It Would Be Chaos Without Paris,” Manchester Guardian, January 18, 1968. 70 “Stephen, Quant Rap Makers.” 71 “1966—A Year of Problems and Progress,” Apparel Manufacturer 47 (October 1966): 17. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Harold J. Leedy, “The Consumer Will Call the Shots in the ’70s,” Apparel Manufacturer (December 1969): 28. 75 Ibid. 76 Heathcote, “Bang, Bang, Bang.” 77 Blaszczyk, Fashionability, chaps. 3–4. 78 “Jeremiah Rotherham & Co.,” Financial Times, March 8, 1945. 79 “Pawsons and Leafs,” Financial Times, May 5, 1945. 80 David Wolfe, interview by author, New York, November 27, 2016. 81 Ibid.

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82

Leigh Rudd, telephone conversation with author, January 18, 2017.

83

Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 1,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 30, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxhcHwrDPHY and “What is Fashion Forecasting, Part 2,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 30, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuSUquYd8mw.

84

Wolfe interview.

85

Leigh Rudd telephone conversation.

86

Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 9,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQGx4xySmgY.

87

IM International Designs (January 1970), n.p.; IM International Designs (May 1971), n.p., both in FC-FIT.

88

Leigh Rudd telephone conversation; Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 8,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=daKzpmA2xeg.

89

Leigh Rudd telephone conversation; Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 7,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQGx4xySmgY.

90

Rudd and Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 2.”

91

Ibid.

92

Ibid.

93

IM International Designs (November 1969), 26–42, in FC-FIT.

94

Ibid., 15, in FC-FIT.

95

Rudd and Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 8.”

96

Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 3,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH1zAYwxNtg.

97

Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 4,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9scLy7dUBE.

98

Rudd and Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 4.”

99

Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 5,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQGx4xySmgY.

100 Leigh Rudd telephone conversation. 101 Ibid.; IM International, advertisement, Women’s Wear Daily, January 31, 1973; Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 10,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UsUcXRkaS8. 102 IM International Designs (August 1970), 1–2, in FC-FIT. 103 Ibid., 2; Leigh Rudd telephone conversation; Rudd and Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 5.” 104 IM International Designs (September 1971), 1–6, in FC-FIT. 105 Leigh Rudd and David Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 11,” November 20, 2016, accessed December 31, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjO0_Xqf9CE. 106 Jo-Ann Jenkins, “Quantity and Quality,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 20, 1969. “Mary Quant: Pragmatism Pays Off,” Women’s Wear Daily, September 23, 1977.

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107 Rudd and Wolfe, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 9.” 108 Marc Levinson, An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 109 Ibid. 110 The IM Report (March 1978), 2, 4, in FC-FIT. 111 Rudd and Wolf, “What Is Fashion Forecasting, Part 1.” 112 “Donna Cristina Leaves Bergdorf ’s for IM Intl.,” Women’s Wear Daily, February 28, 1979. 113 Patricia Mears, ed., Ivy Style: Radical Conformists (New Haven and London: Yale University Press; New York: Fashion Institute of Technology, 2012). 114 Blaszczyk, Fashionability, chap. 8. 115 IM International (October 1972), 6–12, in FC-FIT. 116 Leigh Rudd telephone conversation.

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6 THE VIEW FROM PARIS Nelly Rodi and the Early Days of French Trend Forecasting

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elly Rodi founded NellyRodi, a Paris-based forecasting agency, in 1985 and opened a Japanese affiliate in 1987 (Figure 6.1). The agency is based on two major principles: first, fashion is not just creation but also marketing, and second, fashion is an allencompassing phenomenon that not only influences textiles and clothing but that extends to beauty, interior decoration, food, automobiles, and technology. In 2016, NellyRodi had operations in nineteen countries and was one of the world’s leading providers of information to the creative industries. Rodi is the co-president of the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the vice president of the R3iLab, a cross-sector network for professionals in the textile, fashion, and creative industries to organize, foster, and promote innovation within the garment sector, under the sponsorship of the French government. She is also involved with a number of educational institutions for business and the creative industries, including La Fabrique: École des métiers de la mode et de la decoration, and the Institute Français de la mode (IFM), among others.1 Rodi was born in 1943 in Angers, a city in western France on the edge of the Loire Valley, and she lived in Algiers, the capital city of Algeria in North Africa, until the age of fourteen. “Africa was wonderful at that period, the sand, the colors, the exotic atmosphere,” she remembered. “The Latin feeling was very inspiring and influenced my temperament.” During the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), her family fled the country, moving to Switzerland in 1957 and to Paris around 1959. At school, Rodi took a commercial course, and in 1962 she landed a job at the style office of Prisunic, the mass-market chain of junior department stores established in 1931 by Printemps, the large luxury department store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. By the late 1950s, Prisunic had 223 stores scattered around France and North Africa, and was planning a major expansion with the aim to adopt the “United States ‘democratized’ system of promoting ready-to-wear for the average consumer.”2 Prisunic’s style office was managed by Denise Fayolle, a former ice-skating champion and fashion journalist who in 1968 would join forces with Maïmé Arnodin to establish the innovative trend agency

Nelly Rodi, interview by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, Paris, April 28, 2016 for The Enterprise of Culture Oral History Programme. Regina Lee Blaszczyk selected the excerpts from the transcript, edited them, and wrote the historical introduction.

FIGURE 6.1  Nelly Rodi at a major international conference, History and Future of Fashion Prediction: University Meets Industry. This one-day public conference in Rotterdam on October 17, 2014, explored the different forms and evolution of fashion prediction worldwide since the interwar period. It took place at Erasmus University at the Forum Room. A mixed audience of 150 international professionals, scholars, and students attended. Collection of Ben Wubs; photographer Dennis Wisse.

famously known by the acronym Mafia, for Maïmé Arnodin Fayolle International Associés. Assisted by three stylists, Fayolle acted as Prisunic’s chief style advisor and had a say on every product in the store’s range. As Women’s Wear Daily reported, Fayolle was a human “sieve” between the manufacturers and the store’s buying office. Determined to bring affordable ready-to-wear to France, Fayolle visited retailers in the United States, Japan, and Great Britain for inspiration.3 Working as a trainee stylist under Fayolle, the young Rodi learned that mass-market goods could be well designed. On her first day on the job, Fayolle said, “Okay, Nelly. We work on products sold at Prisunic. We work for mass consumption but we have to do nice things. Why should we have cheap products that are not beautiful?” Fayolle brought Rodi some men’s wool slippers decorated with brown and black checks. “Okay, Nelly. Why should grandpa have such sad slippers? You’ve never worked with color, but you can create a new color card for the slippers.” Fayolle taught Rodi the basics of color harmony, “what it means to mix two colors at the same level when the colors cross,” and a lot more on how aesthetics could fit into product design for the mass market. After six months, Rodi answered a newspaper advertisement for a job with the International Wool Secretariat (IWS), which had a fashion office in Paris directed by Claude-Helene Neff. Rodi spent four years as an assistant there, initially promoting wool to the couture houses through a competitive fashion show. Eventually, she was assigned to

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fabric development, and to advance her understanding of textile production, she spent one day per week in continuing education courses at the École nationale supérieure des arts et industries textiles (ENSAIT), in Roubaix in northern France. “After two, three years, I started to be sort of an expert in textiles. I could discuss with the weavers how to do new weaving. At that time, I had already created the first trend book, a wool trend book.” Rodi used a show-and-tell method when she interacted with the weavers. “The book was shown to the weavers to suggest what would be interesting to develop for the following winter,” she recalled. “These trend books were not as well developed as trend books are today. Each wool trend book was more like a schoolbook, a bit technical with samples. If it was the season for Prince of Wales checks, the book suggested how you might develop the Prince of Wales pattern using different colors or different weaving.” The technical training was a great advantage to Rodi. She remembered how her technical training proved to be an asset: I was a young lady, a young girl. When you arrived at a factory, it was all men—the engineers and the machines. If you just came in with a color card, or if you said “Next year you must do light fabrics,” they would not take you seriously. But if you said, “It should be sixty grams, and you should use this type of yarn, and it needs to be a twisted yarn or a bouclé yarn, and if you mix that with this, and so forth”—suddenly the men looked at you differently. Then the men considered me to be an equal. Before, I was just a young girl, superficielle. In 1967, Rodi became the fashion manager for the International Institute for Cotton, which had an office near the Rue du Bac stop of the Paris Métro in the 7th arrondissement on the Left Bank. This was the heyday of synthetics, and the cotton cultivators were eager to beef up the image of natural fibers. Wool was well established as a luxury fiber, but cotton was considered to be cheap, suitable only for Prisunic and other users at the lower end of the market. It was Rodi’s job to promote cotton to the couture houses. “I did fashion books, fashion trends, color cards, fabric books, and garments.” In her four years with the cotton bureau, she developed all of its trend books, and mounted annual fashion shows in Paris to promote cotton fashions. By serendipity, while working for the cotton industry, Rodi sat next to the couturier André Courrèges on a plane, and ended up doing a big cotton show with him in SaintRémy-de-Provence, in the south of France. In the early 1970s, Rodi left the cotton institute to work for Courrèges. “He was such a modern person, you cannot imagine. We were at the birth of a new world, like we are today with digital. It was exactly the same in 1970.” Rodi fell sway to the designer’s charms, and worked as his assistant for around four years. In 1975, an unprecedented opportunity convinced her to leave his employment. She had been invited to help the government promote French fashion by directing the Comité de coordination des industries de la mode (CIM). The following text draws on an oral history with Rodi conducted by Ingrid GiertzMårtenson. Rodi discusses her experience at the CIM from 1975 to 1985, including her collaboration with Lidewij “Li” Edelkoort to establish a trend forum for the Première Vision textile trade fair, and the flurry of new trend agencies that appeared in France at this time. She also shares her thoughts on trend forecasting today and tomorrow. ***

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Nelly Rodi (NR): The years at Courrèges were fantastic. But one morning, I went to see André and said, “André, I have to speak to you.” “Okay, Nelly, what you want to tell me?” he asked. “I am going to stop working for you. I cannot continue to live like this, you know. It’s too much pressure—working here is leaving me breathless. I would like to accept an invitation to work for the CIM.” And so Courrèges told me, “Okay, Nelly. I’ll give you an office. I’ll give you a secretary. I’ll give you an assistant. And you continue to work for me part-time. And you can work for whomever else part-time.” I then went to work for the CIM and also established my own bureau. My bureau had André Courrèges as my main client. He accepted that I took other clients besides him, and he helped me to get established. Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson (IGM): What organizations were behind the CIM? NR: It was the French minister of industry and the French ready-to-wear federation. That was my board. Their idea was to build up the whole French fashion industry. After the war, one of the French ready-to-wear manufacturers had taken a group to New York to look at the big department stores. They saw American ready-to-wear and discovered that the buyers from big New York stores like Bloomingdale’s were going to fashion shows here in Paris to buy patterns from Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin. They took the patterns back to America and reproduced them in big quantities for their stores. The couture companies received one price for the pattern, but they did not receive a percentage on the sales of the ready-to-wear. All of the benefits were going to Bloomingdale’s and other big American department stores. Following up, there was a big push to develop ready-to-wear in France and to work more with American department stores, who were the major customers for fashion. The French had to better organize their supply chain from beginning to end. It took eighteen to twenty-four months to get a garment from the factory to the consumer, which is not the case today. So it was proposed to organize meetings with different levels in the chain of manufacturing to better coordinate everything. That’s why the CIM was established; to create all of those meetings. I was the general manager of the CIM. My job was really to organize the French fashion system, and to do this, I created some tools. I re-did what I did before with wool and with cotton. I established trend books for womenswear and childrenswear, a special color card for womenswear, and a special color card for childrenswear, another one for knitwear. For retail, I created a buying guide. There was a selection of different tools, printed tools. IGM: Where did you get the ideas? NR: I established a team. One person was in charge of the fabric, another was in charge of the color, another one was in charge of the garment. The team was created as a vehicle for reflection. At the beginning, we had some creative meetings, just for our team. We would determine if we felt that pink would be important, or if “romantic” would come back with flowers or something like that. And I established a system for meeting with people from different areas in the fashion industry. We showed them the romantic idea and asked if they agreed. We said, “We feel that it will be important in pink, in pale blue, or with a flower,” or “The trend will come back to stripes or to geometrics.” We made proposals to people in industry, but we also had an exchange of ideas with them. They never said, “We don’t believe you.” We asked everyone

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coming to the meeting to bring something, so everyone brought their ideas. And we put all of the ideas together, and then we did a sort of coordination. That’s why we had the title “Comité de coordination des industries de la mode.” IGM: What kind of people were on the team? How did you pick them? NR: I quit working for Courrèges very quickly. After two years, I worked four days a week at the CIM, and had one day for my own business, NellyRodi. I wanted the freedom to have my own customers if I wanted. For the CIM, I advertised in the newspapers for creative staff, and Li Edelkoort answered. She was working in fashion at the time. She came to CIM and worked with me there for ten years. At the beginning, she focused on the garments, and then she became chief of the studio. Together, we were a fantastic team. We did a lot of trips to Japan and so on. One day, I decided we should do an audio-visual trend presentation. Instead of working with paper, we would photograph images and project those images. We did the first trend audio-visual for CIM. And then Bernard Dupasquier, the head of Première Vision, and Micheline Alland, the fashion coordinator for Première Vision, asked us to do the first trend forum for their textile trade fair. We invented the concept of a trend forum for a trade fair. IGM: How did you think of the concept? NR: We wanted to do a center, an agora, a Greek agora when people come and mix together and exchange ideas. We thought up a concept to do something exceptional at the center of Première Vision, something exceptional where we could give out information. At the beginning, it was more decorative than anything else. The first one was called J’ai a Première Vision là [here I’ve got the first view]. At the beginning, there was a color card, a big color card, at the center of the trend forum. The space eventually evolved into an information center. Li Edelkoort and I introduced the audio-visual component. Li played a big role, and she did fantastic work. She is very creative. The audio-visuals were very much the thing that everyone wanted to go and see. We wanted to evoke people’s emotions. IGM: What was your inspiration for the audio-visuals? NR: It was really our own idea. At the beginning, when we met with people from industry, we tried to explain the concept of the season. To do this, we invented a type of board, a folding screen. I had the folding screen—“le paravent”—built for Première Vision and told people, “You start there, and you will have the whole story.” There were images on the folding screen. What we were trying to do at Première Vision turned out to be difficult. It was hard to present the concept for the season because we didn’t just have one concept; we had two, three, or four concepts. People needed a way to understand the first concept, the second concept, and so on. We were projecting all types of images besides color harmonies—some fabrics and then some garments and then some silhouettes and so on. And one day I said to Li, “It would be better if we projected on one big screen and if the images were one beside the other one.” So we started with two projectors, and then we moved on to six projectors. IGM: As the CIM director, you invented a lot of new things. You did the books, you did the audio-visuals. How did the territory change between the time you started at the CIM in 1975 and at the end of your tenure there in 1985?

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NR: We have to look back to 1968, when Mafia suddenly arrived. I remember the shock. The word “Mafia” stands for Maïmé Arnodin Fayolle International Associés. It was a business run by two ladies who were “living together”: Maïmé Arnodin and Denise Fayolle. Maïmé was married before, and she divorced her husband to live with Denise. And when they established their agency, it made a big bang because they worked with Peter Knapp, the photographer for André Courrèges. Mafia was like an advertising agency that did a trend book. The design and layout of their trend book looked like something produced by an ad agency. The other trend agencies in France basically just worked with a publicist. Not only had a new agency arrived, but this new agency was also quite creative. Because Mafia was based on advertising methods, its identity was very strong. The identity of Carlin was low profile. Carlin was not really into forecasting; the company existed mainly to provide help to or educate the industry. Promostyl was run by Françoise Vincent [sic] and then by Danièlle de Diesbach. In the 1980s, they were more of the creative mind. Promostyl was a team of girls—all very creative—a team of stylists who worked on garments and colors. And we should not forget Here & There in New York, which was quite good because they were so close to the market. The Peclers agency was like Promostyl; Dominique Peclers had worked at Printemps, the large French department store. There was quite a bit of competition between Peclers and Promostyl. Dominique Peclers had a strong personality, and her staff was creative. It was different with Mafia, and different again with Carlin. IGM: To be a good forecaster represents a kind of constant moving around, a curiosity to find and experience new developments in society and so on. Do you think that the ability to do this is an innate gift or is it something that you can learn? NR: Yes, I think we can educate our eyes, our curiosity. But what is needed at the origin is a great culture—a great artistic culture. You need to go and see everything. Then your brain makes a selection, but first you have to educate yourself. It is a lot of work to go everywhere and see everything and not to stay behind the desk and only watch the computer. You have to go to the place; you have to look; you have to catch everything. And then your brain makes a sort of selection. You can train your mind and your eyes. Honestly, this is something that we are losing today, even in Paris, the couture city. For the young, if there’s a message, it’s move yourself—and go and catch the information. You can educate your brain. IGM: Can you make fashion happen? Can you develop new fashions yourself? Or do forecasters register what’s in society and then give it back to the public? NR: I don’t think we create anything. It is our eyes that make a selection from a new creator. We see a new line, we catch it, and we give it volume. We re-digest and recreate a new concept. I don’t think we create. What does is mean “to create?” We are not like an artist, waking up in the morning and feeling, “I want to create this couture model.” We are not like that. We observe the market. We answer the requests of our customers. We create concepts, yes, in the mood of the period. When we make a survey at the end of the season and when we see which trend has worked, we try to obtain figures from our customers to understand what they have sold, what did the best, what did not do well, and so on. Every time, we find that we are 80 percent right on what we have previewed. So we do calibrate to the market. But is this real

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creation? I cannot say so. We focus on the identity, the images, the concept. We don’t put balloon dresses in our books because we feel it’s very creative. We would not do something like that. IGM: We know that the media and consumer society are today influenced by celebrities because celebrity sells. How does your trend agency leverage the influence of celebrities? NR: For a long time, we have wanted to develop this area. We are in a society of selfies, of narcissists, of celebrities. Every consumer wants to be a star. They love celebrities, and they also want to be a celebrity. So it’s something we think about, and we have some digital concepts that we would like to develop at our company around these developments, but it’s a problem of investment. IGM: How relevant do you think forecasting will be in the future? NR: I think there will still be a business for forecasters because companies need to educate people in their fashion offices. Forecasters have to educate and teach everyone in the entire system and to help fashion companies build up their fashion expertise. Twenty years ago, companies did not know how to build an internal fashion office. They were using consultants to tell them about fashion. Now every company has an internal studio, and we have to train the people that work in those studios. Now every company knows what a storyboard is, what a concept is, and what a color card is. They all know, but I honestly feel that we have a deep influence. We really train the industry. At the beginning of the NellyRodi agency in 1987, I was working with H&M when the company only had one designer with a small staff. Now there are 250 people in the styling office at H&M. So now every company is equipped with an internal design studio, but they need information. And then you have the new generation coming into the company. They are very, very young, twenty-five, twenty-six years old. They have no education. They have never worked. And they need tools to help them. After all these years in the industry, the NellyRodi agency still has a thousand customers buying our books. So, I feel there is still a need for printed forecasts. Will the books stay the same? That’s the real question. They are needed to help the companies’ teams understand how to better structure their collections. I’m not sure that paper—the printed trend book—is finished. The customer is very interested to see the objects in the books: the swatches, the colors. They can touch these objects. Maybe it’s time to do something that mixes printed books and other types of images. But for me, the image still seems important. Maybe we could build a new type of book. We are thinking about this at the NellyRodi agency. We are always asking ourselves many, many questions.

Notes 1 NellyRodi, “Biographie de Nelly Rodi en Anglais,” November 2016; R3iLab, “Les

Missions,” January 29, 2016, accessed January 12, 2017, http://r3ilab.fr/les-missionsdu-reseau-innovation-industrie/.

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2 “French Buying Habits Shift Doubles Chain’s Apparel Volume in 3 Years,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 7, 1956.

3 “Paris Letter,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 29, 1956; “Paris—Prisunic,” Women’s Wear Daily, November 3, 1960; Thelma Sweetinburgh, “Prisunic Chain’s Apparel Luring Chic Frenchwomen,” Women’s Wear Daily, November 3, 1960.

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7 FIBERS, FEATHERS, AND THE FUTURE Ornella Bignami on the Importance of Materials

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n 1979, Ornella Bignami established Elementi Moda, a design consultancy in Milan with the remit to assist clients to think about the future by helping them develop and realize new products and initiatives for the textile and fashion market (Figure 7.1). Today, she is known internationally for her consulting with a range of industries, from textiles to ceramics. She frequently delivers guest lectures to students in design, fashion, and management courses at universities in Milan, Florence, and Bangkok, and is a member of leading trend groups at Première Vision and at several major Asian fairs organized by Messe Frankfurt: Insterstoff Asia Essential, Intertextile Beijing Apparel Fabrics, and Intertextile Shanghai Apparel Fabrics. Born in 1945 just outside of Milan, Bignami grew up in a “very traditional Italian family” and “had a very quiet childhood.” When she was seven years old, her family moved into the city, and Bignami developed a curiosity about “knowing the world.” As a teenager, she traveled to Germany and France, and tried to learn several new languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. After she finished school, Bignami started working for a large corporation in the Italian chemical and textile industries, Rhodiatoce, which produced polyester and polyamide fibers. Her first job was in the export office to sell polyamide to the fishing industry. After three months, Bignami went to the director and said, “It’s not the job for me. I am not interested.” She was at the right place at the right time. The director said: Okay, we produce polyester. We want to modify the perception of polyester on the market. It should not be a commodity anymore. We want to make a special product of it. Are you interested in working on this project? It means you have to travel a lot, to go to the textile factories and convince them to use the new qualities, talk to the engineers there, the chemical people, and so on. Bignami immediately said, “Yes.” It was 1963, and she was eighteen years old.

Ornella Bignami, interview by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, Milan, September 5, 2016 for The Enterprise of Culture Oral History Programme. Regina Lee Blaszczyk selected the excerpts from the transcript, edited them, and wrote the historical introduction.

FIGURE 7.1  Ornella Bignami (r) leading the Trend Table at Messe Frankfurt, 1998, with the former press officer of the textile fairs, Maike de Schmidt, on the left. Collection of Ben Wubs.

Bignami worked with Rhodiatoce’s plants throughout Italy to learn about the production of synthetic fibers. She then began collaborating with silk manufacturers in the Como region of Lombardy, asking them, “Would you like to develop a polyester fabric similar to your silk?” The improved polyesters were presented to the Italian couture houses in Milan and Rome. In 1972, Rhodiatoce merged with Châtillon, a manufacturer of acrylic fiber. So, Bignami started anew with acrylic, “trying to know the material first, the fiber first, and the characteristics, and then working mainly in Prato with the spinning mills.” She learned how “to do a yarn, how to do a fancy yarn, how to develop a color card, how to interpret the quality in knitted textures, and so on.” The company was renamed Montedison Fibre (simply called Montefibre), under whose auspices Bignami continued her work. In Chapter 9, Ben Wubs discusses Bignami’s collaboration with Messe Frankfurt to develop a trend forum for the Interstoff textile trade fair in Frankfurt, commencing in 1989. Here, we draw on an oral history interview with Bignami conducted by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson. The edited excerpts focus on Bignami’s experience at Montefibre (and predecessor companies), including her interactions with the Italian fashion designer Elio Fiorucci (1935–2015), and on some of her work at Elementi Moda. ***

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Ornella Bignami (OB): At Montefibre, something happened which was for me an incredible experience coming from an idea of Elio Fiorucci, a good friend. He suggested that Montefibre open the first Italian design center, and the company agreed. This idea was really fantastic. So, I was in part of this design center and my responsibility was about the development—the material development—of yarns and fabrics and colors. I worked not only on my own but with other people. The group was made up of different designers coming from many different countries and eventually changing from time to time. Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson (IGM): What was the goal of this design center? OB: The goal of the design center was to follow the example of Mafia [Maïmé Arnodin Fayolle International Associés] in Paris—which was probably the first agency in Europe to provide information to the textile and apparel industry in Italy on how to develop their own collections. The Italian textile industry has always been made of medium and small companies, mainly artisanal type of companies. Our industry has always been family-based. Even today, many companies are medium-sized or small companies based on family. And back then, it was even more like that. The companies were not only interested to make money, but they were also really enthusiastic about what they were doing. And Italy has always been a place where people from other countries have come to have things made. We had buyers coming from Germany, from all the other European countries, coming to Italy for the production. Italy has the knowledge. We have the capability and the materials and so on. So Italy has always been a production country more than a fashion country in the real sense. Elio Fiorucci was a fantastic person. I remember his family was producing traditional espadrilles similar to those made in the Veneto region. And they had a shop in the Galleria Passarella in Milan. At a certain point as a young man, Elio said to himself, “Espadrilles only is not good any more. I want to do something else.” So he went to the United States, he went to the Far East, and he brought back things in his luggage, a lot of colored things. He had been in Greenwich Village in New York with Andy Warhol, and he was familiar with Roy Lichtenstein as an artist. So he was really experiencing the period, the 1970s. He was really living an intensive 1970s experience. He was a real artist himself. Honestly, he was starting so many different things in his career and also having a lot of ideas for others. So the fiber maker’s design center was very successful. We had a location in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, very, very central, on the first floor. The space was split into two areas, one was for architecture and design, with a group of designers. One of them was Andrea Branzi, who is still on the scene with exhibitions and installations and so on. And the other space was the fashion one, where I was also working. We organized multi-visual presentations, visual trend representations, which we never did before, nobody ever did before. We organized meetings with buyers to show what we had developed with the textile companies using fibers from the sponsor company. My responsibility was mainly the young fabric and knitting area. The work involved collaborating with my colleagues. We were deciding about the trends of the season, finalizing the color cards, and so on. And then I had to go around Italy showing the trends. The German buyers came to Italy, and I went to Germany to show them materials.

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The objective was to inform the spinners, the weavers, and the apparel companies about the trends to come for the next season. What was also very interesting, when the spinners, weavers, and apparel companies were ready with their own collections, they gave us samples from their collections. We collected samples that used our yarns for the fabrics and garments. We did a merchandising activity after that, inviting the buyers of department stores—Italian, German, and so on—and wholesalers to come and see the collections, which we had produced with fibers from the fiber maker that was backing the design center. We were almost like a marketing organization. We did trends and PR and marketing and merchandising. But at that point we didn’t say “marketing,” we said “merchandising” because it was more about buying, selling and buying, and so on. I worked with around thirty spinning mills altogether. I visited each mill individually to give them the trends. They were all Italian. There were also weavers, and some apparel companies. One of the first apparel companies that we worked with was Max Mara, at the real beginning. The design center existed for ten years, more or less. As it often happens, Montefibre, the fiber maker, had some difficult times, and in 1979, they decided to stop this activity, the design center. At that point some of the spinners and weavers said, “Why don’t you open your own consultancy company?” That’s what I did; that’s when Elementi Moda was born, and my daughter was born as well. IGM: What did you think when you founded your own company? Was it really your own company from the very beginning? What were your plans? What were your hopes? OB: At that point, I had two goals. One was to be able to continue what I thought was definitely my job. And some friends of mine have said, “You have invented your job.” It’s true. I have invented something because there was nobody doing something like that in Italy at that point. The other goal was to have more time for the new baby. That didn’t happen really but the intention was to have more time for the family. I had a baby girl and a young boy, seven years old, so that was the intention. I started my own business working with Elio Fiorucci first as a consultant for the knitwear collection, and as a consultant to some spinning mills in Prato and Biella. Lanificio dell’ Olivo was the one in Prato. IGM: Did some of the spinners and weavers that you had been working with before stay on with you as your customers? OB: Yes, because when I visited them when I still working for the design center. It was like giving them an individual consultancy. So they evidently appreciated the work I was doing, and they decided to follow me as an individual, as a private consultancy, when I opened my studio. So that was the beginning of Elementi Moda. We had a small office, but we immediately started working with some knitting machines because I really liked knitwear and yarns and so on. So, working with the spinners, I decided to offer a service, not only focusing on the development of yarns and yarn color cards but also on ideas about how to present the yarns in a different way. By knitting samples, creating new textures and effects, and so on. We developed new techniques to promote the yarns.

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IGM: At the time you started Elementi Moda in 1979 there were already several fashion forecasting agencies in existence in Paris. At this time, did you have some contact with any of them? OM: I had some contact with them, but only on a private personal basis, like Madame Peclers, for instance, and Nelly Rodi, with whom I’m still a very good friend, but not in terms of collaborating. It was just about knowing each other. We never sat down and discussed our jobs with each other. When I founded Elementi Moda, there was no company like it in Italy. It was a time when manufacturers started to understand that they needed some information coming from outside the company itself, where they had technical people with experience and so on but not yet a vision of the markets outside. The design center was different because it was financed by a fiber company, and the objective was in fact to sell more polyester, to sell more acrylic. There was no financial supporter behind my consultancy, Elementi Moda. I had some money from finishing a job, and I was talking to my husband and said, “Okay, what do you think? Is it a problem if I invest this money in doing something new? Would it be okay? It could be negative. We will be taking a risk.” And my husband said, “Okay, it’s your money. You do what you want.” He supported me quite a lot. He’s still supporting me quite a lot. And he has given me, always, the tranquility. He’s in charge of all the administration—financial and so on—in the company. I didn’t have to think about all of those problems, just my own creativity and the consultancy and so on. IGM: And in Italy there were no trend forecasting agencies like the French ones? OB: No, in Italy, Elementi Moda was the really the first one. The difference was that the forecasting agencies in France have always produced books to sell, but I never did. I’ve been asked many times to produce trend books, which I could do because I have all the elements. I work very far in advance on the season. I was never interested in the commercial part of this job—to sell the books or to organize somebody commercially to sell them. There is no Elementi Moda in other countries. That was my choice. I was never thinking about building a company in the sense of a company that has a life of its own, but I’ve always been thinking, “I want to do the job I like.” IGM: I know that you are now working in so many different areas, so many services. So, could we talk about the different kinds of services that you give today? What do you consider your most important area? OB: Well, I must say first of all that I was always trying to understand in advance how the market was changing, and what type of support and information the textile companies needed. Which means that in the beginning it was very much “I give you the trends, I help you to develop your collection, whether it’s a yarn or a fabric, or a knitted garment, and, I give you all the elements of the storytelling to present the collection.” We did folders, photos. We helped our customers to visualize the collection in the best possible way. I helped them a lot when they were displaying the collection at exhibitions; I helped to decorate the stand, for instance, and things like that. And I was always traveling a lot and working very much in the Far East, in Japan. In 1979, I went to China for the first time, and have been visiting China regularly since then, at least twice a year. Also Thailand, Indonesia, and Korea. IGM: What customers did you have in the Far East?

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OB: Different ones. In Japan, I was working with a vertical company that was producing very high-quality yarns, cashmere-type yarns, fabrics, and then garments. And I was staying in Japan a month normally, working with them on the development of a capsule collection of high-quality fabrics, yarns, and fabrics, and producing the prototype of a small collection and presenting—because they wanted me to present the collection to their own customers. I worked for several seasons with Shiseido on makeup colors, sometime around 1983, 1984, and 1985. It was the Shiseido collection; eyelid colors, nail lacquer, and lipstick for a special collection for the younger market, only in Japan. We also designed the boxes and a special color range. I went to the Shiseido booth at the Isetan department store to present the collection and to meet the young people. We did a small collection because Shiseido wanted to change often. In China, I was working with some weavers. In Thailand, I was working and have been working for more than ten years with the government, with the ministry of industrial development, to help them develop new innovative products and to help them move from handicraft production into industrial production. We are now doing a modern Thai silk project for the fourth or fifth time. We have very specific projects where the fashion content is not the main objective. The main objective is to help these people to transform something that is in their own tradition and produced by hand or woven by hand into something which is more adapted to international markets. IGM: I can see that you have an extremely wide range of customers. Trend forecasting and the work you do is a kind of business-to-business model, so you work with companies. How do you connect with future clients, and what’s the procedure? How do you meet them? OB: I never really did anything to look for new customers. They have arrived because they have read about my work somewhere, or I met them at exhibitions, or friends told them something. Honestly, I never did anything special to look for new customers. So that’s an experience I don’t have. In the 1980s, I did many apparel collections, but I decided about ten years ago to do less and less. This year, I won’t design any garment collections. I am not advising to apparel companies anymore. New fiber developments, technology, and so on— that’s what interests me today. I’m quite curious. I like to learn new things all the time. So I’m not worried about facing a technological development where I have no knowledge. I try to get the new knowledge, to be able have new ideas coming out and helping our customers to work in a new direction. Today, I work mainly in materials. I have people coming to me. Recently, two persons, two technicians, who opened a small factory in Italy, were thinking about developing a new yarn with feathers, just using feathers, goose feathers. And they came here, and said, “What do you think?” I said, “Oh, why not? Let’s try.” And we had an exchange of minds, brainstorming for a couple of days to say, “How could it be? Which are the difficulties, the possibilities?” and so on. At the end we finalized three or four ideas, which were then developed; I did all the trials here. I found all the problems that are related to the yarn. They understand the yarn now. They have a patent in development. So there is now a yarn made with feathers, which can be

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woven and knitted with no problem to make fantastic fabrics. It’s extremely soft. But it’s not only about the softness. It is about the effect of the feathers on the surface. It’s very visible. And, you know, I don’t know why, but when I am faced with a new idea, with a new product, I try to not think too much about fashion. I say, “Let’s do it,” and then maybe, “Let’s do it with color.” Once we have found a solution for something, then we will find a way to introduce it into fashion. But if we want to do something new, we have to be adventurous, we have to take a risk, we have to try.

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8 FASHION PREDICTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE JAPANESE TEXTILE INDUSTRY The Role of Kentaro Kawasaki, 1950–90 Pierre-Yves Donzé

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oday, Japan is well known for its so-called “street fashion,” that is, a mixture of styles inspired by pop culture (anime, manga, music bands, etc.) and resulting from urban subculture rather than being imposed by designers working for apparel makers. Most Western and international scholars discussing Japanese fashion during the second part of the twentieth century emphasize the uniqueness of this bottom-up process.1 The sociologist Yuniya Kawamura argues, for example, that “fashion is no longer controlled or guided by professionally trained designers but by the teens who have become the producers of fashion.”2 According to other scholars, this bottom-up fashion would attract worldwide attention for Japanese fashion and design, giving them a chance for some designers to pursue their career abroad, Kenzo Takada, the designer who made his fame and fortune in Paris, being one of the most famous.3 Of course, during the 1980s and 1990s, some textile companies, supported by fashion magazines, took this opportunity to launch new brands and new styles that answered this demand.4 Since the 1990s, Japanese street fashion has even begun to be exported, particularly to South Korea and the United States.5 Hence, the prediction of fashion trends is a major issue for apparel companies established in a fast-changing environment. In this sense, the business of fashion in Japan is not unique in itself, although the balance of relations between consumers, producers, and intermediaries may be different from Western countries. Consequently, the Japanese fashion system must be analyzed and understood in the context of the transformation of the textile industry and its refocus on apparel during the second part of the twentieth century. Fashion prediction played a particular and important role in this industrial reorganization, and contributed to the emergence of a fashion system characterized by the eminence of street fashion. Fashion prediction is a concept that has not been well defined or discussed in detail by academic literature until this book. It must be understood and approached through the idea that fashion is a system in which intermediaries are major actors who connect producers and consumers and who build cultural and economic values to produce fashion.6 From the perspective of fashion as a business, the job of forecasting trends is a major challenge for manufacturing companies, as they need to produce what tomorrow’s customers will feel

like buying. Hence, intermediaries like consultants and magazines are seen as important sources of prediction.7 In general, the literature assumes that trends are created by the fashion industry—even if based partially on analysis of customers’ preferences—and then purchased by individual firms. The development of mass communication in the 1960s supported this movement, while it was relatively neglected until then.8 Designer manager Susan Dillon even argues that a “trickle-down effect” from fashion designers to commercial designers and retailers can be observed.9 Some scholars date the appearance of fashion prediction, understood as a marketing tool, to Paris in the 1960s.10 Yet, a business history approach to this phenomenon makes it possible to emphasize that it is a far older practice. The necessity to understand consumers’ needs and tastes led textile companies, often geographically distant from their markets, to turn to service agencies and other consultants to collect information on their behalf. In the case of France, the historian Thierry Maillet has demonstrated that this function appeared in Paris in 1825, when a designer from the eastern part of the country, Victor Jean-Claude, arranged to send some samples of popular fashion from Paris back to textile manufacturers in his region. The growth of his business led other designers to open their own offices delivering the same service during the following decades. Then, during the interwar years, New York’s department stores also had their own fashion designers in Paris, who brought French fashion back to the United States.11 For the United States, the historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk had shed light on the role played by a particular group of consultants, the “color advisors.” This profession emerged during the 1920s, sometimes within manufacturing firms like the General Motors Corporation, and aimed to support companies in the choice of colors for their products.12 In addition, Ben Wubs and Thierry Maillet have recently shown that textile fairs had become major intermediaries and disseminators of information related to trends and forecast in the 1970s.13 Finally, works on global value chains in textiles and fashion emphasize the fast process through which information about consumption goes back to manufacturers, who can easily adapt products to the changing tastes of consumers.14 From this perspective, Zara is definitely the best example.15 In comparison with this general overview, centered on Western examples, one can assert that fashion prediction in Japan has taken a similar form since the Edo period (1603– 1868). In the silk and cotton industries, regional traders (ton’ya) played an important role to provide information about consumption and the tastes of citizens based in large cities, particularly Edo, to manufacturers gathered in districts like Kiryu.16 Fashion prediction relied, as in Paris, on intermediaries. For the period following the opening of Japan and the beginnings of industrialization between the 1860s and the First World War, Japanese scholars emphasize the impact of new technology on the development of the textile industry and change of fashion. For example, the introduction of artificial colorants, imported from Germany, was a way for producers to provide a larger variety of goods to customers and to enlarge their product development activities.17 Tetsuro Nakaoka also showed that the weavers who modernized their techniques after 1853 remained competitive by launching products of better quality, cheaper price, and improved designs.18 Furthermore, the historian Hitoshi Tamura stressed the importance of technological development, particularly the improvement of looms, to explain how cotton fabric manufacturers were able to produce cheaper and larger quantities of cloth to meet a growing demand.19 Hence, in the realm of

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creativity and fashion, the common view of Japanese scholars is a technological and topdown perspective after the Meiji Restoration. Scholars emphasize the competitive advantage of companies and regions that were able to adopt foreign technologies, instead of the role of regional traders as key intermediaries (who had been important during the Edo period).20 Yet, viewed from a consumer perspective, a major change occurred during the twentieth century, with the shift from Japanese to Western clothes. This transformation of the product was realized first for school and military uniforms, that is, for products that cannot be considered fashion goods. After the Second World War, in the context of economic growth and Americanization, Western clothes became the standard for daily use. Hence, apparel makers faced a complex challenge. They needed to shift to a new product, which required new techniques and new design skills, and for which there was little information about consumers’ tastes. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of this industrial change and the birth of modern fashion in Japan. The main research questions addressed here are: What was the role of fashion prediction in supporting the textile industry in refocusing on Western apparel? What kinds of information were considered relevant for that purpose? What was the impact of fashion prediction on the Japanese apparel industry? To discuss these issues, the chapter examines the work of Kentaro Kawasaki, an engineer in a textile company who was one of the first Japanese experts to theorize on the purpose and methodology of fashion prediction, and who organized joint research to forecast fashion trends. The paper is divided into three sections: the first examines the organizational changes of the Japanese textile industry and its refocus on Western garments; the second introduces the activities of Kawasaki; and the third discusses the impact of fashion prediction on the Japanese apparel industry.

The Westernization of the Japanese apparel industry The development of fashion prediction in Japan during the second part of the twentieth century occurred in a specific context: the Westernization of the apparel industry. The challenge, for the manufacturers of clothing, was not only to predict trends and consumers’ tastes for common goods (trousers, shirts, sweaters, etc.), but also to engage at the same time in the development of a new type of product (Western clothing). In order to make clear the context of the rise of Western fashion prediction in Japan, it is necessary to briefly revisit the historical evolution of the Japanese textile industry since the end of the nineteenth century and to emphasize the particular position of apparel companies at that time.21 The textile industry can be divided into two main sectors, spinning and weaving, which experienced very different paths of development. First, the spinning industry, especially for cotton, but also for silk to some extent, was transformed into a modern sector, led by numerous large enterprises. The most famous firm in the cotton sector was the Osaka Cotton Spinning Company. Founded in 1882, Osaka benefited from the world’s best technology, such as machines supplied from the UK by Platt Brothers & Company. It later merged with Mie Cotton Spinning and was renamed Toyobo in 1914, then merged again with Osaka Joint

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Spinning, becoming the largest cotton spinning company in the world in 1931.22 That year, the five largest Japanese cotton-spinning companies had an accumulated share of 46.4 percent of national production.23 Cotton spinning was a highly concentrated industrial sector, for which international competitiveness relied on economies of scale. As for silk, it shifted at the end of the nineteenth century from a luxury craft business to lower-quality, mass-produced goods for the United States market, but was less concentrated than cotton. Japanese silk exports overtook those of China in 1906, and silk was Japan’s main export until the 1920s. During the interwar years both cotton and silk spinning were deeply affected by the development of artificial or man-made fibers, particularly rayon. This technological innovation was a major reason for the decline of the silk industry in Japan. Newcomers, namely trading companies with links with some European enterprises and thus access to new technology, founded man-made fiber firms such as Teijin (1918) and Toray (1926). Large cotton-spinning companies, including Toyobo and Kurashiki, also invested in the new business of artificial fibers. Japanese rayon producers became competitive in world markets during the 1930s. Hence, from a long-term perspective, one can emphasize the existence of strong producers of yarn in Japan. Second, the weaving and garment industry did not gravitate towards the large modern enterprises. For both cotton and silk, these sectors kept their traditional organization of clusters of small and medium-sized companies, oriented towards the domestic market. They benefited from cheap and high-quality thread provided by large spinning companies, and could launch a wide variety of goods on the market, while adapting to changes in customers’ tastes. Yet, the clothes produced by these firms were mostly in the Japanese style, namely, kimono and yukata (a casual kimono for the summer, made of cotton). Until the end of the Second World War, most Western clothes in Japan consisted of uniforms for the army and for schools. Hence, they were not consumer goods that had to be adapted to changing tastes, and fashion prediction was not an issue. After 1945, the Japanese textile industry underwent a major change. Despite high growth during the 1950s, the rise of competitors in Asia had a deep impact on spinning and weaving companies in Japan. They gradually lost their competitiveness in the 1960s and declined. The largest and most competitive companies, namely the producers of cotton yarn and artificial fibers, diversified outside of textiles, mostly into chemicals.24 Between 1980 and 2008, the most important of these companies witnessed a massive shrinkage of their artificial fiber and textile divisions relative to the growth of chemicals. Measured in terms of sales, the share dropped from 74.5 to 38.7 percent at Toray Industries, 69.7 to 29 percent at Teijin, and 38.2 to 6.6 percent at Asahi Kasei.25 The gradual withdrawal of these large firms from the textile industry had a deep impact on its evolution. As they had large financial, human, and technological resources, their absence became a weakness for the textile industry, which had started in the 1960s to reposition itself towards the manufacture of Western apparel. The former rayon producers continued, of course, to supply new kinds of fibers and cloth to apparel makers, but they did not invest in building sales networks and brands, as could be observed in Europe and the United States. The withdrawal of these large enterprises from the textile sector created a space for apparel companies to take the lead in the Japanese textile industry during the 1960s. These firms benefited from high tariffs until the mid-1990s.26 Department stores were major partners of the emerging Western garment industry. During the interwar years, department stores had ordered Western clothes from Japanese textile companies who found a way to diversify

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into a new business.27 After the Second World War, inspired by French haute couture, department stores started to organize catwalk shows for their customers (Mitsukoshi in 1950, Takashimaya in 1953).28 At the same time, they began to distribute the products of the French haute couture houses, and then began to produce them under license. Christian Dior is a case in point.29 In the early 1950s, this company adopted a strategy of international growth based on license agreements signed around the globe. In Japan, it began to offer an exclusive sales contract with the department store Daimaru in 1953. Then, in 1964, an agreement for production under license in Japan was signed with Kanebo, one of the former large cotton-spinning companies which had diversified beyond textiles but kept some production facilities at that time.30 Fashion production under license, however, was not a business controlled by large companies alone. A substantial number of small firms, engaged in the manufacture of clothes or the trade of yarn, also seized this opportunity. This was, for example, the case of Sankyo Seiko, a company based in Kobe, who specialized in the export of silk thread and the trade of rayon during the interwar years.31 As it became difficult to keep the yarn trade profitable after 1960, the company diversified into the fashion business. In 1963, it obtained the exclusive right to import and sell Lacoste shirts in Japan, and, ten years later, founded a joint venture with its French partner for the production of these goods under license. During the 1970s, Seiko signed import and licensing contracts with other European companies, such as Daks of the UK and Leonard of France. In 1980, the profit of the fashion division was six times larger than that of the silk division.32 Knowledge acquired in manufacturing these products helped Sankyo Seiko to start production under license for the Japanese apparel industry. In 1973, it founded the subsidiary Sankyo Seiko Fashion Service, with branches in Tokyo and Osaka. Companies developing Western garments for department stores or foreign partners thus acquired technical knowledge to design and manufacture clothes. Yet, it was also necessary to organize the collection of information related to markets, in order to be able to develop and manufacture goods which fit with the wishes of customers. There were several organizations at the industry level, such as the Mikawa Textile Center, opened in 1927, and the Japanese Research Center on Textile Economics (Nihon sen’i keizai kenkyujo), founded in 1948. They carried out research and published reports about the future of the textile industry. Moreover, large artificial fiber companies set up in-house R&D centers dedicated to fashion beginning in the 1960s: Kanebo in 1961, Toray in 1969, and Asahi Kasei in 1974.33 All these centers offered, however, a technology-oriented approach without much concern for consumer perspectives. This is the environment in which Kentaro Kawasaki intervened, with a slightly different objective: to provide textile companies with fashion prediction based on a scientific analysis of consumers’ tastes.

Kentaro Kawasaki and fashion technology The repositioning of the Japanese apparel industry towards Western fashion during the postwar years of high growth was undertaken by numerous entrepreneurs, advisors, and middle-management employees. Basically, they acted within individual companies and implemented new product development strategies that aimed to answer the desires of tomorrow’s customers. Kentaro Kawasaki was one of them. He did not work in a large or

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famous, or even particularly successful firm, and never attracted the attention of scholars working on the history of the Japanese textile and apparel industry. Yet, he had a major influence on the emergence of fashion prediction in Japan during the 1960s and the 1970s. He had an important impact within his company, Chori, and especially as a coordinator for the development of a scientific methodology to predict trends at the industry level. He was also one of the very rare Japanese people who carried out theoretical work on fashion prediction. Kawasaki was an engineer, and his entire career as a fashion predictor was deeply influenced by his engineering background. Born during the interwar years, he graduated in 1952 from the Department of Chemical Fibers of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Kyoto.34 This department had been set up during the Second World War in cooperation with the state to carry out research on nylon for military purposes, and was redirected to the development of artificial fibers for the textile industry after 1945.35 After graduation, Kawasaki entered graduate school to pursue his research, but the next year, in 1953, he stopped and moved to a small company named Chori. Based in Osaka, Chori was a trading company specializing in silk and artificial fibers. During the 1930s, it was one of the largest sellers of rayon to domestic manufacturers of fabrics, with a share estimated at about one-third of all artificial fibers produced in Japan.36 In the 1950s, Chori focused on the export of artificial fibers and was among the ten largest exporters. It was also an important supplier for the domestic apparel industry. Hence, Chori experienced fast growth, with gross sales going from 7 billion yen in 1950 to 67.4 billion yen in 1960 and 365.4 billion yen in 1970, but with a low operating profit (0.5 percent on average between 1950 and 1970).37 When Kawasaki was recruited, Chori had decided to engage in a new kind of cooperation with one of the largest producers of artificial fibers, Toyo Rayon.38 As Chori had access to the market and knew customers’ needs, the idea was to link marketing knowledge and technological capabilities to co-develop a new kind of fiber similar to nylon. The prototype of “wool-nylon” was presented in 1952. Sales started the following year and met with big success, which led Chori to become more actively involved in the co-development of chemical products in the late 1950s. It founded a joint venture for the production of wool-nylon with Toyo Rayon in 1953, and opened a chemical products division at its Tokyo branch five years later.39 Kawasaki was employed by Chori to work on the development of new fibers and cloth in relation with the needs of the apparel industry. In 1965, he became head of the textile development unit and was appointed director of textile marketing in 1975.40 He worked his whole career for the company and moved after retirement, in the late 1980s, to Kyoto Bunkyo Junior College where he taught for some ten years. Beside his work at Chori, Kawasaki continued his research on chemical fibers and materials, ultimately obtaining his doctorate from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1964. Moreover, he published more than fifty research papers in academic journals published by associations such as the Society of Fiber Science and Technology Japan (Sen’i gakai) and the Textile Machinery Society of Japan (Sen’i kikai gakkai). He was also the author of two books, the first on the manufacturing of yarn (1967)41 and the second on fashion prediction (1981).42 Kawasaki’s interest in fashion prediction appeared in the early 1970s, after nearly twenty years of work as an engineer and a developer of new fibers and cloths. In 1971, he was stunned by an official report on the evolution of science and technology to 2000, published by the Japanese Science and Technology Agency.43 This document stressed that, in the case of the textile and apparel industry, technological development was the

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driving force of economic growth and improvement of living conditions. Kawasaki was against this top-down perspective and argued that clothes were consumer goods, so that their choice, purchase, and use by customers resulted from market mechanisms, rather than the expression of companies’ will.44 Moreover, after the 1973 Oil Crisis, as economic growth started to lower, it became clear that companies had to engage in marketing and to develop goods which answered the needs and tastes of customers. For the apparel industry, forecasting trends became a major issue. In a paper entitled “Looking for the Possibility of Fashion Prediction,” published in 1976 in the journal of the Textile Machinery Society of Japan, Kawasaki explored the idea that an approach of mixing product life cycle, psychology, and sociology could help companies to predict the future.45 The work carried out by Kawasaki on fashion prediction was, however, not the result of individual research and thought. In 1976 and 1977, together with two friends working in chemical companies, Shigeto Tozawa, from Asahi Kasei, and Masaaki Tomiji, from Teijin, he organized the Fashion Technology Group (FTG), which gathered experts from various enterprises engaged in textile, apparel, and fashion.46 Table 8.1 shows the twelve

TABLE 8.1  Members of the Fashion Technology Group in 1980 Name

Company

Industry

Function/division

Masahiko Adachi

Asahi Kasei

Artificial fibers

Product planning marketing

Fibers, cloths

Textile general planning

Kentaro Kawasaki Chori

Hiroyuki Shinmura Hamasan Seishoku Weaving

CEO

Shima Iwanaka

Iwanaka Keori

Weaving (wool) CEO

Akihito Otahara

Teijin

Artificial fibers

Director of marketing

Kazuhisa Furuse

Tokai Senko

Dyeing

CEO of a subsidiary

Kiyo Fukami

Toray

Artificial fibers

Director of textile division and of product planning

Toyotsura Kiguchi

World

Apparel

Director of product planning

Atsuko Tada

Fashion coordinator

Masaaki Tomiji

Teijin

Artificial fibers

Textile planning

Shigeto Tozawa

Asahi Kasei

Artificial fibers

Member of the board of the subsidiary Asahi Kasei Textile

Masanori Yamagawa

Novelty book service

Unknown

CEO

Source: Kentaro Kawasaki, Fasshon tekunoroji no hasso: ryuko yosoku kara shohin kikaku he (Tokyo: Daiamondo, 1981), 9.

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core members of FTG in 1980. Most of them were CEOs or directors in leading textile companies and were often accompanied by engineers and managers to the meetings. The composition of this group embodies perfectly Kawasaki’s view of fashion prediction, that is, a perspective focusing mainly on technological issues. The sector most represented was the artificial fibers industry, with five members. FTG members came from large competitive firms (Asahi Kasei, Teijin, and Toray) which dominated the Japanese textile industry as suppliers of raw material, and were suppliers of Chori.47 Next, there were four companies in the middle of the textile production process, that is, weaving, cloth making, and dyeing. Finally, there was only one apparel maker, the company World, the third largest clothing manufacturer in Japan.48 The presence of a freelance fashion coordinator, Atsuko Tada, must also be stressed, even if it is difficult to imagine the real impact of this woman on discussions between representatives who mostly came from divisions of product development and planning. The objective of FTG was obviously to offer a technological answer to the issue of structural shift in the Japanese textile industry and the refocus on Western apparel. Fashion prediction aimed to understand which kinds of fibers, cloth, and dyes needed to be developed for apparel makers. It is remarkable that there was only one representative from an apparel maker, and no one from branding or retail. This focus embodies a general trend in the Japanese manufacturing industry to concentrate on technology instead of marketing. The results of the collective work carried out by the FTG were presented by Kawasaki in his second book (Figure 8.1), published in 1981 under the title: The Idea of Fashion Technology: From Fashion Prediction to Product Planning (in Japanese).49 FTG was deeply influenced by the engineering spirit of most of its members. Its basic idea was that a scientific analysis of information made it possible to predict the near future of fashion at a success rate of about 90 percent. As fashion is both a process of continuity and novelty, the issue was to understand which aspects of clothing were going to change, and in which direction. At first, Kawasaki recommended the selection of a broad set of data, about population structure, economic cycles, segments of specific targets (chic, casual, trendy, sporty, simple), and past fashion patterns (colors, materials, silhouette; with an inspiration here from the work of the home economist Marilyn J. Horn).50 Then, these data were processed through various kinds of mathematical equations provided by Kawasaki. He showed the utility and the relevance of his models through a demonstration which proved that Japanese fashion for women was basically copied from the Parisian prêt-à-porter collections. The message of the FTG was that the apparel industry had to investigate scientifically the desires of customers and to develop new goods based on this market knowledge.

The impact on the Japanese apparel industry It is, of course, difficult to measure and evaluate the impact of the FTG on the evolution of the Japanese textile and apparel industry as a whole. Kawasaki was obviously not the only one to think about the future of this sector on the basis of scientifically based prediction methods, even if he was one of very few to organize this activity at a collective level. Many Japanese textile companies carried out similar surveys, but within their own planning and

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FIGURE 8.1  The Idea of Fashion Technology: From Fashion Prediction to Product Planning, authored by Kentaro Kawasaki in 1981. Courtesy Diamond Company, Japan.

product development divisions, rather than in cooperation with a broad range of other companies. This section discusses the impact of Kawasaki’s work and his consideration of the Japanese apparel industry, with a special focus both on the company Chori, where he worked, and on the industry as a whole.

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First, let us look at the development of Chori after 1970.51 The fast growth experienced by this company during the 1960s and early 1970s through the co-development and sales of artificial fibers, with gross sales going from 67.4 billion yen in 1960 to a peak of 583.8 billion yen in 1973, led to a diversification into unrelated businesses, such as real estate and leisure businesses in Japan and fast-food enterprises in the United States. This unfortunate strategy produced financial losses between 1974 and 1977 and led to the decline of gross sales until 1978. The firm was saved by banks and the large artificial fiber companies, including Asahi Kasei, which became a major shareholder and appointed a new CEO in 1978.52 Consequently, Kawasaki carried out his work on fashion prediction in the context of a company that was struggling with severe financial problems and was under restructuring. There was thus a direct and indispensable need to understand the future of fashion, in order to launch new fibers and new cloths for the apparel industry, and to recover the company’s profitability. During the restructuring process, Chori returned to its core competencies, namely, the development of fibers and cloths for the apparel industry. It opened new plants abroad, especially in China, to manufacture clothes, for example, men’s clothing.53 However, it was still basically a subcontracting company, manufacturing fibers and cloths for others. Hence, Chori did not launch its own brands nor open any retail network. It developed clothes with new materials for some of the largest companies in the apparel industry, such as World, Itokin, and Sanyo Shokai, which were among the top five garment producers in Japan in 1980.54 Hence, Chori kept its upstream position in the fashion value chain, between the developers of fibers and apparel companies. This intermediary position, as well as the technological and financial dependency on chemical companies, explains the choice of Chori’s new CEO in 1985: Eiki Kono. He was a former employee of Asahi Kasei, where he had been director of textile marketing.55 Kawasaki’s work helped to strengthen this position. Trying to forecast customer needs and to predict tomorrow’s fashion, he cooperated with chemical companies to improve and develop materials, and provided new clothes to apparel companies. This strategy led to a decade of sales growth (from 617.4 billion yen in 1980 to a peak of 727.6 billion yen in 1991) and stable profitability (0.2 percent operating profits on average in 1980–91 period). This was followed by a steady decline of sales until 2005 (206.6 billion yen) and increasing profitability (1.8 percent in 2005) (Table 8.2). In 2004, Toray purchased Asahi Kasei and integrated Chori as a subsidiary specializing in apparel development. The same year, the unit responsible for fashion prediction, a legacy of Kawasaki’s FTG, was incorporated as a new subsidiary under the name Chori Moda. It is now a company in the Toray Group that offers services related to product development, design, market surveys, public events, and production under license.56 Second, it is necessary to look beyond the case study of Chori and to examine the influence of a fashion prediction approach based on a technological paradigm in the Japanese apparel industry as a whole. Between 1965 and 1985, the cumulative sales of the six largest companies in this sector (Renown, Kashiyama Onward, World, Itokin, Sanyo Shikai, and Tokyo Style) went from 35.9 billion yen in 1965 to 783.5 billion yen in 1985.57 Yet, during this period, these firms had no direct access to markets and customers. They produced garments for retailers, mainly department stores and specialized stores that sold many different brands.58 Consequently, the co-development of clothes was the outcome of cooperation between the producers of new materials (like Chori), garment companies, and retailers. Apparel makers were intermediaries. They took part in the process of developing clothes, but had little influence on brand management and retail.

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TABLE 8.2  Sales (in billion yen) and operating profit (as a %) of Chori Co., 1950–2007 800

2.5 2.0

700

1.5 600 1.0 500

0.5

400

0.0 –0.5

300

–1.0 200 –1.5 100

–2.0 –2.5

19

5 19 0 5 19 2 5 19 4 5 19 6 5 19 8 6 19 0 6 19 2 6 19 4 6 19 6 6 19 8 7 19 0 7 19 2 7 19 4 7 19 6 7 19 8 8 19 0 8 19 2 8 19 4 8 19 6 8 19 8 9 19 0 9 19 2 9 19 4 9 19 6 9 20 8 0 20 0 0 20 2 0 20 4 06

0 Sales (billion yen)

Profit as a %

Source: Chori kabushikikaisha (2008), Chori setsuritsu 60 shunen kinenshi, Osaka: Chori kabushikikaisha, appendix.

This perspective was very different from the strategy adopted by successful apparel makers in Europe and in the United States, which invested massively in branding and retailing worldwide. A good example at that time was undoubtedly the Italian chain Benetton.59 This family firm, which was founded in 1965 as a knitwear specialist, opened its own retail outlet in northern Italy in 1968 selling Benetton goods exclusively. A second store was opened in Paris in 1969. The international expansion of retail accelerated in the late 1970s, with the opening of outlets in the US in 1979 and Japan in 1982. In the 1980s, Benetton was the world’s most successful apparel company because the firm controlled the entire value chain, including design, production, distribution, and retail. Aside from Benetton, The Gap of America and the British retailer M&S had their own brands and foreign stores by the 1970s. The new competitiveness of all three companies was based not only on technology expertise, but also on retail and branding. Yet, in Japan, apparel companies proved unable to shift their business model efficiently towards the SPA model, that is, to specialty store retailers of private apparel.60 The business historian Rika Fujioka mentioned the cases of Onward, which launched a new brand Ozoc in 1993, for an exclusive retail network, and World, which adopted an SPA strategy in 1995.61 The pressure from global SPAs was indeed growing. The Gap opened its first shop in Japan in 1994, and Zara followed suit in 1997. However, Japanese apparel companies restricted their SPAs to the Japanese market and elected to multiply their brands and branded retail outlets, following a strategy of extreme segmentation. For example, today Onward owns more than twenty brands.62 Table 8.3 shows the ten largest apparel companies in Japan in 2013. This ranking emphasizes the strong orientation of Japanese apparel companies towards the domestic market. Only four companies had foreign sales above 10 percent of their total sales. These

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TABLE 8.3  Top ten apparel companies in Japan, ranked by gross

sales, 2013 Company

Gross sales (billion yen)

Foreign sales (billion yen)

Foreign sales (as a %)

Fast Retailing

1,143

332.9

29.1

Shimamura

501.8

4.6

0.9

World

317.3

NA

-

Onward Holdings

279.1

61.9

22.2

Aoyama

222.1

NA

-

Wacoal Holdings

193.7

44.1

22.8

TSI Holdings

181.9

NA

-

Aoki Holdings

179.4

0

0

Adastria Holdings

153.2

8.2

5.4

Gunze

142.4

25.2

17.7

Source: http://gyokai-search.com/4-apparel-uriage.htm and annual reports. Note: data for fiscal year ending in March 2014 (August 2013 for Fast Retailing).

firms were either enterprises focused on a specific product, such as lingerie (Wacoal), holding companies that took over foreign fashion brands (Onward), or companies with significant businesses outside of fashion (Gunze). In the context of the decreasing domestic market for garments, the total value of which dropped from 15,300 billion yen in 1991 to 10,500 billion yen in 2013, the failure of Japanese apparel makers to internationalize has resulted in a decline in competitiveness.63 Their weakness is closely related to the way Kawasaki and the FTG saw fashion, that is, in its technological and functional dimensions. The attention to customers was omnipresent, but the emphasis was on understanding and fulfilling specific material needs. Branding was not integrated into the process of product development based on fashion prediction. The exception that proves the rule is the company Fast Retailing, which owns the worldfamous brand UNIQLO (Figure 8.2).64 Fast Retailing is unusual in the Japanese apparel industry. It started off as retailer, which invested in designing, branding, and selling clothes. In some respects, it was similar to The Gap. It adopted a SPA strategy during the 1980s, with the opening of the first UNIQLO store in Hiroshima, and has expanded its network on a global scale. The international competitiveness of this company relies on a strategy of building a strong global brand, based especially on product development. Since 1999, UNIQLO has collaborated with Toray to develop new fibers.65 Tadashi Yanai, the CEO of Fast Retailing, often tells the media that “Uniqlo [sic] is not a fashion company, it’s a technology company.”66 It offers a broad range of clothes, made with innovative fibers, such as “heat

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FIGURE 8.2  Tokyo, Japan, on December 29, 2012, a shopper walks into a UNIQLO clothing store. The fashion retailer is headquartered in Tokyo with hundreds of store locations in over a dozen countries. Getty Images; photographer SeanPavonePhoto.

tech.” Customers can select and coordinate merchandise to create their own look, in contrast to Western SPAs that offer particular styles.67 Hence, although UNIQLO perfectly embodies the kind of technologically driven fashion prediction promoted by Kawasaki and the FTG, Fast Retailing expanded on that concept by adding a strong brand and a strong retailing experience. This mix of tactics gives UNIQLO its competitive advantage and helps to explain why it has been so successful in global markets.

Conclusion This chapter sheds light on Kentaro Kawasaki’s fashion prediction activities in relation to the structural transformation of the Japanese textile industry and its reorientation from spinning and weaving to apparel. Kawasaki was an engineer trained in one of the most outstanding universities in Japan. He carried out original work regarding fashion prediction, as he was one of the very rare people in Japan, and in the world, to develop a theoretical framework and publish papers in academic journals on this topic before 1980. Moreover, he set up a joint organization with representatives of the textile industry to discuss the future of fashion: the Fashion Technology Group, or FTG. Kawasaki’s work was characterized by the use of scientific methods and the idea that mathematical models could help predict the future of garments. It was a market-oriented perspective, in that Kawasaki wanted to understand customers’ tastes and propose clothing that answered a need. Hence, the objective of fashion prediction as it was understood in Japan during the

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1970s and the 1980s was to help companies develop new garments. However, the target companies for Kawasaki and FTG were not so much apparel makers and retailers, but rather producers of artificial fibers and fabrics. This approach was deeply influenced by the rationality of the engineer and the need to offer technological answers to a problem of marketing. One must stress here that there was no consideration of branding as a way to support the expansion of apparel companies in this period. Garments were seen as useful consumer goods, not as branded products. Managing brands and building a distribution network were the purview of apparel companies, not of Kawasaki and his fellows. They developed clothes people were likely to buy, but the act of selling itself was seen as secondary. Yet, at the same time, some European textile companies such as Benetton were growing fast, based on a strategy of product development that included branding and retailing. This new business model became dominant in the 1990s with the global expansion of specialty store retailers of private label apparel, or SPAs, such as H&M, UNIQLO, and Zara. Offering customers clothes that corresponded to their wishes was not enough. They needed branded goods. Consequently, going back to the research questions addressed in the introduction, it is possible to argue that fashion prediction as it was implemented by Kawasaki and the FTG supported the overall move of the textile industry towards Western apparel. Technologically informed fashion prediction provided garment makers with information related to the tastes and needs of customers, and helped them make clothes that answered the market’s needs. Then again, a fashion prediction methodology focused on technological issues had shortcomings in terms of marketing strategy. Dedicated to the quality of their products, apparel companies neglected brand management and retailing precisely at the moment when these areas had become major sources of competitiveness in global markets. Beyond the case of Kawasaki’s fashion prediction activities, this study offers implications for a new understanding of the emergence of so-called street fashion in Japan from the 1970s to the 1980s. As explored in the introduction, scholars in sociology and cultural studies argue this bottom-up process to create fashion was the outgrowth of modern Japanese culture and society. Yet, looking at this phenomenon from the perspective of apparel companies’ product development strategies provides a very different point of view, one in which the cultural uniqueness of Japan disappears. The lack of strong brands in Japan may be a better indicator of why street fashion emerged when it did.

Notes 1 Aliyaapon Jiratanatiteenun, Chiyomi Mizutani, Saori Kitaguchi, Tetsuya Sato and Kanji Kajiwara, “The Transformation of Japanese Street Fashion between 2006 and 2011,” Advances in Applied Sociology 2, no. 4 (2012): 292–302; Yuniya Kawamura, Fashioning Japanese Subcultures (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2012); Toby Slade, Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2010); Valerie Steele et al., Japanese Fashion Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Penelope Francks, The Japanese Consumer: An Alternative Economic History of Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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2

Yuniya Kawamura, “Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion,” Current Sociology 54, no. 5 (2006): 784.

3

Tiffany Godoy and Ivan Vartanian, Style Deficit Disorder: Harajuku Street Fashion, Tokyo (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007).

4

Don Cameron, “Off-the-Rack Identities: Japanese Street Fashion Magazines and the Commodification of Style,” Japanese Studies 20, no. 2 (2000): 179–87.

5

Azuma Nobukaza, “Pronto moda Tokyo-Style—Emergence of Collection-Free Street Fashion in Tokyo and the Seoul-Tokyo Fashion Connection,” International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 30, no. 3 (2002): 137–44.

6

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Producing Fashion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

7

Janet Bohdanowicz and Liz Clamp, Fashion Marketing (New York: Routledge, 1994).

8

Annette Lynch and Mitchell Strauss, Changing Fashion: A Critical Introduction to Trend Analysis and Cultural Meaning (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007).

9

Susan Dillon, The Fundamentals of Fashion Management (London: AVA Publishing, 2011), 28.

10 Mathilda Tham, “The Futures of Futures Studies in Fashion?” in Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion, ed. Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015), 283–92. 11 Thierry Maillet, “Histoire de la médiation entre textile et mode en France: des échantillonneurs aux bureaux de style (1825–1975),” in L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques (2013), accessed May 8, 2016, http://acrh.revues.org/5610. 12 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012). 13 Ben Wubs and Thierry Maillet, “Building Competing Fashion Textile Fairs in Europe, 1970–2010: Première Vision (Paris) vs. Interstoff (Frankfurt),” Journal of Macromarketing (2015), accessed May 25, 2016, http://jmk.sagepub.com/content/ early/2015/12/07/0276146715619010.full.pdf+html. 14 Alper Sen, “The US Apparel Industry: A Supply Chain Review,” International Journal of Production Economics 114 (2008): 571–93. 15 Jordi Catalan and Ramon Ramon-Muñoz, “Marshall in Iberia. Industrial Districts and Leading Firms in the Creation of Competitive Advantage in Fashion Products,” Enterprise and Society 14, no. 2 (2013): 327–59. 16 Tomoko Tsukuda, “Waga kuni sen’i sanchi no burando senryaku ni kansuru,” Keiei ronshu 77 (2011): 33–46. 17 Tomoko Hashino, Keizai hatten to sanchi-shijo-seido: Meijiki kinuorimonogyo no shinka to dainamizumu (Kyoto: Minerva, 2007); Hitoshi Tamura, “Zairai orimonogyo no gijutsu kakushin to kagaku senryo: Dentoiro kara ryukoiro he,” Shakai keizaishi gaku 69, no. 6 (2004): 645–70. 18 Tetsuro Nakaoka, Nihon kindai gijutsu no keisei: dento to kindai no dainamizumu (Tokyo: Asahi, 2006). 19 Hitoshi Tamura, Fasshon no shakaikeizaishi (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyoronsha, 2004). 20 A similar perspective was adopted by Penelope Francks, “Kimono Fashion: The Consumer and the Growth of the Textile Industry in Pre-War Japan,” in The

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Historical Consumer: Consumption and Everyday Life in Japan, 1850–2000, ed. Penelope Francks and Janet Hunter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 151–75. 21 On the Japanese textile industry, see Takeshi Abe and Kyohei Hirano, Sen’i sangyo (Tokyo: Nihon keieishi kenkyujo, 2013); Hiroaki Yamazaki, Nihon Kasen sangyo hattatsushiron (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1975); and Hiroyuki Itami, Nihon no sen’i sangyo: naze, kore hodo yowaku natte shimattanoka (Tokyo: NTT Press, 2001). 22 Hiroyuki Odagiri and Akira Goto, Technology and Industrial Development in Japan: Building Capabilities by Learning, Innovation, and Public Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 112–14. 23 Ibid., 122. 24 Junko Watanabe, Sangyo hatten suitai no keizaishi: 10 daibo no keisei to sangyo chosei (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2010). 25 Abe and Hirano, Sen’i sangyo, 212. 26 Itami, Nihon no sen’i sangyo, 35–41 and 64. 27 Takeshi Abe and Hiroaki Yamazaki, Orimono kara apareru he: bingo orimonogyo to sasaki shoten (Osaka: Osaka University Press, 2012). 28 Pierre-Yves Donzé and Rika Fujioka, “European Luxury Big Business and Emerging Asian Markets, 1960–2010,” Business History 57, no. 6 (2015): 826. 29 Tomoko Okawa, “Licensing Practices at Maison Christian Dior,” in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 97. 30 Kanebo, Kanebo hyakunenshi (Osaka: Kanebo, 1988). 31 Hiroshi Majima, Miki takizo-den (Kobe: Sankyo Seiko, 1983). 32 Ibid., 304. 33 Kracie Fashion Institute Ltd, http://www.kracie.co.jp/f-ken/history.html. Toray, http://www.toray.co.jp/technology/organization/laboratories/lab_001.html. Both accessed May 17, 2016. 34 Kentaro Kawasaki, Fasshon tekunoroji no hasso: ryuko yosoku kara shohin kikaku he (Tokyo: Daiamondo, 1981), 241. 35 Kyoto daigaku kogakubu kagakukei hyakushunenkinen jigyo jikko iinkai, Dento no keisei to keisho: Kyoto daigau kogakubu kagakukei hyakunenshi (Kyoto: Kyoto daigaku, 1998), 17. 36 Chori kabushikikaisha, Chori setsuritsu 60 shunen kinenshi (Osaka: Chori kabushikikaisha, 2008). 37 Ibid., annexes. 38 Toyo Rayon was a subsidiary of the trading company Mitsui Bussan, created in 1926; it is today Toray Industries. Odagiri and Goto, Technology and Industrial Development in Japan, 127–8. 39 Chori, Chori setsuritsu, 26–7. 40 Kawasaki, Fasshon tekunoroji, 241. 41 Kentaro Kawasaki, Kako ito gairon: kiso to oyo (Tokyo: Nihon sen’i kikai gakkai, 1967). 42 Kawasaki, Fasson tekunoroji.

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43 Kagaku gijutsu cho, 2000 nen made no kagaku gijutsu (Tokyo: Kagaku gijutsu cho, 1971). 44 Kentaro Kawasaki, “Fasshon ningen shakai,” Kala dezain 18, no. 3 (1972): 12. 45 Kentaro Kawasaki, “Fasshon yosoku no kanosei wo sagaru,” Sen’i kikai gakkaishi 29, no. 11 (1976): 487–94. 46 Kawasaki, Fasshon tekunoroji, 9. 47 Financial Times, September 20, 1977. 48 Akihiro Kinoshita, Apareru sangyo no maketingu shi (Tokyo: Dobunkan, 2011), 34. 49 Kawasaki, Fasshon tekunoroji. 50 Marylin J. Horn, The Second Skin (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1968). 51 Chori, Chori setsuritsu. 52 Mainichi Shimbun, September 20, 1977 and February 10, 1978. 53 Chori, Chori setsuritsu, 77. 54 Kinoshita, Apareru sangyo, 34. 55 Yomiuri Shimbun, May 2, 1985. 56 Accessed May 17, 2016, http://www.chori-moda.com/index.html (in Japanese). 57 Kinoshita, Apareru sangyo, 34. 58 Rika Fujioka, “Fasuto fasshon no taito to hyakkaten no kiro: apareru,” in Gurobaru keieishi: kokkyo wo koeru sangyo dainamizumu, ed. Takeo Kikkawa, Takafumi Kurosawa, and Shigehiro Nishimura (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 2016), 90–110. 59 Jay P. Pederson, “Benetton Group SpA,” in International Directory of Company Histories 67 (Farmington Hills, MI: St. James Press, 2005). 60 Yuki Yamauchi, “Apparel,” in Nihon no sangyo to kigyo: hatten no dainamizumu wo toraeru, ed. Takeo Kikkawa, So Hirano, and Akira Itagaki (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 2014), 46–66. 61 Fujioka, “Fasuto fasshon,” 99. 62 Onward, http://www.onward.co.jp/brandlist/. Accessed May 18, 2016. 63 Estimation of Yano Research, quoted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), accessed May 18, 2016, http://www.meti.go.jp/committee/ kenkyukai/seizou/apparel_supply/pdf/001_03_00.pdf. 64 Hiroshi Tsukiizumi, Uniqlo: sekai ichi wo tsukamu keiei (Tokyo: Nikei bjinesujin bunko, 2015); Eugene K. Choi, “The Rise of Uniqlo: Leading Paradigm Change in Fashion Business and Distribution in Japan,” Entreprises et histoire 3 (2011): 85–101. 65 Tsukiizumi, Uniqlo, 127. 66 The Telegraph, May 12, 2016. 67 Takahiro Saito, Yunikuro tai Zara (Tokyo: Nikkei book, 2014).

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9 INTERSTOFF’S FASHION TABLE The Internalization of Fashion Forecasting in the World’s Most Important Fashion Fabric Fair Ben Wubs

T

rade fairs perform various functions in the modern economy.1 On a macroeconomic level, they are concentrated markets that bring supply and demand together. Markets are created and further developed by bringing the most important actors together temporarily in a concrete space. Fairs are the “barometer, not only of the business situation, but also of economic and trade policy trends.” They can also be the “drivers of market change,” and can additionally host different industries at the same time, thereby creating cross-industry networks.2 On a microeconomic level, fairs serve as a sales and marketing tool for exhibitors and visitors, both of whom use these shows to discover new products, the status of their competitors, and the general disposition of the business. Buyers, meanwhile, can find comparative information that enables them to make informed decisions. Direct contact with exhibitors makes in-depth discussions about innovative products possible. The exhibitors also learn a great deal about the needs of their customers and the market in general. Direct contact can also improve customer loyalty. Moreover, these shows can serve to motivate the members of staff of an exhibiting company who are able to explore a highly competitive and stimulating environment.3 According to the management scholars Diego Rinallo and Francesca Golfetto, trade fairs can be regarded as temporary knowledge-exchange clusters because “they form central relational spaces for knowledge and market processes.”4 Using economic geography cluster theories, they explored European fabric fairs from 1986 to 2006 and the background practices of trade fair organizers that shaped the learning activities of the visitors to these events. “By marking the boundaries of temporary clusters, improving the release and acquisition of knowledge, hindering undesired knowledge spillovers, and investing in the development of new knowledge, organizers bring to life knowledge-rich spaces that are currently attended for learning purposes, rather than for economic exchange.”5 In other words, these fabric fairs have increasingly become information hubs and temporary spaces for learning, and, less and less, they perform the macroeconomic function of bringing together supply and demand. Moreover, these learning processes are not spontaneous, but they are well organized. While the findings of Rinallo and Golfetto are based on an empirical study of twelve fabric trade shows in the European Union (EU), mainly in Germany, France, and Italy, their research primarily focuses on Première Vision, the leading European fabric

fair in the 2000s. Indeed, not much is said about the older Interstoff, which was the other leading fair in the global textile industry until 1999. Interstoff was launched in 1959 by Messe Frankfurt as a spin-off of a general consumer fair that took place in the spring and autumn. This new event was the most important fabric fair in the world for almost forty years, although it lost its primary position in Europe during the 1990s to Première Vision in Paris, which had combined fashion predictions and fabric sales since the 1980s. Interstoff was a trend-making event from the start, but began to make trend forecasting an explicit part of its fairs at the start of the 1980s. The two fabric fairs internalized fashion prediction in order to position themselves as central hubs of fashion in terms of trend information.6 Messe Frankfurt decided to close down the Interstoff event in Frankfurt in 1999, but had meanwhile successfully set up fabric fairs in fairs in Asia, particularly China, where they provide trend information to this day. Première Vision still organizes its shows in Paris on a semiannual basis and also adheres to its information-centric model. This chapter focuses on the trendsetting or trend forecasting activities of Interstoff in Frankfurt and then later in Hong Kong and on China’s mainland (Interstoff Asia and Intertextile are both organized by Messe Frankfurt). It addresses the following questions: how and why did fashion forecasting begin to play an explicit role at the Interstoff fabric trade fair in Frankfurt? Why and when did Interstoff lose its prime position as a trend-making event in Europe? How did it continue to play a role as trendsetter in the global fashion industry after the closure of the Frankfurt event? In an article for Industrial Marketing Management, Rinallo and Golfetto focused on Première Vision and described a mechanism that is generally called “concertation.”7 The term comes from political science, where it refers to the collective activity of various interest groups. It is also used in industrial relations to refer to the collaborative actions of organizations in industry to defend their interests. Rinallo and Golfetto, however, use the term to describe “trend concertation” at Première Vision as a collective endeavor among various actors in the textile industry.8 A few months before the fair takes place, trend forecasts are made with the help of specialist representatives of the textile industry and related associations. During the fair, these trends are communicated through seminars, dedicated trend forums, artistic displays, and trend publications.9 The various forums show textile swatches predicting the color and structure of apparel textiles for the next season, one year later. Unfortunately, Rinallo and Golfetto did not conduct interviews with contemporary actors at the Interstoff event, nor did they take a more historical approach. If they had done so, they would have discovered that similar collective endeavors had taken place elsewhere, during the earlier Interstoff fairs in Frankfurt, at Interstoff Asia in Hong Kong, and in Shanghai at the Intertextile fabric fairs, all of which were organized by Messe Frankfurt. During the 1990s, it was Ornella Bignami, the subject of Chapter 7, who took the lead in organizing a Fashion Table in Frankfurt and a Trend Committee in Hong Kong that made trend predictions in a similar way, which could also be described as trend concertation. This paper is largely based on documents held at the Messe Frankfurt Historical Archive, including official catalogues, reports, press releases, newspapers, and trade journals. It is also based on interviews with Ornella Bignami, CEO of Elementi Moda in Milan, and Ingrid Maurer, a former coordinator of Interstoff ’s Trend Table.

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History of Interstoff According to the corporate history of Messe Frankfurt GmbH, its roots date back to the sixteenth century when Frankfurt became a center of international trade. However, Frankfurt had received imperial privileges as a fair-trade city commencing in 1240. The Frankfurt exchange was born in 1585, “laying the foundation for the subsequent development of Frankfurt into the finance capital that it is today.”10 Frankfurt’s favorable geographical position in the middle of major European trade routes—one could go from Paris via Frankfurt and Leipzig to Nizhny-Novgorod on the Volga River—worked to the advantage of the city, enabling it to become the key European center for trade and finance. The origins of Frankfurt as a fair city thus have a long history. The modern history of such events nonetheless dates back to May 19, 1909, when the Festhalle, Europe’s largest domed building at the time, was opened by Emperor Wilhelm II.11 Inspired by the world’s fairs in London in 1851 and Paris in 1855, Frankfurt began to organize large industrial technology exhibitions in the second half of the nineteenth century. In due course, the organizers noticed that the city was missing a large venue to hold these major fairs. Consequently, the Ausstellungs and Messegesellschaft mbH (hereafter Messe Frankfurt) was set up by the city of Frankfurt as the founder of the Festhalle.12 The company was financed partly with public money from the city and partly with private funding from sixteen local entrepreneurs, including the bankers Benedikt von Goldschmidt-Rothschild and Albert von Metzler and the chemical industrialists Leo Ganz and Arthur Weinberg. In 1915, however, the city bought the interests of these private investors and thus became the sole owner of the hall by 1918.13 Until the First World War, a few fairs, as well as cultural, sporting, and political events (e.g., meetings of the Socialist Party), took place in the new hall, but the outbreak of hostilities meant that all exhibition plans were put on hold when it was transformed into a barracks. Immediately after the war, the plan was to re-start the exhibitions, with an international import fair organized in the autumn of 1919 to stimulate international trade in defeated Germany. The city of Frankfurt provided 500,000 marks to build five provisional exhibition halls.14 The majority of exhibitors came from Switzerland and the Netherlands, two states that had been neutral during the war and which were more than happy to resume trade relations with Germany, their most important trading partner. Textiles played a major role in this first postwar event. Indeed, the expansion of textile fairs during the 1920s even forced Messe Frankfurt to build new exhibition facilities. In 1925, it established a special dedicated hall for textiles, Haus der Moden (Home of Fashion), the spaces of which were soon fully booked by German and foreign textile companies, including silk manufacturers from Lyon, France.15 The 1929 crisis and the ensuing Nazi take-over brought an end to Messe’s expansion in the interwar years. Indeed, at the start of the Second World War, the greater part of the Festhalle was destroyed, while the Messe complex was also heavily bombed during the war. Frankfurt began to rebuild the Festhalle directly after the end of the Second World War. Indeed, in 1948, even before the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Messe opened its doors for a general consumer goods fair in the autumn. Textiles again played a major role, along with mechanical engineering, tobacco, and household equipment. During the opening speech, Ludwig Erhard, director of the economic custodians for the

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Allied occupied Bi-zone and later the Minister of Economics of the FRG, stated that the reopening of Messe Frankfurt was a symbol of the general recovery of West Germany’s economy and society.16 After the establishment of both the FRG and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949, a struggle broke out about the fate of Messe Leipzig, which was now located behind the Iron Curtain and was therefore no longer appropriate as a central European trading center. During the early 1950s, Messe Frankfurt was competing seriously with the organizers of fairs in Hannover and Cologne, Germany. The latter two, however, were subsidized by the German states of Niedersachsen and North-Rhine Westphalia. As a result, Messe Frankfurt also applied for a subsidy from the state of Hesse, Germany. When the Organization of the German Car Industry decided to move its international annual automobile fair (Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung, or IAA) from Berlin to Frankfurt in 1951, the state of Hesse decided to buy into the Messe company. From that moment on, the state of Hesse took a share of 5 million DM, which was second only to the investment of the city of Frankfurt, which had a 10 million DM share of the company’s equity capital. In 1952, the total capital was increased to 25 million DM to finance the company’s expansion plans. The two shareholders increased their stakes by 5 million DM each, meaning that the state of Hesse ultimately had 10 million DM (40 percent) and the city of Frankfurt 15 million DM (60 percent), which is the proportionate distribution that is still in place today. The company’s aims, however, remained unchanged: “To stimulate the German and Rhine and Main economy through the organization of fairs and exhibitions and marketing at home and abroad. To reach its targets the company maintains fair and exhibition facilities which its rents against adequate tariffs.”17 Textiles had expanded significantly since 1948 at the general consumption-goods fairs organized by Messe Frankfurt each spring and autumn. In 1955, an Australian journal stated that the textile industry was increasingly focusing on the international fair in Frankfurt, which had become the largest in Europe, with more than 100 textile exhibitors and some 30,000 square meters of exhibition space. This reflected the prosperous market conditions for textiles as a result of a tremendous increase of West German textile production and consumption since the start of the 1950s.18 By 1959, the textile component of the general consumer fairs in Frankfurt had become so large that the management decided to divide the events according to specific goods. This fit within Messe’s general trend towards event specialization. Indeed, this was how new specialist fairs were developed in Frankfurt— mostly as spin-offs of multi-sector shows—as a result of the success of individual product groups.19 So, from 1959 forward, one fair in Frankfurt would be dedicated entirely to clothing textiles. It was given the name Interstoff, which was a contraction of “Inter” for international and “Stoff,” which means textile in German (Figure 9.1). The inaugural edition of this fabric fair took place from July 7 through July 10, 1959, and was supported by fabric manufacturers and confectioners from Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.20 The exhibitors were located in standardized booths in which they showed off their fabrics and had meetings with potential buyers (Figure 9.2). The fair was a great success from the start, and its international character was underlined by the fact that, during the first Interstoff event, eighty-three exhibitors from seven different nations met 2,600 buyers from thirtyone different countries. At the start of the 1960s, Messe Frankfurt benefited to a great extent from the German economic miracle, namely Germany’s rapid and spectacular recovery after 1950, with annual growth rates of over 10 percent.21 The second Interstoff event in

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FIGURE 9.1  Interstoff exterior, 1961. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt.

January 1960 saw a total of 4,757 buyers from twenty-two different countries. In 1962, the semiannual event, which was originally held in January and in July, was rescheduled for May and November/December to follow the change of the fashion seasons more efficiently, harking back to the old rhythm of the general consumer fairs that were held in autumn and

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FIGURE 9.2  Interstoff interior, 1961. © Hessisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, Darmstadt. Photo: Sepp Jäger.

spring. The tenth edition of Interstoff in 1964 rented out 14,206 square meters of space and had 12,097 buyers from thirty-six countries.22 Table 9.1 shows the formidable growth of the Interstoff event during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the size of the exhibition space; and the breakdown of the number of exhibitors and visitors (buyers) with their geographic origins. The table also shows the figures for every tenth event and, without showing the numbers of all eighty-one shows, can only be an indication of Interstoff ’s development. It nevertheless clearly shows that the number of foreign visitors constantly increased until the 1980s and fell thereafter. These numbers do not reveal the composition of the group of exhibitors or visitors, which possibly changed as well during the 1990s. Just as important, Table 9.1 shows Interstoff ’s growing international scope during these years; more and more exhibitors and buyers came from outside Germany. The event in Frankfurt had become the number one business-to-business (B2B) fabric fair worldwide and the place to be if you needed to know what would be hot next season. However, during the mid-1980s, competition from Première Vision in Paris was getting fierce, in particular in relation to trend forecasting. The Dutch trend forecaster Lidewij “Li” Edelkoort organized extraordinary trend events at the Première Vision fair from 1985 to 1996 using audiovisual material like Le Film de la Mode (The Movie of Fashion). This became a huge success and attracted many visitors and exhibitors to the Parisian fabric fair.23 At the same time, visitors to the Interstoff event in Frankfurt complained that it had become too big at the end of the 1980s. One regular attendee noted: “Interstoff was really a giant . . . From year to year, it became more time-consuming and tiring to visit all the exhibitors. You went home confused because you could not work out the direction that fashion was taking.”24 In a way, the Frankfurt event suffered as a result of its own success. Indeed, the exhibition space

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INTERSTOFF’S FASHION TABLE

173

50

60

70

81

1984 S

1989 S

1994 S

1999 A

 3,677

36,146

44,502

40,274

38,617

37,867

23,915

14,206

–

Rented out exhibition space

308

1,044

1,076

931

818

697

498

380

82

Exhibitors

24

770

836

753

664

524

328

249

44

Foreign exhibitors

284

274

240

178

154

173

170

131

 38

German exhibitors

Source: Messe Frankfurt, MAFO, Entwicklung Eigenveranstaltungen am Messeplatz Frankfurt, October 16 2013.

40

20

1969 S

1979 S

10

1964 S

30

 1

1959 S

1974 S

No.

Year

 2,656

20,125

24,245

18,333

24,359

22,627

16,906

12,097

 2,603

Visitors: buyers

 1,165

 8,048

10,137

 9,123

15,378

13,810

 8,049

 4,437

   499

Foreign visitors

TABLE 9.1  Interstoff spring (S) and autumn (A), exhibition space, exhibitors, and visitors, 1959–99

 1,491

12,077

14,108

 9,210

 8,981

 8,817

 8,857

 7,660

 2,104

German visitors

increased in size continually until 1993, but the event simply became too large and not exclusive enough, and was therefore no longer setting trends. Growing numbers of visitors and exhibitors therefore preferred Première Vision, with the attendance figures speaking volumes in this respect.

Interstoff as a trend event Trend prediction was not new for Interstoff. Indeed, during the 1950s, European textile manufacturers and confectioners had visited the general consumer fair organized by Messe Frankfurt to see the latest trends. As early as 1955, four years prior to the opening of Interstoff, a trendsetting textile show was mentioned in a Messe Frankfurt annual report for the first time. According to this document, the fashion shows organized during the spring 1955 fair had an international nature. They were designed from a new point of view: the focus was no longer on haute couture fabric models, but more on selected models from leading firms in the higher-middle segment, which “convey[ed] the average fashion trends (‘Modetendenz’) and production schedules of the textile industry.”25 It was not only German companies that showed their models, but also fashion houses from Belgium, England, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States participated in the event. A few conclusions can be drawn on the basis of this annual report. First, as early as the mid-1950s, the Messe Frankfurt textile fair that would become Interstoff in 1959 was an international event, at least from an exhibitor perspective. Second, at the time, this fair was actively organizing trendsetting events such as the fabric model show. Interstoff was a trend-making event from the start, but this was not explicitly communicated to the textile industry at the time. Although Tobé Coller Davis had started her fashion consultancy in New York in 1927 (Chapter 3) and Fred Carlin began his textile consultancy in Paris in 1937 (Chapter 1), fashion forecasting was still a rare phenomenon at fabric fairs. Nevertheless, during the 1960s and 1970s, Interstoff was the leading trade event in global textiles. This changed when the much smaller Parisian fair Première Vision entered the arena and started to compete with Interstoff directly as a trendsetter at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, which, as discussed in Chapter 6, was when Nelly Rodi and Li Edelkoort of the Comité de coordination des industries de la mode (CIM) began to present fashion forecasts at the Parisian fair. From that time onward, fashion prediction became a more explicit feature of the Interstoff events. One important source for studying the rise of explicit trendsetting is Interstoff ’s semiannual official catalogues (Figure 9.3). These provided a wide variety of practical information for exhibitors and visitors. Not only did these booklets list the names and addresses of the exhibiting textile and related industry manufacturers, chemical companies, fiber and yarn manufacturers, fashion associations, the fashion and textile press, and accessory manufacturers, but they also provided plans of the fairgrounds and the exhibition halls.26 At the 44th edition of Interstoff, which took place between November 4 and 7, 1980, designers and design schools were mentioned as a separate category of exhibitors for the first time. Moreover, the event also organized a “Design Forum,” with design schools from Germany, the UK, the US, and France being received particularly enthusiastically by the fair’s organizers.27 A special press release was entitled “Design schools bring juvenile

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FIGURE 9.3  The cover of the catalogue for the 11th Interstoff (May 26–9, 1964). Courtesy Messe Frankfurt.

light-heartedness to the Interstoff.”28 A year later, at the 46th edition of the fair in 1981, Interstoff scheduled a dedicated forum called Trendset for the first time.29 This was set up in an important venue at Messe Frankfurt’s Congress Hall, which was a sign of the importance attached to it by the management of the fair. Sixty design companies exhibited in this hall.

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FIGURE 9.4  Interstoff 1983 display of design trends for summer 1984. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt.

According to Ingrid Maurer, a former organizer of the trend forums and a later coordinator of Interstoff ’s Trend Table, the competition from Première Vision in Paris had forced the management in Frankfurt to move more explicitly towards design and trend forecasting (Figure 9.4).30 During the 1980s, the importance of these forums increased tremendously. The Dutch trend-watcher and director of the Dutch Fashion Institute (Nederlands Mode Instituut), Günther “Gunnar” Frank was the first consultant to be hired to introduce trend forecasting to the Interstoff event.31 In May 1983, the plan of the Congress Hall even displayed a “Trend Temple,” demonstrating the almost divine power that was now attached to trendsetting. The hall was filled with designers and organizations related to forecasting and consultancy, including the German Fashion Institute (Deutsches Mode Institut, or DMI, from Berlin) and Promostyl, a styling and fashion forecast agency from Paris that had been established in the late 1960s. Interestingly, trend agencies were not yet listed as a separate category by the organization, but were grouped together with the designers, proving again that trend prediction was a relatively newly recognized profession at the fashion fair. The cover of the program for the 51st Interstoff event of April 1984 demonstrates very clearly that trendsetting had become a hot topic in Frankfurt (Figure 9.5). This ironic cover image, created by the famous fashion photographer Helmut Newton, shows a picture of a naked woman—no fabric at all—behind diagonal colored strokes, referring to color forecasting.32 It also shows that color and fashion forecasting had become inseparable from the Frankfurt event a year before Li Edelkoort started her famous audio-visual forecasting shows at the Première Vision fair in Paris.

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FIGURE 9.5  The cover of the catalogue for the 51st Interstoff (April 16–18, 1984). Courtesy Messe Frankfurt; photographer Helmut Newton.

In the second half of the 1980s, Trendset continued and more foreign style offices exhibited at Interstoff, including Promostyl and Carlin from Paris.33 Starting in 1984, the trend forums were organized in the new and bigger Hall 4, while one year later “Styling” had become a separate category of exhibitors. The program for 1986 advertised “The

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TrendSet in the World of Fashion” and “TrendsLive,” proving that forecasting activities had become increasingly important for Interstoff in terms of distinguishing itself from forty other smaller and local fabric fairs in Europe, but mainly with respect to competing with Première Vision in Paris.34 The TrendsLive show at Interstoff informed visitors about new trends and fashion themes. The fair’s organizer “invited 27 European designers to select new fabrics from leading firms in the textile industry and to create designs for the autumn/winter 1988/89.”35 The trend information created by this committee of experts in a private meeting several weeks before the show served as the basis for the new designs. The TrendsLive shows took place in Hall 4 three times a day during the fair. Although not many details are known about this committee, it seems as if some kind of concertation mechanism was already in use to inform designers and the rest of the industry of anticipated style changes. By the early 1990s, the information and trendsetting function of the two most important textile fairs had become crucial. Since Première Vision endeavored to beat Interstoff in that respect, the latter focused and advertised its trend activities ever more explicitly. The catalogue of the 64th edition of Interstoff, held in November 1990, was organized around the “Lands of Wonders” theme. Designers, design schools, fashion institutes, and style offices like that of Nelly Rodi were consolidated in Hall 4, which was called the “Creative Centre.” Hall 7 was solely reserved for “Fashion Point,” which was dedicated to Interstoff ’s trendsetting.36 In this hall, visitors could see and “experience” impressive artistic displays about the color, yarn, and fiber trends for the next season, with fashions shows offering creative realizations of the textiles in new silhouettes, with accessories for the coming season complementing the new collections. Fashion Point was comprised of a Fashion Table, whereby international fashion specialists met before the Interstoff event to discuss and eventually decide on the new color, yarn, and fiber directions for the upcoming year. The Fashion Table can be interpreted as the internalization of fashion forecasting within the fabric fair in Frankfurt, and can be compared to the trend concertation mechanism of Première Vision. In 1990, Sébastien de Diesbach of Promostyl was responsible for the realization of Fashion Point, its trend themes, and the creation of a color card. The Fashion Table organized by Interstoff included representatives from the Danish Association of the Clothing Industry, Schweizer Moderat, Nederlands Mode Instituut, Instituto Español de la Moda, Elementi Moda, the International Wool Secretariat, Deutsche Mode Institut, Cotton Service Büro, Bundeskammer für gewerbliche Wirtschaft, Austria, and, of course, Promostyl. The arty trend documentation that came out of this group, which was handed to visitors to Fashion Point, opened with the semi-poetic, but somewhat incomprehensible, lines: “A 1991/1992 winter in which color will prove to be an essential value concept, evident in every camaieux variation and making a spectacular entrance on the masculine stage . . . The background for these trends is nature, and LANDS OF WONDERS invites you to take a winter stroll in atmospheres of real and imagined nature.”37 The trend documentation showed four themes—wood land, earth land, sky land, and plastic land—with artistic impressions, fashion sketches, color cards, and a minimalistic use of language to describe the trends for the next year. In 1989, Interstoff ’s management hired the Italian fashion and color forecaster Ornella Bignami of Elementi Moda, who became responsible for the creation of the trend themes and the color card in autumn 1992. She also worked with Première Vision, but clearly had no problem serving two masters at the same time. (She actually still works with both

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organizations.) Bignami became responsible for the organization of a trend forum in Frankfurt, “introducing the new season whilst part of the display in the trend forum was also showing the fabrics that were exhibited at the exhibition itself. So it was always projecting the new ideas for the starting new season.”38 Three years later, she had thus become the leading individual at the Trend Table, taking over the position of trend forecasters from Promostyl, which still participated in Interstoff ’s trend concertation alongside the same participants as the year before, as well as a few new ones from Germany, Portugal, and the United States. The format of the official catalogue completely changed for the first time, as Interstoff stopped numbering the events. More importantly, the catalogue opened with the trends for autumn/winter 1993/4 (Figure 9.6). “Performance of Nature” was the theme that would “shape the coming fashion and your business.” The creations produced from the latest fabrics were shown at the Fashion Point in Hall 7, with protection, tradition, and decoration the key themes. The variety in fashion trends produced two moods

FIGURE 9.6  The cover of the catalogue for Interstoff, October 25–7, 1994. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt.

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for every theme, with “nature . . . the main source of inspiration for colors, fabrics and patterns.”39 The next page showed the color card for the next season, which was valid for women’s outerwear, menswear, sportswear, and childrenswear. Overall, the floor plans and communications to exhibitors and visitors clearly demonstrated that fashion forecasting had become key to the event. During the 1990s, fashion forecasting, including color cards, mood boards, and trend shows, would be a significant part of the Interstoff event. Bignami, meanwhile, remained in charge of the Fashion Table until the last Interstoff apparel fabric fair in Frankfurt in 1999.

Exporting the Interstoff brand and new textile fairs to Asia The market for textiles had become increasingly competitive with the arrival of new suppliers from low-cost countries, in particular those in Asia. Ever since the 1970s, the industry in the developed world had lost considerable market share to countries where labor costs were low. In particular, the Asian textile industry expanded rapidly in the late twentieth century.40 The shift of manufacturing locations from West to East had consequences for the textile markets as well, particularly the textile and fabric fairs in Europe.41 At the end of the 1980s, Messe Frankfurt adapted its strategy in response to changing macroeconomic conditions worldwide and began to look for opportunities in the global market. In 1987, Messe Frankfurt organized its first event outside Germany, a fair for textile exports to Hong Kong that was branded Interstoff Asia. It was no coincidence that this fabric fair followed the global shift in manufacturing, because textile manufacturing happened to be one of the first European industries to be rapidly outsourced to Asia. Interstoff Asia also introduced trendsetting as an important part of the event. In November 1991, for example, it organized a fair at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre named “Lands of Trends.” Around 300 exhibitors from Europe, the United States, and Asia presented their yarns, fabrics, and accessories. The advertisement for the event was set out in the same trendy but folksy style as in Frankfurt: “Colors are more than a fashion phenomenon. They also express a feeling, a moment of joy, a passing mood.”42 Until 1994, the show in Hong Kong was managed from the headquarters in Frankfurt, but due to its success a special holding company, Messe Frankfurt (HK) Ltd, was established to handle the Asian business. Hong Kong was seen as a hub for entering the South Asian growth markets, particularly mainland China, where the consumer markets of the time showed staggering growth, ranging from 18 to 24 percent annually.43 The aim of Messe Frankfurt (HK) was to enter the Chinese market as soon as it was open to foreign investors. In autumn 1995, Messe Frankfurt (HK), together with the Chinese Sub-Council of the Textile Industry (CCPIT), set up Intertextile, the China International Trade Fair for Apparel Fabrics, Home Textiles and Accessories, in Shanghai. The show grew in size and importance and, within five years, became China’s foremost international textile event.44 This fair was a combined event for fashion fabrics and home textiles. According to a report from the organizers in 2000, market conditions for the fair were excellent, as Chinese

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consumers constantly increased their spending on clothing and interior decoration. China remained the world’s largest textile manufacturer, but, due to sluggish development in technology and equipment, the quality and design of its fabrics behind those of its Western counterparts—meaning huge opportunities for foreign textile manufacturers and exporters. China is also the single largest garment producer in the world, using around 20 billion meters of fabric a year for clothing manufacture—a quarter of which is imported from overseas. The high quality of imported fabrics, in terms of quality, dyeing color, hand-feel, design, and pattern, means that they are used predominantly for clothing destined for export; equating to 40% of total production, worth around US$30 billion per year.45 More and more imported textiles were consumed in the Chinese domestic market. Indeed, increasing numbers of Chinese consumers were willing to spend their money on highend brands made with high-quality fabrics. In other words, according to Intertextile’s organizers, the Chinese textile market had become extremely interesting for Western highquality textile manufacturers. In 2001, due to the huge success of the Shanghai fair, Messe Frankfurt (HK) and the CCPIT set up an Intertextile spring fair in Beijing to serve the North Chinese market.46 These Chinese apparel fairs became extremely successful in the 2000s in terms of the number of exhibitors and attendees. In 1998, the Directions Trend Committee was founded exclusively for Interstoff Asia to meet the demand for the growing number of international buyers who attended the Asian fairs to source apparel fabrics and show the latest fashion trends. Its members originated from the strongest fashion cities in the world, including Nelly Rodi, Ornella Bignami, Rob Merret (Global Color Research, London), Kai Chow (Here & There, New York), Deb Waterman-Johns (Get Dressed, Washington), and Sachiko Inoue (consultant, Tokyo). These experts were selected because of their “combined knowledge and wide experience in all fields of fashion, and their rich and diverse approach in the related areas of beauty, interiors and technology.”47 The group did trend consultations, created trend books, and designed dedicated trend spaces for the Asian fairs. However, according to Bignami, the Directions Trend Committee was different from the trend concertation at Première Vision, which had (and has) a more collaborative approach that included several high-end textile manufacturers from different national backgrounds.48 Bignami, who still works for Intertextile in Shanghai, explains: We produce a trend booklet where you have the colors, the stories, the type of fabrics, and so on. And we organize a fashion forum where all the fabrics are exhibited, the colors are displayed. It’s different because the international trend area is a specific place, it’s not like in Première Vision [where] you have various areas where the fabrics are divided according to material or outdoor or silk or evening and so on. We have one area and that’s it. And so it’s a different display concept, but we also do the trends for the Chinese market. And the fact is that Messe Frankfurt Hong Kong, which is the organizer, works together with the Chinese organizations as well and although we try to change something slowly, they have their own ideas that they want as many fabrics as possible, so the quantity for them is important, whilst we think a selection is important.49

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Interstoff fights back in Europe By the 1990s, Interstoff had internalized fashion forecasting, made trend prediction into one of its strategic assets. The semiannual Interstoff fair in Frankfurt was still, by far, the leading textile event in Europe measured by the exhibition space and the number of visitors. Nonetheless, there were serious doubts about the course and the future of Interstoff in Frankfurt. While Première Vision pursued a selective policy for exhibitors and only chose high-end manufacturers, particularly those from Europe, Interstoff opened its floors up to the entire world. As a result, European manufacturers started to complain about Asian competitors and raised serious doubts about the quality of the exhibitors in Frankfurt. In an interview with one trade journal, Interstoff ’s general manager Rolf Steinwartz noted that, according to German law, it was impossible to reject exhibitors from former communist countries or from Southeast Asia. As a result, Première Vision’s policy would be illegal in Germany, even if Messe Frankfurt would have liked to pursue it.50 Adopting a similar strategy would, however, also have gone directly against Messe Frankfurt’s internationalization strategy and the economic principles of free trade to which it adhered as a business principle. As a result, Messe Frankfurt gained larger market shares worldwide, particularly in Asia, but simultaneously lost ever more ground in Europe. Exhibitors also complained about the fact that the Interstoff fair was scheduled too late, weeks after its competitor Première Vision, which took pride in providing buyers with the “first sight” of all the new fabrics. According to Steinwartz, it was difficult to make everyone happy; some exhibitors, such as the makers of printed fabrics, liked to have the event at the latest possible moment.51 Furthermore, from the perspective of being a successful textile market, Interstoff was deliberately organized as the last event of the season. Those in the textile business went to earlier fairs to see the textile samples, but the real deals were made in Frankfurt. According to Interstoff ’s data, 40 percent of the samples that were shown in Frankfurt would be produced in larger quantities, while at the earlier fairs only 10 percent of the samples would reach the market.52 However, Germany’s most important textile trade journal, Textil Wirtschaft, maintained that the record-breaking number of exhibitors (1,200) and visitors (24,000) could not disguise Interstoff ’s structural problems. High-end Italian and French manufacturers began to avoid the event in Frankfurt. The journal noted, “Quantity has nothing to do with quality, and that’s lacking at Interstoff.” Despite the fact that Messe relocated the fair to new venues—Halls 8, 9, and 10, which were all on the same floor—and rearranged the exhibits according to product groups and information functions, Interstoff had a huge image problem. It was no longer seen as the most fashionable event showing the trendiest and highest-quality apparel fabrics.53 In the opinion of Ornella Bignami, the new groupings by product groups like silk, cotton, and wool, rather than groupings by country of origin, was another reason why the Italian mills turned away from Interstoff and turned to Paris to showcase their high-end products.54 Messe Frankfurt’s managing director Michael Peters, who was closely involved with Interstoff ’s policy regarding Première Vision, endeavored to turn the tide. He was committed to maintaining Interstoff ’s competitive position and aimed to set up new fairs in Germany and abroad. In 1995, Messe Frankfurt set up Take Off, a new and small exclusive textile fair in the Sheraton Hotel near the Frankfurt airport. On February 21 and 22, 1995, weeks before Première Vision, thirty-six key European exhibitors were asked to exhibit at Take

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Off, with the invitation based on exclusivity. Normally, manufacturers would visit their best clients to collect their first orders, which would take them a few weeks, but now they could invite their customers to Frankfurt and make the deals within two days, meaning that they would save time and money. Clearly, this was an attempt to compete with Première Vision using the Paris event’s key selling point: being the earliest show of the season and being very exclusive. One German trade journal commented: Clearly the background of this new event is that, despite the fact that Frankfurt, with “Interstoff ”, organizes the biggest fair in the world, many confectioners prefer the Paris fair because of its early date. Some of the exhibitors also criticized the fact that Interstoff serves as a platform for the Far Eastern competition. Première Vision, on the other hand, has restricted itself—at least officially—to European exhibitors.55 Nevertheless, the Take Off experiment failed. The attendance was too low, with the organizers needing at least fifty to sixty exhibitors to break even. Moreover, the visitors were mainly from Germany, with no high-end exhibitors from France or Italy. In 1996, Messe Frankfurt decided to divide the Interstoff show into two events, Interstoff World and Interstoff Season, both of which would be organized in the spring and in the autumn. In a press release, general manager Peters stated that the fashion pipeline was changing rapidly. Sixty percent of the European textile business was already based on direct imports, while the delivery time to the small and medium-sized manufacturers of inexpensive ready-to-wear had become shorter. The imperative to showcase samples of the right fabrics “just in time” had thus become a reality to which the textile fairs had to adapt. As a result, a “four seasons” approach would be better than the traditional two seasons model.56 At the Interstoff World event, initiated in autumn 1996 and clearly referring to the fair’s international audiences, ready-to-wear manufacturers or confectioners could make their first selections; they could order basic products like fabrics for suits and skirts, but also highly fashionable novelties for early delivery. Interstoff World was now also positioned as the first fair of the autumn season in Europe, being organized in September before Première Vision, and was presenting competent and reliable trend information about colors, fabrics, and silhouettes for autumn/winter 1997/8, as well as a pre-show for spring/summer 1998 (Figure 9.7). Moreover, at Interstoff World, thirty-four design studios from eleven countries grouped under the umbrella of the “Ideas Group” showed the latest trends in the sportswear segment.57 Ornella Bignami was still responsible for the concepts of the International Trend Table, which consisted of the same agencies and organizations as before. Promostyl, however, had been replaced by Nelly Rodi. Interstoff Season was organized in November, later than the other fabric shows in Milan and Paris. The intention was to offer clothing manufacturers the chance to make their second selections for a second line for the new season, and to show them very latest trends whereby they could fast produce the most up-to-date new collection. This was a much smaller event, with only 136 exhibitors from twelve different countries, compared to 470 exhibitors from fifty countries at Interstoff World. Trend prediction was organized under the umbrella of a so-called Trend Focus in Hall 10, which showed the materials and designs for autumn/ winter 1997/8. The silhouettes of the four trend themes, Emotion, Contemporary, Reality, and Artistic, were shown exclusively using the fabrics of the exhibitors. Another trend

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FIGURE 9.7  An Interstoff World mood board, autumn/winter 1997/8. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt.

forum—Basic Line—provided a preview of the yarns and colors for spring/summer 1998, which would influence the manufacturing process in the two years that followed. With this information in hand, apparel makers would not only have a tremendous advantage, but would also lower their risks in the fashion market.58 Clearly, Messe Frankfurt was attempting to beat Prèmiere Vision with these two new events and aimed to address the competitive advantages of being the first and the last event in the year. However, the idea to remake the Frankfurt fairs around a protectionist and selective policy, as demanded by many European exhibitors, proved unsuccessful. Half of the exhibitors at Interstoff World came from Asia.59 In July 1996, Peters announced that Messe Frankfurt had signed an agreement with two rival fairs—Première Vision (Paris) and S. I.Tex (Milan)—to jointly organize EuroPremière, an early trend fair in Nice and Como in 1997. According to Messe Frankfurt’s managing director, “The proliferation in the European fair landscape should be stopped with our joined forces.”60 However, this joint effort was short-lived. The last joint show took place in 1999, with the Italians not wanting to share the burden any longer.61 Despite the fact that Interstoff even set up a major new fair before Première Vision and had invested heavily in an international Trend Table and several trend forums, the numbers of exhibitors and visitors dropped dramatically at the end of the 1990s (Table 9.1). As a result, Messe Frankfurt’s management decided to skip the next Interstoff show in Frankfurt in 1999 and aimed to organize a new event in 2000 based on sportswear and outdoor wear. This did not, however, ever materialize. In 2002, Messe Frankfurt acquired Daniel Rubenstein’s Texworld in Paris, and started to compete with Première Vision in the French fashion capital. Rubenstein had set up Texworld

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five years before as a textile fair benefiting from the attractiveness of Première Vision. He had organized a show for those exhibitors, largely from Asia, who had not passed muster with the jurors at Première Vision. Texworld had started as a hotel fair, like Première Vision, but had steadily grown. The 10th edition, organized by Messe Frankfurt in 2002, filled the entire CNIT Exhibition Centre in Paris La Défense. Stephanie Keukert, the events manager for Messe Frankfurt’s foreign textile fairs, took over the joint management of Texworld with Michael Scherpe, who was the president of Messe Frankfurt France SAS, a Paris-based subsidiary founded at the beginning of 2002. Texworld was committed to presenting the world’s most comprehensive range of textiles in Paris, namely the exclusive upmarket range as well as lower-priced products. Exhibitors and visitors were welcomed from all over the world. It also offered a trend forecast forum, which was organized by the Italian style agency Ricerca & Comunicazione from Florence.62 In September 2002, collections were shown for autumn/winter 2003/4 and product innovations for spring/summer 2003. The Italian style agency, which consisted of designers, architects, stylists, and sociologists, presented four themes to the Texworld event: “Mental Therapy, Mineral Therapy, Thermal Therapy, and Natural Therapy.” This clearly showed that Messe Frankfurt’s new fair in Paris used the same trend methodologies as Interstoff in Frankfurt and immediately made trend forecasting the cornerstone of its competitive strategy.63

Not concertation, but selection made the difference Messe Frankfurt’s aim had never been to become the most trendy and fashionable place in the world; instead its function was to stimulate the German economy, contribute to Frankfurt’s growth, rent out exhibition facilities, and make a profit. Although Messe Frankfurt is still owned by the city of Frankfurt and the state of Hesse, it has always been managed as a private company. The city of Frankfurt has never been a fashion capital, but it has been a center for trade and finance since the Middle Ages. The city established a leadership position as a textile market during the twentieth century largely through the efforts of Messe Frankfurt. Textiles began to play a key role in the general consumer fairs that Messe Frankfurt organized during the 1920s. Later, Messe Frankfurt developed Interstoff, a dedicated fair for fabrics that became the most important business-to-business event for a variety of players in the textile and fashion industries. As fabrics form the basis of the apparel and fashion business, exhibiting at or visiting the Frankfurt event became an imperative for everyone in the industry. Interstoff, which was a spin-off from a general consumer fair organized by Messe Frankfurt, had, like all trade fairs, many functions. However, right from the start, Interstoff was not only a temporary market place for the international textile industry, but was also a trend maker (Figure 9.8). All kinds of business people related to the textile industry went to Frankfurt to see the latest fabrics and colors, even though Interstoff ’s trendsetting function was, at the start, not so explicit to visitors and exhibitors. Even before the start of Interstoff, apparel shows with models had taken place at the general consumer fairs during the 1950s. Over the next few decades, Interstoff ’s semiannual events were the place to be in

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FIGURE 9.8  The interplay between fabric and fashion trends for summer 1983 as shown at Interstoff, 1982. Courtesy Messe Frankfurt.

the global textile business, with all major players going to Frankfurt twice a year, and not just to buy and sell. Trends were clearly being set, even if indirectly. From the start of the 1980s, however, trend forecasting increasingly became an explicit activity at the Interstoff event through the organization of several trend forums in dedicated spaces and, from the 1990s, an international Trend Table at the start of the decade. This had parallels with the “trend concertation” approach used at Première Vision. Interstoff used a similar method, employing an international team of experts to forecast the fashion and color trends for the following season and showcasing these predictions in a special venue through trend shows, artistic presentations, mood boards, and color cards. Despite these efforts, in Europe, it was difficult for Interstoff to compete with the highly selective, protectionist policies of Première Vision, which had positioned itself as the gatekeeper of the European, and particularly the Italian, weavers. Many European mills increasingly chose to exhibit in Paris, and visitors followed them in pursuit of the latest trends. Messe Frankfurt’s hands were tied. It could not exert the same controls over the quality of the participating mills as did the French fair. For starters, German law made it illegal to shut out Asian exhibitors. An exclusionist policy would also contradict Messe Frankfurt’s internationalization strategy, which aimed to organize new fairs outside Germany, particularly in Asia. The exclusion of Chinese exhibitors, for example, would have immediately led to countermeasures by the Chinese government and the Chinese textile industry. Although Messe Frankfurt had internalized fashion forecasting by means of an expensive international Trend Table, by the 1990s it was no longer able to attract the top segment of the textile industry. Its open attitude towards all textile manufacturers in

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the world was a direct contradiction to being an exclusive, trendsetting, leading fair. In addition, Première Vision could also play the Parisian card of being part of the leading fashion capital, where fashion predictions were made for the rest of the world. Li Edelkoort’s stunning video performances and fashion forecasts from the middle of the 1980s onwards also created an atmosphere of Paris being the trendiest place in the world. For Interstoff, it was nigh on impossible to win this competition about exclusivity. However, at the end of the 1980s, Messe Frankfurt had decided to export the Interstoff brand, including trend forecasting, to Asia. Indeed, it was the first mover on the Asian textile fair market and became the most important organizer of fabric fairs in China. At first glance, one could conclude that Première Vision, by focusing largely on Europe, won the competition with Interstoff. This conclusion, however, completely misses the point that Interstoff ’s move to China may have been a clever decision. The growth rate for the last thirty years in China was incomparably higher than in Europe, and the textile market was much more lucrative there. Messe Frankfurt’s locational strategy was also based on the philosophy that markets have to follow production, which was now mainly taking place in China, instead of Europe. Furthermore, Interstoff contributed to the geographical expansion of the European fashion and textile industries into China, and also supported Chinese firms to become major actors on the world market, which was a direct consequence of the liberal trade policies that growing numbers of nationalist politicians in the West began to regret. Messe Frankfurt, however, profited greatly from its internationalization strategy. Indeed, 2015 was a record business year, with the highest ever sales figures of 648 million Euros and 133 trade fairs organized on four continents. In that same year, the company still organized two important textile fairs in Frankfurt: one for home textiles (Heimtextile), and one for technical textiles (Techtextil). Outside Germany, it organized twenty-one textile and textile technology events in six different countries, including global cities like Paris, New Delhi, Moscow, New York, Istanbul, and Shanghai. All these events explicitly aimed to mirror the latest trends of the global textile industry.64

Notes 1 The author would like to thank Ornella Bignami, CEO of Elementi Moda, and Ingrid Maurer, former coordinator of Interstoff ’s Trend Forums and Fashion Table, for sharing their great knowledge of Interstoff.

2 Manfred Kirchgeorg, “Characteristics and Forms of Trade Shows,” in Trade Show

Management, ed. Manfred Kirchgeorg, Werner M. Dornscheidt, Wilhelm Giese, and Norbert Stoeck (Wiesbaden: Betriebswirtschaftlicher Verlag Dr. Th. Gabler/GWV Fachverlage GmbH, 2005), 39.

3 Ibid., 41. 4 Diego Rinallo and Francesca Golfetto, “Exploring the Knowledge Strategies of

Temporary Cluster Organizers: A Longitudinal Study of the EU Fabric Industry Trade Shows (1986–2006),” Economic Geography 87, no. 4 (2011): 454.

5 Ibid., 455.

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6

Ben Wubs and Thierry Maillet, “Building Competing Fashion Textile Fairs in Europe, 1970–2010: Première Vision (Paris) vs. Interstoff (Frankfurt),” Journal of Macromarketing 37, no. 1 (2015): 1–15, doi: 10.1177/0276146715619010.

7

Diego Rinallo and Francesca Golfetto, “Representing Markets: The Shaping of Fashion Trends by French and Italian Fabric Companies,” Industrial Marketing Management 35 (2006): 857–8, 861–4.

8

Ibid., 857.

9

Rinallo and Golfetto, “Knowledge Strategies,” 470–1.

10 Messe Frankfurt GmbH, “Frankfurt, City of Trade Fairs: From a Medieval Marketplace to a Global Trade Fair Partner,” accessed June 5, 2017, http://www. messefrankfurt.com/content/dam/corporate/Downloadmaterial%20divers/History_ extended%20version.pdf.res/History_extended+version.pdf. 11 Tomas Bauer, 100 Jahre unter eine Kuppel (Frankfurt: Messe Frankfurt GmbH, 2009), 7–13. 12 In 1983, Ausstellungs- und Messegesellschaft mbH was renamed Messe Frankfurt GmbH. 13 Bauer, 100 Jahre unter eine Kuppel, 30. 14 Ibid., 60. 15 Ursula Haver, Am Straβenkreuz Europas. Frankfurter Messen und Ausstellungen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Brönners Druckerei, 1957), 88–91. 16 Bauer, 100 Jahre unter eine Kuppel, 104. 17 Ibid., 117. 18 Ibid., 118–19. 19 Michael Peters and Sabine Scharrer, “Product Development in the Fair and Exhibition Sector,” in Trade Show Management, ed. Manfred Kirchgeorg, Werner M. Dornscheidt, Wilhelm Giese and Norbert Stoeck (Wiesbaden: Betriebswirtschahftlicher Verlag Dr. Th. Gabler/GWV Fachverlage GmbH, 2005), 469. 20 Mitteilungen der Messe- und Ausstellungs-GmbH Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurter Messen und Ausstellungen (1959), 5, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 21 Hans-Joachim Braun, The German Economy in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2011), 170. 22 Frankfurter Messen und Ausstellungen, Mitteilungen der Messe- und AusstellungsGmbH Frankfurt a.M. (1970–1), Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 23 Wubs and Maillet, “Building Competing Fashion Textile Fairs,” 7. 24 Quoted in Rinallo and Golfetto, “Knowledge Strategies,” 467. 25 Geschäftsbericht der Messe- und Ausstellungs-GmbH (1955), 16, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 26 Offizieller Katalog Interstoff (1959–9), Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 27 Offizieller Katalog Interstoff 44, November 4–7, 1980, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 28 Press Release Interstoff 45, March 30, 1981, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt.

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29 Offizieller Katalog Interstoff 46, November 3–6, 1981, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 30 Ingrid Maurer, interview Ben Wubs, Frankfurt am Main, June 30, 2014. 31 Ibid. 32 Offizieller Katalog Interstoff 51, April 16–18, 1984, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 33 Offizieller Katalog Interstoff 56, October 28–30, 1986, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 34 Offizieller Katalog Interstoff 52, October 29–31, 1984, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 35 Interstoff 58 TrendsLive, October 27–9, 1987, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 36 Offizieller Katalog Interstoff 64, October 23–5, 1990, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 37 Trend Documentation Lands of Wonder (1991–2), Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 38 Ornella Bignami, interview by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, Milan, September 5, 2016. 39 “Interstoff Performance of Nature,” in Offizieller Katalog Interstoff, October 27–9, 1992, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 40 Stephan Lindner, Den Faden Verloren. Die westdeutsche und die französische Textilindustrie auf dem Rückzug (1930/45–1990) (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2001), 56. 41 Wubs and Maillet, “Building Competing Fashion Textile Fairs,” 9. 42 Offizieller Katalog Interstoff 66, October 29–31, 1991, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 43 Expo Eye, February 2000, Messe Frankfurt (HK) Limited, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 44 Intertextile Shanghai, 5969, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 45 Ibid. 46 Intertextile Beijing, 5966, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 47 “Trend Forecast Autumn/Winter 2005/06,” in Interstoff Asia, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 48 Ornella Bignami, interview by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, Milan, September 5, 2016. 49 Ibid. 50 “Was bei der Interstoff geändert werden soll,” Textil Mitteilungen, April 28, 1993. 51 Ibid. 52 “The Interstoff zeigt profil,” in Messe Zeitung, April 9–11, 1991, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 53 “Stimmt das Messe-Konzept noch,” in Textil Wirtschaft, November 4, 1993. 54 Ornella Bignami, interview by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, Milan, September 5, 2016. 55 “Vor der Première,” in Textil-Mitteilungen, February 1, 1995.

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56 Press Release Interstoff World Autumn 1996, 2273/2374, 4, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 57 Ibid., 7. 58 Press Release Interstoff Season Autumn 1996, 2273/2374, 1–2, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 59 Press Release Interstoff World Autumn 1996, 2273/2374, 1, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 60 “Ausführungen von Dr. Michael Peters,” in Interstoff World, September 19, 1996, 6, 2273/2374, Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 61 Wubs and Maillet, “Building Competing Fashion Textile Fairs,” 11. 62 Final Report (Texworld Paris, February 27, 2002); Press Release (Texworld Paris, July 2002), Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 63 Ibid.; Final Report (Texworld Paris, February 2006), Historisches Archiv der Messe Frankfurt. 64 Annual Report, 49 (Messe Frankfurt GmbH, 2015); Trade Fairs, Congresses and Events (Messe Frankfurt GmbH, October 2016), 5.

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10 THE ROLE OF THE PITTI UOMO TRADE FAIR IN THE MENSWEAR FASHION INDUSTRY Mariangela Lavanga

M

enswear no longer lives in the shadow of womenswear. According to a recent article from the Business of Fashion website, the growth of menswear has outpaced that of womenswear since at least 2011.1 Until the 1970s, male fashion in Europe mainly focused on tailoring and smaller-scale production of ready-to-wear, or confection, producing shirts, and underwear. One exception was the famous menswear tailoring industry in Leeds, England, which clothed British working-class and middle-class men in stylish suits for a century until its demise in the late twentieth century. London’s Savile Row traditionally set the trends for the high end of the industry. After the 1970s, men’s ready-towear and men’s haute couture start to grow elsewhere in Europe. Trends and styles in menswear change much more slowly than in women’s fashion; however, the pace of those changes is increasing. One of the world’s most important players for menswear is the international fashion trade fair Pitti Uomo in Florence, Italy. Pitti Uomo was established in 1972 under the umbrella of the non-profit organization Centro di Firenze per la Moda Italiana (CFMI-Florentine Centre for the Italian Fashion), which today is the holding of Pitti Immagine (officially born in 1988). This chapter investigates the rise of Pitti Uomo and its role in the menswear industry. Instead of focusing on fashion fairs in large established global fashion capitals, such as Milan, Paris, or New York, this study is centered on Florence, Italy, a second-tier fashion city that is home to one of the most important international fashion fair organizations. It looks at the strategies of Pitti Immagine and Pitti Uomo, and the perspectives of the fashion designers and brands that exhibited at this menswear trade show in order to explain how this important fair stayed competitive and affirmed its role as one of the key intermediaries in the globalized and highly segmented fashion industry. In doing so, this chapter unravels the strategies of the trade fair as an intermediary adapting to the global and digital marketplace. It shows how the trade fair remains an important intermediary in the process of trend development. As noted by fashion business scholar Tim Jackson, “buyers and fashion designers are able to predict what is likely to be ‘in fashion’ through a combination of influences, including reviewing important textile and style magazines, the specialist services of forecasting trend agencies, and visits to textile and garment fashion shows.”2 The chapter uses a qualitative methodology; besides the analysis of published materials within the fashion industry and the documentation from Pitti events (e.g., documents, websites, magazines, press releases), it draws data collected from interviews with

independent fashion designers who focus on menswear, and with buyers, other experts, and key informants in the European fashion industry.3 It situates the case of Pitti Uomo within the framework of cultural economics and economic geography. The analysis is informed by studies on the economic exchange of cultural goods,4 studies on temporary clusters,5 and the recent exhibition and book, The Glamour of Italian Fashion Since 1945, edited by Sonnet Stanfill for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.6 This chapter contributes to debates on the role of trend forecasting and cultural intermediaries in the digital age.

Intermediaries in the cultural and creative industries In his seminal work on creativity, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues, “creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than individual phenomenon.”7 Artistic production is a collective action, wherein the artist is at the center of a wide network of cooperative interrelations among players in the field, including the so-called cultural intermediaries or gatekeepers. The term “cultural intermediary” is one of the most confusing in the literature of cultural industries.8 The term has found a wide range of uses, from Pierre Bourdieu’s9 discussion of the new petite bourgeoisie to debates on the relationship between culture and society,10 studies on cultural policy,11 and research on the cultural and creative industries.12 What unifies the different definitions is the reference to the process of intermediation between the production and consumption of symbolic goods and services. The rise of the cultural industries and their complex divisions of labor, together with the segmentation and globalization of markets and the influence of new media, have led to the growth in the number and the significance of functions involving mediations between cultural production and consumption. Evolving new roles have emerged in order to fulfill the gatekeeping practice of maintaining boundaries of access and inclusion, as musicologist Keith Negus argued in his study about the enduring distance between cultural production and consumption.13 The range of actors that today fall under the term “cultural intermediary” has expanded well beyond the two categories of old and new intermediaries developed by Pierre Bourdieu.14 Bourdieu referred to old cultural intermediaries as critics and experts on high culture in the pre-mass media age, while new cultural intermediaries are critics and experts in the massmedia age, for example, producers of TV and radio shows, critics of quality newspapers and magazines, and journalists. In recent years, there have been several attempts to create a bridge across the different definitions and improve the conceptualization and operationalization of the term “cultural intermediary.” It is clear that cultural intermediaries are selectors and tastemakers. They influence consumption as well as production, and they curate products and services as well as artists and brands. Cultural sociologists Jennifer Smith Maguire and Julian Matthews have recently provided a comprehensive overview to the field of cultural intermediaries’ research, from conceptual and theoretical foundations to empirical research.15 They highlight two main characteristics to identify cultural intermediaries. The first one,

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necessary but not sufficient, focuses on value formation through mediation and the power relationship present in any intermediation or interaction process. The second characteristic relates cultural intermediaries to their role as experts and to the context of particular markets. Cultural intermediaries are defined as such by their claim to be professional experts in taste and value within a specific cultural field. They are the experts that validate a cultural good or service and they include it in the specific domain—in other words, they are the appropriating experts discussed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.16 In addition, they are defined by their locations within the value chain (in relation to actors, stages of production, and products or services that they mediate) and furthermore by their autonomy, authority, and set of tools and resources they use in their intermediation processes. The question that remains is why we still need cultural intermediaries in the digital age. In theory, digitalization and globalization would allow for the elimination of intermediaries and permit the producers to interact directly with the consumers, even though the extent of such dis-intermediation remains unclear. Some scholars argue in favor of reintermediation processes with evolving and new roles for (traditional) intermediaries.17 This is especially true in the case of cultural goods and services that are highly differentiated and multidimensional, to a certain extent “uncommon, incomparable, unique, singular,” as highlighted by the economic sociologist Lucien Karpik in Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities.18 Cultural economists such as Richard Caves and Ruth Towse consider cultural goods as “experience goods” in the sense that complete information about their quality is difficult to assess before the purchase or even after. Information asymmetry exists; one party (e.g., designer) has more or better information about the characteristics of the products than the other (e.g., buyer, consumer). Information asymmetry makes the market for cultural goods opaque and their demand uncertain, with extreme variance on sales.19 The market of “singularities” requires coordination devices to reduce quality uncertainty and to help the buyer and consumer to make decisions. The effectiveness of these devices depends on the credibility of the information provided, “which in turn depends on the trust placed in the judgment devices” as mentioned by Karpik.20 In the fashion industry, the level of coordination is very high. Compared to other cultural industries, the fashion industry has probably the highest number of intermediaries. We will now turn to the major fashion intermediaries and focus on the role of fashion trade fairs.

Intermediaries in the fashion industry Each cultural industry has its own set of intermediaries that select and recognize work as creative, promote the creators, and bring their products to the market. As other creative industries, fashion is a “collective process” whereby the designer is surrounded by many different actors and institutions.21 These intermediaries are all essential to the production, distribution, and consumption of fashion products. They determine what the consumer will see, read, or hear. In Imagining Consumers, Regina Lee Blaszczyk coined the term “fashion intermediary” to describe the agents who work behind the scenes, connecting designers, manufacturers, retailers, and consumers.22 Various intermediaries shaping the development of the designer-fashion industries can be identified, ranging from traditional

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intermediaries—such as magazine editors and journalists, sales agents, buyers, fashion forecasters, PR agents, stylists, models, photographers, fashion weeks and fairs, and fashionrelated educational institutions—to a range of new intermediaries such as marketing and consumption websites, social networking websites, and fashion bloggers. This chapter zooms in on one specific intermediary, the international fashion trade fair in the downstream part of the fashion value-chain, that is, fashion designers and brands exhibiting their sample collections to buyers. Those shows are defined as garment or product trade shows, different from the yarn trade shows and fabric trade shows that concern the upperstream part of the fashion value-chain, thus earlier in the sequence of trade shows organized over the years. Despite the globalization and digitization of the fashion world, we argue that there is a need for temporary physical settings where all the most important actors of the global fashion world can meet and share knowledge and information, where fashion goods are exhibited to a large numbers of designers, manufacturers, buyers, and a wide range of intermediaries, and where quality uncertainty can be reduced. As explained by fashion business scholar Tim Jackson, “The final ‘fashion look’ for a season is therefore the result of a process of development that combines the evolved views of forecasters, textile and product trade shows, designers, buyers and RTW [ready-to-wear] shows. Like a collage, the final picture emerges after the various layers have come together.”23 In this picture, the fashion garment or product trade fair acts as an important player in the trend development process through the number of knowledge creation and dissemination mechanisms: for example, the selection and promotion of innovative cutting-edge designers and the organization of space in a diverse range of areas (luxury, avant-garde, and so on). The trade fair becomes the thermometer of the general and specific trends in the highly segmented fashion industry and helps fashion designers and brands to better understand their position in the (global) fashion market. By promoting key innovators and innovations in the fashion industry, the trade fair has an influence in spreading those innovations and thus developing trends and predicting the future of fashion.

The international fashion trade fair as an intermediary and a temporary cluster Contemporary fashion trade shows are temporary and cyclical business-to-business events usually not open to the public. Until the 1990s, they were mostly local trading places where regional products were exhibited and traded. In the last two decades, they have become “intermediary fairs,” as discussed by the cultural sociologist Lise Skov.24 They are not meant to only display and sell products. Originally, there were only two production seasons (autumn/winter and spring/summer). In January, the collection for autumn/winter of the same year was presented, then two or three months of sales and in August the production started. At that time, fairs were the only place where buyers could see new clothes and make their orders. Today, this is no longer the case; fairs are no longer simple promotional and commercial spaces. They have to develop new roles and services, and they have to deal

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with different overlapping purposes. Fairs have become nodal points in the territorially dispersed fashion industry, or, in Skov’s words, “a social setting in which different types of encounters take place, including encounters for trade, networks and knowledge [creation and dissemination].”25 In their longitudinal study of the European fabric industry trade shows, Diego Rinallo and Federica Golfetto discovered that international fashion trade fairs act as loci for “trend concertation” or “trend orchestration.”26 The most-cited example is Première Vision in Paris, the world’s most important textile trade fair. The fair has developed an influential view on future trends; it sends trend information to potential exhibitors well in advance; exhibitors tend to comply with those trends at least partially if they want to exhibit during the trade fair. The displayed trends obtain worldwide recognition and visibility as visitors to the fair come from different industries and different countries. The fair acts as a key intermediary not only for the fashion industry but also for many other creative sectors of the world economy. Today’s fashion trade fairs are places for knowledge exchange and distribution, for networking, for studying sellers and their products, and for mapping out the diversity of the buyers. They can provide exhibitors (fashion brands), buyers, and other intermediaries with access to knowledge and opportunities for interactions similar to those provided by permanent geographic locations, such as the production-distribution clusters in the East End of London or the textile-clothing district in Prato, Italy, or the Seventh Avenue fashion district in New York in the second half of the twentieth century. Trade fairs create and provide access to local, global, and virtual buzz.27 Economic geographers Peter Maskell, Harald Bathelt, and Anders Malmberg have analyzed them as “temporary clusters” or “temporary organized proximity.”28 At the same time, they are also cyclical events. In their analysis of the furniture trade fairs, Dominic Power and Johan Jansson argue in favor of cyclical clusters in global circuits for economic activities, whereby “global trade-fair circuits are central components of the architecture within which different industrial and market relations are mediated and connected.”29 Multiple overlapping spaces for different business purposes are present not only in the same fair but also across fairs worldwide and across time. In the fashion global annual calendar, fashion fairs are mostly held when catwalks are in town. In that week, showrooms experience the busiest week of the year, large sales orders and contracts are negotiated, and the city becomes a key center for defining new trends and styles in the industry.30

The origins of Pitti Immagine in Florence, Italy Pitti Immagine is one of the most important institutions in the world to organize fashionrelated fairs and events. The origins of Pitti Immagine can be found in the fashion-related activities organized by Giovanni Battista Giorgini in Florence in the 1950s. Giorgini first organized a special fashion show for a selected number of American buyers and journalists in Florence on February 12, 1951. The show was scheduled for after the Paris spring shows so that the buyers and journalists who traveled to Europe from around the world could easily reach the city of Florence.31 As discussed by Stanfill in The Glamour of Italian Fashion

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Since 1945, five American buyers witnessed the catwalks of nine high-fashion tailors and three boutique tailors, among them Emilio Pucci and Sorelle Fontana.32 In order to enter in Palazzo Strozzi, where the shows took place, buyers needed to guarantee purchases of at least 500 Lire (almost 8,000 Euro in 2016 money). This was the first time that a high-end fashion show with Italian fashion garments was exclusively organized for American buyers. The next fashion show, organized in July of the same year, saw the participation of 300 buyers. These events signaled the birth of Italian fashion, in the sense that they provided unity, international cultural legitimacy, and identity to a diverse number of individual tailors and designers.33 The carefully selected buyers and journalists who attended the shows by invitation were the key gatekeepers at that time. Therefore, their positive reactions laid the foundation for the development of the Italian fashion system. The Moda Italiana or “Made in Italy” label started to compete with the French haute couture, eroding its monopoly. The success was not accidental. Giorgini strategically planned everything: the type of collections, the way they were presented, and the venue steeped in Italian heritage.34 The fashion houses invited to participate were selected according to their originality and their stylistic distance from the French haute couture, and they were allowed to show only a limited number of pieces. Instead of presenting the garments according to the name of designers, Giorgini decided to group them according to the type of clothing presented in order to highlight their shared and distinctive characteristics. The show was organized in Giorgini’s home, the historical Villa Torrigiani, in order to strongly link fashion and art, exploiting the so-called Renaissance effect. From 1952 to 1982, the fashion shows were organized in the beautiful Sala Bianca in Palazzo Pitti, while the sales contracts were dealt with in the Palazzo Strozzi. These shows were the precursor to later fashion trade fairs. Besides the fashion shows, Giorgini organized grand balls, performances, and suppers where the international fashion press, buyers from all over the world, and Italian aristocrats could mingle in the beautiful Sala Bianca in the Pitti Palace. By entertaining buyers and journalists, he secured important press coverage in newspapers and magazines in the United States, which was targeted as the key export market for Italian fashion. As Stanfill explained, Fay Hammond, fashion critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote on August 4, 1952, “No royal entertainment had surpassed this unforgettable scene.”35 Giorgini was interested in the potential of fashion as image and identity creator and promoter. We can argue that fashion was used as a tool for marketing the city of Florence, or, even better, for marketing of the whole of Italy as a modern and creative country. Florence soon became a new fashion capital. In 1954, the fashion shows were organized by the newly created non-profit organization CFMI, which today is the holding company of Pitti Immagine (officially born in 1988). By 1955, 500 buyers and 200 journalists attended the fashion show. Until 1965, Florence was the most important center for haute couture and boutique (deluxe ready-towear) fashion shows in Italy. Thanks to Giorgini’s initiative, the support of the national government, and of the United States through the Marshall Plan, Italian exports in fashion clothing increased over 150 percent between 1950 and 1957. The large communist population in Italy and the rising communist threat after the Second World War led the American government to seal privileged relationships with the Italian government, supporting its economic and industrial recovery, the emergence of a capitalist market, and, in particular, the relaunch of its textile and clothing industry. Under the Marshall Plan, the United States lent money and

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raw materials, especially cotton. The US Secretary of State “Stettinius mandated that 2/3 of all imports and contributions would directly aid Italian industry . . . the Marshall Plan allotted Italy a $25 million loan to pay for 150,000 bales of American cotton, a number that constituted ¼ of the total American cotton loans to Europe. Italy was expected to repay the loans from America in exports of finished cotton fabric.”36 Italy became the major exporter of fashion clothing and textiles to North America, overtaking France and England. An export-oriented textile and fashion industry was created that would play a significant role in Italy’s postwar economic reconstruction.37 The geography of Italian fashion was gradually changing. In the 1960s, high fashion houses slowly moved their fashion presentations from Florence to Rome, where the majority of their ateliers were located and where the rising movie industry was getting international attention. In 1959, Valentino opened his atelier in Rome; in 1968, he would dress Jacqueline Kennedy for her wedding with Aristotle Onassis. Segre Reinach mentions that Americans loved Rome and started to shoot movies there at affordable costs; she highlights that “Roman fashion was spectacular and linked to the cinema.”38 In 1967, Florence hosted its last high fashion show, while Rome became the new Italian capital for haute couture. The CFMI could continue organizing boutique fashion (deluxe ready-to-wear) shows. For the first time in 1968, it organized MAIT—Mostra Campionaria della Maglieria, a trade fair for high-fashion knitwear. In 1969, men’s ready-to-wear was added to boutique fashion and knitwear. In 1972, Pitti Uomo was created, as a trade fair for men’s clothing and accessories. While conceived as a trade fair for the national market, it became soon one of the most important in the world. In 1973, fashion shows and cultural events were organized in parallel to the trade fair. Following the success of Pitti Uomo, the CFMI organized new fairs, predicting the segmentation of the fashion market: Pitti Bimbo (Child) in 1975, Pitti Filati (Knitting Yarns) in 1977, Pitti Casa (Home) in 1978. In the 1970s, some of the designers left Florence for Milan, among them Albini, Missoni, Krizia, and Ken Scott. They felt the Florence trade fairs were too rigid and limited the number of the collections exhibited. Milan was more innovative, and its fashion fairs and shows allowed a combination of clothing and accessories for a total look and style. Milan was driving the Italian economic boom; it was the center of media, publishing, and design, with an industrial system ready for mass production and distribution. Milan emerged soon as the center for the women’s ready-to-wear and designer collections, whereas Florence managed to retain its lead as the center for men’s fashion and the rest of the textile-clothing industry. In the 1980s and 1990s, the CFMI went through a radical transformation in its management and strategy that saw the involvement of key fashion entrepreneurs and the creation of Pitti Immagine in charge of the Pitti trade fairs in 1988. Since 2000, the diversification and specialization of Pitti Immagine became even stronger with a whole range of new fairs, projects, and events; from Fragranze (Fragrances) in 2003 to Taste in 2006, to ModaPrima (women’s, men’s and children’s ready-to-wear and accessories for large-scale retailers) and Super (women’s accessories and ready-to-wear, with particular attention to emerging designers) held in Milan in collaboration with Fiera Milano (Milan Trade Fair organization). Pitti Immagine was involved in the establishment of one of the most prestigious fashion schools in the world in 1986, Polimoda in Florence, and it was also the initiator of important fashion-related events such as the Biennale di Firenze (Florence Biennale)

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in 1996, the exhibitions Il Guardaroba di D’Annunzio (D’Annunzio’s Wardrobe) in 1988 and “The London Cut: Savile Row Bespoke Tailoring” in 2007, as well the organizer of research projects, conferences, seminars, and publishing activities. Through the project Pitti Discovery, established in 1999, several artists were invited every year in order to study the relationship between fashion, art, architecture, and communication; among them, Pipilotti Rist, Inez and Vinoodh, Vanessa Beecroft, Raf Simons, and Gareth Pugh. As part of Pitti Discovery, Pitti Italics has been recently launched to promote and support the next generation of Italian or Italy-based designers already showing bright international potential,39 such as the Italian designer Fausto Puglisi who launched his first menswear capsule collection at Pitti Italics Special Event during Pitti Uomo in June 2016. Pitti Uomo, in particular, fosters and promotes the development of (new) innovative fashion designers and new trends; it provides a stage for the future of the menswear fashion industry; it nurtures a culture for high-quality products; it attracts the world to Florence and thus it facilitates the distribution of those products and trends worldwide. The next section will explore the role of Pitti Uomo in the menswear fashion industry.

Pitti Uomo as one of the key intermediaries in the menswear fashion industry Modern menswear is on the rise, likely driven by streetwear, hipsterism, and a growing number of jobs that do not require men to wear a traditional suit. In The Trendmakers, Jenny Lantz interviewed several trend forecasters and buyers across the globe. When discussing menswear, her interviewees mention that men pay more attention to details than women in their sartorial choices; they are now spending more on fashion; they have a growing appeal for building a wardrobe; they are loyal customers; they buy more designer clothing compared to women; and they want to be fashionable. As Euromonitor International reported, “The global market for men’s designer apparel is projected to reach nearly $33 billion in 2020, up 14 percent from $29 billion in 2015.”40 Before the Second World War, Italy already had an international reputation for highquality tailor-made men’s shirts and accessories, but it was after the war that Italian menswear transformed itself into an export industry, rising to a position of world leadership from the 1970s onwards. From Brioni’s “Continental Look” in the late 1950s to Giorgio Armani’s unstructured jackets in the 1970s and Gianni Versace’s voluptuous style in the 1980s, Italian tailoring and menswear fashion distinguished itself from the traditional styles of London’s Savile Row. The rise of Italian menswear brands was supported and documented by L’Uomo Vogue (Men’s Vogue), the most important menswear magazine in the world. Created in 1967, it was the first Vogue for men published by Condé Nast. The city of Florence is linked to the development of Italian menswear. In his second 1951 fashion show, Giorgini decided to use men to accompany models for the eveningwear catwalk. In The Glamour of Italian Fashion Since 1945, cultural historian Alistair O’Neill wrote, “This was the first sighting of Italian fashion for men, promoted as a regional craft

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and, in part, an exportable product.”41 After more than sixty years, Italian menswear has grown into a significant industry; in this respect, the role of Pitti Uomo is not to be forgotten. A Pitti Uomo fair has been held in January and June of each year in Florence since 1972. It is the largest menswear trade show of its kind; according to O’Neill, “it is now recognized as much for the sartorial appearance of its audience as by the product ranges displayed on its stands”42 (Figure 10.1). It is at Pitti Uomo that Armani showed his first collection; the same holds true for many other designers such as Vivienne Westwood of Britain, Dries van Noten of Belgium, and Victor&Rolf of the Netherlands. The first edition of Pitti Uomo, held in 1972, was a much smaller version of the present trade fair. It was an export-oriented fair mainly promoting Italian manufacturers, and was focused on formal wear, mostly suits, shirts, ties, and trousers. There was a clear separation between day and evening activities. During the day, buyers were placing orders; while in the evening, informal social events were dominating the scene. As stated by one expert and former buyer interviewed, “When I was a buyer for my shop in Antwerp, I was going to numerous fairs. Fairs were commercial events, to buy, to see your competitors but they were also social events; we were all going together for dinner.”43 Pitti Uomo grew from exhibiting around forty-five brands in 1972 to over 1,200 in 2016. CEO Raffaello Napoleone remembers that Pitti Uomo begun as 90 percent Italian, and developed into a fair that now hosts around 60 percent Italian brands and 40 percent international ones. Until the 1980s, 90 percent of the Italian fairs were controlled by a system of associations represented through Confindustria (General Confederation of Italian Industry); these fairs were export-oriented, extremely linked to the regional producers. CFMI adopted a different strategy: internationalization and fashion culture. Firstly, Pitti

FIGURE 10.1  Pitti People—Stylish men at Pitti Uomo 87, December 13, 2015. Courtesy Pitti Immagine website (www.pittimmagine.com), Pitti Uomo; photographer AKA Studio Collective.

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TABLE 10.1  Pitti Uomo exhibitors, 1990–2013 1,200

1,000

800

600

400

0

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1994 1995 1995 1996 1996 1997 1997 1998 1998 1999 1999 2000 2000 2001 2001 2002 2002 2003 2003 2004 2004 2005 2005 2006 2006 2007 2007 2008 2008 2009 2009 2010 2010 2011 2011 2012 2012 2013 2013

200

Total Exhibitors

International Exhibitors

Source: own elaboration, data from Osservatorio Fiere Italia-Europa, CERMES, Bocconi University

Uomo was one of first fairs to invite foreign designers, despite high resistance from different Italian institutions. From displaying Italian tailoring and style to the foreign markets, it became a fair more open to international brands. This is reflected both in the increase of international brands (see Table 10.1) together with an increase in square meters of exhibiting space (see Table 10.2). Pitti Uomo began to scout and invite the best menswear designers from all over the world. Secondly, it started to dedicate a considerable amount of its resources to the creation of cultural events, fashion shows, and projects that fostered the

TABLE 10.2  Pitti Uomo square meterage, 1990–2013 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000

0

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1994 1995 1995 1996 1996 1997 1997 1998 1998 1999 1999 2000 2000 2001 2001 2002 2002 2003 2003 2004 2004 2005 2005 2006 2006 2007 2007 2008 2008 2009 2009 2010 2010 2011 2011 2012 2012 2013 2013

5,000

Total Square Meters

Square Meters for International Exhibitors

Source: own elaboration, data from Osservatorio Fiere Italia-Europa, CERMES, Bocconi University

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growth of a fashion culture. The idea was not to compete or overlap with the fashion runway shows in Milan or Paris, but to show innovative designers who were rarely seen in Italy and Europe and to debut new talent, while making a strong connection with the cultural and artistic heritage of Florence. Pitti Uomo has retained its leadership role among menswear fairs because of its attention to innovative approaches to fashion and experimentation, a strong selection of high-quality designers and brands, an ability to review and revise fairs, and cultural events being ahead of the changes in the fashion industry. Both stars designers and established brands exhibit at the fair along with emerging fashion designers. The role of Pitti in launching the career of innovative new designers is remarkable. Pitti Uomo has helped emerging designers reach important buyers of multi-brand stores and department stores or be hired by important fashion brands. As one expert and former buyer stated, “The fair is the beginning for a new designer. It gives him or her international visibility and it is a commercial platform. Just think to Umit Benan, winner of Who is on Next/Uomo in 2009. He made his debut in Pitti Uomo in 2010 and now he is in [the Italian fashion house] Trussardi.”44 This is explained also by Raffaello Napoleone, the CEO of Pitti Immagine, who mentioned that “The destiny of a good fair is to help designers to grow” (Figure 10.2).45 The selective approach is one of the strong points of Pitti Uomo. As one designer put it: “It is not easy to be selected for Pitti Uomo. You have to go through a technical committee which checks who you are, the market position and strategy of your brand—where and how—and most importantly your collection should be in line with the image of the fair.”46 As with the Première Vision textile fair in Paris, the selection by jury makes Pitti Uomo a true gatekeeper and tastemaker for the entire menswear industry. The fair provides a signal to fashion buyers that the exhibitors are successful and trusted. As one designer explained,

FIGURE 10.2  The latest fashion buzz at Pitti Uomo 90, June 16, 2016. Courtesy Pitti Immagine website (www.pittimmagine.com); photographer AKA Studio Collective.

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“The fair gives you an ontological position: it tells that you are a brand, you exist.”47 The high selection process allows Pitti Uomo to become a place where buyers, designers, and key players of the fashion industry can underpin not only short-term trends linked to the next fashion season, such as a particular style of shoes, but also long-term trends. The trade fair has become a highly curated space for presenting experimental and new designs, thus acting as a trend forecaster for the menswear industry both in the short and long term. In this respect, Pitti Uomo stands out among the Men’s Fashion Weeks and other fairs. Fewer and fewer menswear brands are presenting in Milan or Paris; more and more choose Pitti Uomo. Belgian designer Raf Simons showed his twentieth-anniversary collection at Pitti Uomo in June 2016, instead of Paris Menswear Week (Figure 10.3). At the same time, more and more international buyers visit Pitti Uomo because they can find the best selection of menswear in the same place. Differences in attendance exist between the editions of the fairs in January and June of every year, as the data in Table 10.3 shows. Both the experts and designers that I interviewed for this chapter highlighted that the Paris fashion trade fairs are the most important in the world now, but that Pitti Uomo is definitely the most relevant for menswear. One designer stated, “My dream is to go to . . . Pitti Uomo.”48 After having exhibited in fashion fairs in the Netherlands and in the Nordic countries, and having a solid base of shops selling his collections there, he sees Pitti Uomo as the next best place to position and promote his work internationally. Pitti Uomo will make him part of the future of menswear and it will open its doors to a more international market, as buyers and key intermediaries flock to the show from all over the world. Exhibiting at Pitti Uomo is seen as a signal of achievement and success for the designer. In this sense, a cycle is created where the reputation of the fair as a gatekeeper,

FIGURE 10.3  Belgian designer Raf Simons at Pitti Uomo 90, June 16, 2016. Courtesy Pitti Immagine website (www.pittimmagine.com ); photographer Vanni Bassetti.

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TABLE 10.3  Pitti Uomo visitor numbers, 1990–2013 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000

0

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1994 1995 1995 1996 1996 1997 1997 1998 1998 1999 1999 2000 2000 2001 2001 2002 2002 2003 2003 2004 2004 2005 2005 2006 2006 2007 2007 2008 2008 2009 2009 2010 2010 2011 2011 2012 2012 2013 2013

5,000

Total Visitors

International Visitors

Source: own elaboration, data from Osservatorio Fiere Italia-Europa, CERMES, Bocconi University

tastemaker, and trend developer increases the reputation of the designers and the brands, and vice versa. High selection criteria allow high-quality and innovative designers to exhibit at the fair, which in turn allows the fair to disentangle global fashion trends and to attract international buyers, thus increasing its reputation as well those of the designers exhibiting there (Figure 10.4).

FIGURE 10.4  Fashion buyers at Pitti Uomo 90, June 16, 2016. Courtesy Pitti Immagine website (www.pittimmagine.com); photographer AKA Studio Collective.

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In addition to the physical fair, Pitti Immagine has recently introduced a digital fair, ePitti, in 2011. By using the Web, ePitti prolongs the exhibition experience after the physical fair ends. In this way, it is not a substitute for the physical fair, but serves to amplify and multiply opportunities for business development. Fashion buyers can go back to their offices and still be able to browse among the brands. In turn, brands can see which buyers are actually visiting their virtual booth. For each brand, buyers have access to a selected number of items whose pictures have been taken by a team of professional photographers during the physical fair. Brands have the possibility to decide which items will be photographed and posted in a highly curated virtual space. In this way, an effective and efficient interaction continues online. As one designer put it, “In the past, buyers were actually writing orders during the fairs; they would sit and write down everything, there was a queue of them. Today the main reason to attend the fair is to see the different collections.”49 However, no buyer can ever see the entire fair while on site; the digital fair allows them to revisit the fair in their home office and provides them with more time to browse the collections. In addition, ePitti together with Nextatlas offers an innovative trend-forecasting service based on big data analysis; it taps into data generated from social media and discovers emerging trends. Both buyers and exhibitors can consult the evolution of trends and their real-time development. Apart from the selection of international designers and the extension of the fair online, the success of Pitti Uomo also depends on exclusive and high-quality cultural events that are organized during the fair. As Raffaello Napoleone, the CEO of Pitti Immagine, explained, “The fair is not a typical fair but it is a festival of creativity. Its success lies in the quality of ideas, quality of the project, quality of the realization, quality of the communication, quality of the selection of participants.”50

Conclusions The changes in the fashion production and distribution system have strongly affected the role of intermediaries and, in particular, the role of fashion fairs. Today fairs are not meant exclusively for direct sales, but they serve more as a platform for trend development, visibility, and communication. Promotion reaches not only the buyer but also the ultimate consumer, thanks to old and new media and a series of related events. Fashion fairs are an important source of networking, information and knowledge creation, and dissemination. They are special events in time and space that group together all the most relevant actors in a particular segment of the geographically dispersed fashion industry. Participants are there not only for trading but also for studying the competitors, and having a general overview of the activities and strategies of their segment of the fashion industry, to move to new markets and extend their product range. As the history of Pitti Immagine and Pitti Uomo has highlighted, new fairs, new fashion capitals, and changes in the way fashion is created, promoted, and distributed challenged the pioneer fairs of late twentieth century, forcing them to reinvent themselves to preserve their position, reputation, brand, and competitive advantage. This makes it even more difficult for fairs to select the right designers, for designers to select the right fair, and for buyers to get ex ante trustful information regarding trade fairs and designers, especially the emerging ones. The case of Pitti Uomo underlines the importance of selecting the right 204

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designers, buyers, and press. The evolving role of Pitti Immagine can serve to illustrate how fashion trade fairs are changing and adapting to the complexity of the fashion industry. For the fashion designers who exhibit there, the fair serves as a commercial platform for visibility, communication, and networking as well as for information and knowledge sharing and for reputation building. Buyers visit the fair to reduce uncertainty in their buying process; they benefit from the role of the fair as a gatekeeper, curator, and trend developer. Reputation is a strong signal about the competence and expertise of the gatekeepers. It takes time to build a strong reputation and time to keep it, trying to be ahead of new developments in the fashion world. The reputation of the fairs is guaranteed by the quality of the ideas, the communication, and the juried selection of exhibitors. At the same time, being present in one important fair can be a sign of prestige for the designer. Pitti Uomo has different functions: from commercial activities to communication, networking, and knowledge creation and diffusion. Pitti Uomo managed to keep and create not only new places for trade but also to promote a fashion culture, through innovative events, projects, and publications. The development of ePitti as a digital companion to the physical fair has allowed accessibility anytime, from anywhere around the world. The digital fair can lengthen the duration of the event, but it will probably never substitute the physical one. Pitti Immagine is well aware of that; the festival character of the trade fair is a clear contribution to strengthen the experience and environment where the buyers, brands, designers, and press interact. Certainly, in recent years other intermediaries have emerged, such as bloggers and online retail platforms, but face-to-face interaction is far from being dead. There is a complex interconnectedness of roles among intermediaries reflecting the fragmentation and segmentation of the fashion industry. However, the visibility and reputation that a credible fair can give is still a valuable asset. With the current overload of information, we need even more credible and trustful intermediaries. The expertise of the traditional intermediaries is certainly not obsolete. Their expertise is still valuable now, as a filter to help consumers to make sense of the flood of available fashion information that was once so highly restricted. In conclusion, adopting the terminology by Lucien Karpik, the fashion trade fair can be seen as a “judgment device,” as a social device that helps actors in the market to gather information and ascertain trends, to get to know the sellers and the buyers, and to develop opinion on the quality of the goods exhibited.51 Digitalization allows the fair to reach buyers and consumers from all over the world. However, the larger the number of choices, the greater our cognitive limitations will be, the more we will buy items from the same restricted number of well-known designers and brands. We may select the unknown and new designers only if there exists trustworthy judgment devices, filters, or intermediaries that can help us to find the right ones. As Jenny Lantz stated, trends still provide a significant organizing principle for the fashion industry as much as a source of legitimacy.52

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Notes 1 Lisa Wang, “No Signs of Slowing in the Global Menswear Market,” Business of

Fashion, June 17, 2014, accessed January 26, 2016, https://www.businessoffashion. com/articles/fashion-show-review/signs-slowing-global-menswear-market.

2 Tim Jackson, “The Process of Trend Development Leading to a Fashion Season,” in

Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, 2nd ed., ed. Tony Hines and Margaret Bruce (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), 180.

3 Data were collected between 2012 and 2016. Ten in-depth semi-structured

interviews were conducted in Florence and Milan (Italy), and in Amsterdam and Rotterdam (the Netherlands). This chapter draws on the results of two funded projects: (1) “International change and technological evolution in the fashion industry” in 2012, funded by Fondazione Florens (Florens Foundation); (2) “Behind the Scenes in Dutch Fashion: Bridging the gap between independent fashion designers, craftsmen and fashion intermediaries,” funded by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO—Dutch Organization for Scientific Research) within the Creative Industry—Knowledge Innovation Mapping (KIEM) program (project number 314-98-062) in 2015–16. Quantitative data on Pitti Uomo have been kindly provided by Osservatorio Fiere ItaliaEuropa (Observatory Fairs Italy-Europe) within the Centro di Ricerca Marketing e Servizi (CERMES—Centre for Research for Marketing and Services) at Bocconi University, Milan. I would like to thank Fondazione Florens and NWO for funding my research, Francesca Golfetto and Diego Rinallo from CERMES for providing me with quantitative data, Pitti Immagine for allowing the use of images on Pitti Uomo, all my interviewees for their precious time, knowledge, and insight into the fashion industry, and last but not least the editors Regina Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs for their precious feedback on the earlier version of this chapter.

4

Richard Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Arts and Commerce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Lucien Karpik, Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Marina Bianchi, “Willingness to Believe and Betrayal Aversion: The Special Role of Trust in Art Exchanges,” Journal of Cultural Economics 39 (2015): 133−51.

5

Peter Maskell, Harald Bathelt, and Anders Malmberg, “Building Global Knowledge Pipelines: The Role of Temporary Clusters,” European Planning Studies 14 (2006): 997−1013; Dominic Power and Johan Jansson, “Cyclical Clusters in Global Circuits: Overlapping Spaces in Furniture Trade Fairs,” Economic Geography 84, no. 4 (2008): 423−48; Diego Rinallo and Francesca Golfetto, “Exploring the Knowledge Strategies of Temporary Cluster Organizers: A Longitudinal Study of the EU Fabric Industry Trade Shows (1986–2006),” Economic Geography 87, no. 4 (2011): 453−76.

6

Sonnet Stanfill, ed., The Glamour of Italian Fashion since 1945 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014).

7

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 23.

8

David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2007).

9

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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10 Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991); Justin O’Connor, “Intermediaries and Imaginaries in the Cultural and Creative Industries,” Regional Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 374−87. 11 David Hesmondhalgh and Andy Pratt, “Cultural Industries and Public Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 11, no. 1 (2005): 1−13. 12 Caves, Creative Industries; Elisabeth Currid, “How Art and Culture Happen in New York: Implications for Urban Economic Development,” Journal of the American Planning Association 73, no. 4 (2007): 454–67; Brian Hracs, “Cultural Intermediaries in the Digital Age: The Case of Independent Musicians and Managers in Toronto,” Regional Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 461–75; Calvin Taylor, “Between Culture, Policy and Industry: Modalities of Intermediation in the Creative Economy,” Regional Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 362–73. 13 Keith Negus, “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance between Production and Consumption,” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 501–15. 14 Bourdieu, Distinction. 15 Jennifer Smith Maguire and Julian Matthews, ed., The Cultural Intermediaries Reader (London: Sage, 2014). 16 Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, 25. 17 Payal Arora and Filip Vermeylen, “Learning to Evaluate: Experts and Expertise in the New Media Art World,” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 2 (2012): 1–12; Olav Velthuis, “The Contemporary Art Market Between Stasis and Flux,” in Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, ed. Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis (Berlin: Sternberg, 2012), 17–50; Hracs, “Cultural Intermediaries in the Digital Age.” 18 Karpik, Valuing the Unique, 5. 19 Caves, Creative Industries; Ruth Towse, A Textbook of Cultural Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 20 Karpik, Valuing the Unique, 14. 21 Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2015). 22 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 23 Jackson, “The Process of Trend Development Leading to a Fashion Season,” 183. 24 Lise Skov, “The Role of Trade Fairs in the Global Fashion Business,” Current Sociology 54, no. 5 (2006): 764–83. 25 Ibid., 781. 26 Diego Rinallo and Francesca Golfetto, “Representing Markets; The Shaping of Fashion Trends by French and Italian Fabric Companies,” Industrial Marketing Management 35, no. 7 (2006): 856–69. 27 Harald Bathelt and Nina Schuldt, “Between Luminaries and Meat Grinders: International Trade Fairs As Temporary Clusters,” Regional Studies 42, no. 6 (2008): 853–68; Harald Bathelt and Philip Turi, “Local, Global and Virtual Buzz: The Importance of Face-to-Face Contact in Economic Interaction and Possibilities to Go Beyond,” Geoforum 42 (2011): 520–9; Rinallo and Golfetto, “Exploring the Knowledge Strategies of Temporary Cluster Organizers.”

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28 Maskell, Bathelt, and Malmberg, “Building Global Knowledge Pipelines.” 29 Power and Jansson, “Cyclical Clusters in Global Circuits,” 426. 30 J. Entwistle and A. Rocamora, “The Field of Fashion Realized: A Study of London Fashion Week,” Sociology 40, no. 4 (2006): 735–51; Skov, “The Role of Trade Fairs in the Global Fashion Business”; Sally Weller, “Beyond Global Production Networks: Australian Fashion Week’s Trans-Sectoral Synergies,” Growth and Change 39, no. 1 (2008): 104–22. 31 Eugenia Paulicelli, “Fashion: The Cultural Economy of Made in Italy,” Fashion Practice 6, no. 2 (2014): 155–74. 32 Stanfill, The Glamour of Italian Fashion Since 1945. 33 Carlo Belfanti, “History as an Intangible Asset for the Italian Fashion Business (1950–1954),” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 7, no. 1 (2015): 74–90. 34 Andy Pratt, Paola Borrione, Mariangela Lavanga, and Marianna D’Ovidio, “International Change and Technological Evolution in the Fashion Industry,” in Essays and Research: International Biennial of Cultural and Environmental Heritage, ed. Mauro Agnoletti, Andrea Carandini, and Walter Santagata (Pontedera: Bandecchi & Vivaldi Editori e Stampatori, 2012), 370. 35 Stanfill, The Glamour of Italian Fashion Since 1945, 31. 36 Emily Garrison, “The Italian Reconstruction and Post-War Fashions,” in Young Historians Conference (April 26, 2012), 4, accessed December 1, 2016, http:// pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/younghistorians/2012/oralpres/8/. She referred to the work by John Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 37 Nicola White, Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the Italian Fashion Industry (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000). 38 Simona Segre Reinach, “Italian Fashion: The Metamorphosis of a Cultural Industry,” in Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design, ed. Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan (London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2013), 241. 39 Pitti Italics is promoted by the CFMI with a grant from the Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico (Ministry for Economic Development) and Agenzia ICE (Italian Trade Agency) in support of Italian trade fairs and Made in Italy. 40 Lauren Sherman, “Menswear is Dead, What’s Next?” in Business of Fashion, June 9, 2016, accessed June 9, 2016, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/ menswear-movement-dead-mens-fashion-market-growth. 41 Alistair O’Neill, “In the Things That Go Over Other Things,” in The Glamour of Italian Fashion Since 1945, ed. Sonnet Stanfill (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 194. 42 Ibid., 204. 43 Linda Loppa, (former) Director of Polimoda, Florence, interview by the author, Florence, Italy, April 16, 2012. 44 Ibid. 45 Raffaello Napoleone, CEO Pitti Immagine, Florence, interview by the author, Florence, Italy, April 16, 2012. 46 Anonymous designer for an Italian footwear brand, Milan, interview by the author, Milan, Italy, April 13, 2012.

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47 Anonymous designer for an Italian footwear brand, Milan, interview by the author, Milan, Italy, May 6, 2014. 48 Mevan Kaluarachchi, fashion designer and owner of Mevan Kaluarachchi (Dutch menswear brand), Rotterdam, interview by the author, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, May 26, 2015. 49 Linda Loppa, interview by the author. 50 Raffaello Napoleone, interview by the author. 51 Karpik, Valuing the Unique. 52 Jenny Lantz, The Trendmakers: Behind the Scenes of the Global Fashion Industry (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016).

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PART THREE

THE DIGITAL IMPERATIVE

11 LOOKING BEHIND THE SCENES OF SWEDISH FASHION FORECASTING Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson

I

n what is called the “fashion system,” there are a number of sectors with different actors and institutions that create fashionable international clothing as each season is launched in the West.1 These people are all, in different ways, involved in the production of fashion. Thus, fashion is a collective activity and a highly international activity. Some players in the fashion system are relatively unknown but are significant for their contributions to an activity called “fashion forecasting.” This activity involves anticipating the future to interpret upcomimg fashion trends. In Sweden, the term most commonly used to describe this activity is “trend analysis.” This area of intermediary activity is a somewhat hidden and “secret” world, even within the international fashion industry itself.2 Trend analysis has often been regarded as trivial, uninteresting, and superficial.3 However, trend forecasters play an important role in shaping the fashions of tomorrow. Therefore, there is good reason to study this part of the fashion system. Fashion not only reflects society but it also helps to shape society. Trend forecasters are invisible, but influential, tastemakers within the fashion system. International trend analysis has a material impact on the ongoing evolution of fashion in the West. It is a major contributing factor in the production of the belief in the socially constructed idea of “fashion” versus “clothing.” This chapter focuses on the history and practice of fashion forecasting in Sweden through several questions. How did fashion forecasting begin in Sweden? What factors in the Swedish political and socio-cultural scene influenced it? Why was Sweden one of the first countries in Europe where the fashion sector organized itself to develop reliable trend information? And how does the Swedish fashion market view fashion forecasting today? I use the term “trend” as it is used in the Swedish fashion industry, namely, as the representation of a direction in fashion. The word is defined as follows in the Swedish National Encyclopedia: “Trend: direction, tendency. A stable, long-term social change regarding e.g. economics, demographics, values, interests or consumption patterns (e.g. in fashion).” However, I would point out that fashion trends are often anything but long-term and stable. They are, as I discuss in this chapter, often rapid and, in particular, seasonal. Therefore, the “trend” concept is often debated in public forums with the fashion and lifestyle sectors. This chapter, however, only covers the area and the phenomenon commonly known as “trend analysis” in the fashion industry in Sweden. It

draws on my own experience with the fashion-forecasting field in Sweden, having been CEO of both the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council and the Swedish Fashion Council for many years.

The beginning of fashion forecasting in Sweden: SBR, the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council An examination of the history of collaboration around “trends” in the European fashion industry makes clear that the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council (Skobranschrådet, or SBR) played a critical role. The origins of this organization lie in the Second World War. Sweden was a neutral nation that managed to avoid being drawn into the conflict that devastated large parts of Europe. But six years of war meant that Sweden eventually found itself in a serious crisis, as the supply of essential goods and raw materials faced ever-greater constraints. Guidelines for the adjustment of domestic production and consumption were drawn up to meet emergency war needs, including the rationing of most consumer goods and restrictions on manufacturing. Sweden had significant domestic industries in the clothing and fashion sectors: textiles, ready-to-wear, and shoes and leathers. In 1945, imports of foreign apparel and footwear were as yet negligible.4 In order to control wartime production, the Swedish government created an Industrial Commission that regulated production levels and manufacturing principles. Regulating the availability of raw materials and the output of manufacturers was essential to the wartime economy. Full shoe rationing became necessary from the spring of 1943, but was repealed in November 1945, shortly after the end of the war. All remaining price controls and other regulations were lifted in May 1952.5 The Swedish footwear and leather industry was in a precarious situation after the Second World War. During the last year of the war, the Shoe Industry Planning Committee met to review opportunities for increased cooperation between shoe manufacturers and retailers. On September 11, 1945, the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council was founded with the aim to “inform the industry’s various branches about shoe trends before every season” and “provide the best possible services to the industry.”6 Delegates to the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council were selected from among the representatives of manufacturers, retailers, leather tanners, leather importers, and shoe-last manufacturers. At the outset, it was emphasized that the council, “to meet its objectives concerning fashion trends,” should initiate cooperation with similar organizations abroad and “establish relations with major cities with a determining role in fashion.”7 Collaboration with the Swedish textile and clothing industries was also planned. To coordinate these activities a fashion consultant was to be hired, “preferably a woman . . . able to handle a demanding role. She must have good language skills, sure taste and good judgment, be well-traveled, and preferably possess journalistic experience. In addition, she should be proactive and able to work independently, as well as, critically, possess the ability to monitor and interpret changes in fashion.”8

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The perceived need for the new fashion consultant to be a woman is symptomatic of the prevailing view of fashion at the time. Most member companies in the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council were headed by men, but it was believed that women were more open to fashion and better able to interpret its changes.9 Aili Pekonen, a well-known designer and illustrator, became the first fashion consultant to the council. Except for a brief period in the 1950s, Pekonen held this position until 1968, when I was appointed head of the Swedish Shoe Council.10

Information from a new council The activities of the Swedish Shoe Council got off to a quick start. Soon the first color and fashion forecast was produced and delivered to all members: tanneries, shoe manufacturers, shoe retailers, and shoe-last manufacturers (Figure 11.1). Pekonen described her mission: “My most important task abroad is to connect with foreign experts and color organizations,” she wrote in 1946. “This will be very profitable for the Swedish shoe and leather industry. I will also study color and design both in ready-to-wear and shoes in order to constantly update the Swedish shoe manufacturers on the latest trends.”11 In the spring of 1946, Pekonen took a five-week trip to New York, London, and Paris. In London, she visited the British Colour Council (BCC)—the subject of Chapter 2—as well as other trade organizations. Networking and gathering information from international color groups was evidently seen as crucial to the creation of a unique color card for Sweden. Other influential color-forecasting agencies were also a part of the Swedish network. In the archives of the SBR from 1947, a color card from the Textile Color Card Association of the United States (TCCA) is found together with a newsletter (called Broadcast) signed by the TCCA’s well-known managing director, Margaret Hayden Rorke, who also appears in Chapter 2. Exchanges of information took place every season, starting in 1946.12 Early on, the Swedish Shoe Council understood the importance of staying in touch with international color trends, and working with American and British industrial color groups seems to have been more important than collaborating with organizations in France and Italy. According to reports from visits abroad, fashion and color inspiration from these countries came from famous designers and haute couture houses, rather than from working with trade associations for the fashion industry as with Britain and the United States. Contacts with as many sources as possible were essential. The idea of creating a national Swedish color and fashion look, separate from international trends, did not exist. On the contrary, the objective was to follow developments in major foreign markets and interpret them for Swedish industry. Sweden had a small population of around 7 million people in 1950, and Swedish industry realized the importance of international collaborations, exchanging ideas and seeking inspiration from actors in larger markets. There was something else that was new in Pekonen’s reports. Unlike most fashion magazines or forecasts, which mainly covered styles and trends, her reports explored the cultural and social significance of new shoe trends from abroad. Pekonen discussed the social landscape in Sweden and predicted why certain styles and trends would not work in the Swedish market while others could become great hits. This effort can be seen as a desire to relate fashion to Swedish culture and social thinking, something that has later garnered interest among researchers

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FIGURE 11.1  The Swedish Shoe Fashion Council played a critical role in the history of European trend forecasting. From its foundation in 1945, the Council published trend forecasts every year. Similar organizations were established in the other Nordic countries, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. The four countries worked closely together and founded the Nordic Fashion Council in 1948. From then on the Nordic Council started to publish a general forecast for the Nordic shoe market. This document shows the cover of the Nordic forecast for spring 1957. The text reads “Spring 1957. Fashion Forecast for Shoes and Leather. Internal industry information.” Cover design by the first fashion consultant of the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council, Aili Pekonen. © The Swedish Shoe Council; photographer Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson.

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concerned to uncover the sources of inspiration for Swedish design. One such example is the exhibition Sverige i tio skepnader (Ten Views of Sweden) at the National Museum of Stockholm in 2005.13 “Swedish Style” often is said to be closely connected to an inspiration of nature, to simplicity, and to function.

Collaboration across Nordic borders The years after the Second World War saw intense activity in the European shoe and leather industry and a growing need to find business partners in new markets. Thus the foundation of the Swedish Shoe Council soon became the inspiration for similar councils in the other Nordic countries. From 1945 to 1948, national organizations for the shoe and leather industry were established in Norway, Denmark, and Finland.14 After a few years, in 1949, the four Nordic councils decided that it was in their common interest to work more closely together. It was believed that the coordination of color and fashion trends for leather and shoes in the Nordic market would generate commercial success for the sector. As a result, a council of councils—the Nordic Fashion Council (Nordiska Moderådet, or NMR)—was founded in 1949.15 In this organization, fashion expertise was also a female affair. All of the Nordic fashion consultants, appointed to be in charge of the actual color and trend forecasting in the four countries, were women. It was a common belief that to understand what was happening on the fashion scene required the skills of a woman, rather than a man. This perspective, which emphasized the value of “the woman’s viewpoint,” has been documented by fashion history researchers in other contexts.16

The importance of working together: Producing a Nordic fashion forecast From the very beginning of the NMR, the various Nordic fashion consultants worked closely together. Their forecasts, published from 1950 onward, are filled with elaborate descriptions and exquisite illustrations of the new fashions for the coming season. Detailed sketches of men’s and women’s shoes, garments, and handbags are spread across the pages, combined with information regarding colors and materials. The color collection from fall 1954 consists of twenty-four shades, most of them named after geographical areas or inspired by nature.17 The NMR color and fashion forecasts are not only interesting as evidence of the actual collaboration among the Nordic countries, but they also are aesthetic examples of the fine graphic design of the time. No doubt, there was a wish for the leather and shoe industry to be seen as a modern and forward-looking sector of the market. The trend forecasts embodied these aspirations. The forecasts were not only used as information tools for the industry. They also became public relations tools and information documents for the press, and were publicized in daily and weekly newspapers as well as trade magazines.18 The successful collaboration among the Nordic countries would eventually have wider consequences. The Nordic Fashion Council was the backdrop for the creation of Modeurop,

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a hub for color forecasting for the entire European leather and shoe industry created in the wake of the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC), or the Common Market, in January 1958 and of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in January 1960. The first of these trading zones eradicated tariff barriers among the “Six” member nations: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. The second trading block encouraged commerce among the “Outer Seven”: Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The business idea and the objective behind Modeurop were defined at its inception in 1960: to coordinate color trends for shoes, leathers, and leather garments within the European market (Figure 11.2). The idea behind the establishment of Modeurop was that color is both a major factor in design and an important driver in the consumer’s purchasing decisions.19 According to the statutes adopted at the foundation of Modeurop, only national organizations and councils representing the leather and shoe industry could become members. As the name indicates, this group aimed to focus on “mode” (or fashion) within “Europe,” and drew members from the fashion industries of the European nations. The headquarters of Modeurop were established in Berne, Switzerland, but were later moved to Zürich. From its founding in 1960, Modeurop was the central trend information organization for the European shoe and leather industry until the original organization ceased operations in 1997.20

FIGURE 11.2  Modeurop color card, spring/summer 1979. Modeurop, the European organization for color forecasting for the European leather and shoe industry, was founded in 1960, with the same goal as the Nordic Fashion Council: to coordinate color trends for shoes, leathers, and leather garments within the European market. A color card was produced twice a year, indicating new trend colors for the coming season. The design of this 12 × 8 cm color card for spring/summer 1979 is a typical example of Modeurop’s color cards, distributed until the end of the 1990s. Photograph and © Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson.

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Forecasting on the fashion scene in Sweden A quick review of the historical process behind the establishment of fashion forecasting in Sweden shows that Paris dominated the early fashion scene in Europe, serving as the center of “good taste” and the heart of European fashion. With roots going back to the nineteenth century, the Chambre syndicale de la couture Parisienne was the Paris-based trade association that managed and maintained French fashion sovereignty.21 The Chambre cemented the position of Paris as the world’s fashion center, a position it still largely enjoys today. In the twentieth century, conditions began to change in terms of market demand. New consumption patterns and retail outlets emerged. For one, large department stores were established throughout Europe. In Stockholm, the Nordiska Kompaniet, or NK, opened in 1901 and remains the city’s flagship department store to this day. NK had a special couture department named “NKs Franska” (The French Department of NK). To secure the seasonal collections, representatives of the Swedish couture houses (the most well known were NKs Franska and Märthaskolan) from the late 1940s to the 1960s traveled to see the Paris couture collections in order to find inspiration and to select and buy the styles that were to be reproduced for their Swedish clients (Figure 11.3).22 But buyers from the successful Swedish retail sector also visited the Paris couture collections to seek inspiration and to purchase patterns for styles that were reproduced for the Swedish market. Growing market optimism in the postwar years laid the foundation for a freer lifestyle with new forms of expression and a new interest in recreation, sports, and travel. In the mid-1960s, some fashion houses in Paris tried new approaches in response to these cultural shifts (Figure 11.4). To reach a wider audience, they began to produce a less-expensive type of prêt-à-porter, called ready-to-wear collections. But the seasonal dictates of Paris no longer had the same force. London was the center of an innovative and youthful fashion movement in the 1960s and 1970s, pivoting on new styles such as denim, the space-age look, mini-skirts, Mods, hippies and flower-power. London has an enormous influence on the Swedish fashion market. “The market changed completely in the 1970s: suddenly the customer was in focus, listening to the customer. It was a profound change,” remembers Catriona Macnab, then a design student and now director of trends at the Worth Global Style Network (WGSN), today seen as one of the world´s most influential trend-forecasting authorities (see Chapter 13).23 In the fast-paced postwar world, with its great ideological and political movements, the fashion industry needed a new kind of information about the rapidly growing market. The Zeitgeist created the conditions for trend analysis. Even before the war, technological developments in man-made fibers, stimulated by international companies like Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, had begun to influence color forecasts for the fashion industry.24 Some seasonal color and shape information was also published by national trade and professional organizations like the British Colour Council, the Comité international de mode (CIM) in Paris, and Comitato Moda in Milan, and by certain natural fiber organizations, including the International Wool Secretariat (IWS) and the International Institute for Cotton. The trend analysis phenomenon in Europe thus saw its earliest beginnings among organizations concerned with the raw materials in the supply chain.25

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FIGURE 11.3  Märthaskolan. One on the best-known couture houses in Sweden was Märthaskolan, founded in 1927. Representatives from this house traveled to Paris every season to find inspiration from the haute couture houses and to buy styles to reproduce for their Swedish clientele. Here the founder of the Märthaskolan, Marg von Schwerin, is surrounded by models in evening gowns from spring 1961. Archive of the Nordic Museum, Stockholm; photographer unknown.

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FIGURE 11.4  The Swedish fashion scene was highly influenced by Paris haute couture until the end of the 1960s. All major Swedish papers and magazines sent representatives to follow the Paris collections. This image from 1964 shows the head designer of the haute couture house Castillo, Antonio Canovas del Castillo (former head of the house of Lanvin for many years which at that time was called Lanvin Castillo) and, to the left, the author of this article, Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, at this time PR Director of the House of Castillo. To the right is Alice Chavannes de Dalmassy, head of fashion of the French paper Le Figaro. Courtesy Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson.

The spirit that prevailed in Paris in the 1960s provided the right atmosphere for the first private trend businesses. In 1968, Arnodin established an “agence de style,” Maïmé Arnodin Fayolle International Associés, which was later called by the acronym Mafia.26 In 1970, Dominique Peclers, who had worked at the Paris department store Printemps, opened her own “trend agency” in order to provide advice and information on upcoming seasons of color and fashion trends. Her company, Peclers Paris, is still regarded as a major player in the field. The same applies to Promostyl, founded by Françoise Vincent-Ricard in 1966.27 In this way, the beginnings of the modern trend analysis field were established in Paris in the 1960s. While successful collaboration in joint fashion forecasts began in the Nordic footwear and leather industry in the mid-1940s, there was little movement toward cooperation in the Swedish fashion industry at that time. Until the early 1960s, Sweden had a prosperous domestic clothing and textile industry that supplied the country’s retail sector with Swedishmade goods. The dominance of stand-alone clothing stores, however, was challenged by the establishment of retail chains that had a new approach to selling. As an example, H&M was established in 1947, under the name of Hennes (“Hers”), and opened a number of stores

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throughout Sweden using a new business model. Chain stores like Hennes expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, and offered a completely new way of retailing clothes. The emphasis was high volume, low prices, and rapid turnover—and fewer Swedish-made goods.28 The result of this approach by retailers was that more and more imports flowed into Sweden, which created a far-reaching crisis in the Swedish textile and clothing industry. In 1950, there were 115,000 people employed in textiles and clothing, but in the 1960s to the late 1970s nearly 70,000 of these jobs disappeared.29 There were several causes of the textile crisis, including the high costs of manufacturing in Sweden, combined with fierce foreign competition and the liberalization of trade policies. Clothing imports grew and, to a large extent, domestic production moved abroad, eventually to the newly developed textile and clothing factories in Asia with their lower labor costs.30 An interesting fact is that the perception of fashion in Sweden during this period, and therefore also of fashion trends, was marked by a negative attitude toward frivolity and, indeed, to fashion itself. This trend emerged in Sweden in the aftermath of the rise of the radical left-wing political currents that colored the public debate after the student revolts of 1968. Fashion became a symbol of superficiality and was seen as an area that part of the media did not want to deal with. Some of the major newspapers in Sweden reduced their reports on fashion to a minimum towards the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s. To determine the needs of the remaining domestic textile industry, in 1978 the Swedish government commissioned a report which in part offered advice on trend watching. “Almost half of Swedish companies believe the Swedish clothing industry could benefit from the ability to adapt more quickly to changing fashion trends.” As a result, the Swedish Fashion Council was launched in 1979 with the financial support of various industry organizations.31 The Swedish Fashion Council was tasked with “producing forecasts and fashion information for the industry . . . with the aim that the information should be a tool for companies to better and more quickly adapt their products to swings in fashion.” Sixtyfive percent of the council’s activity focused on women’s fashion, twenty-three percent on menswear, and twelve percent on childrenswear. These figures roughly corresponded to the respective market shares of the three segments. As head of womenswear at the Swedish Fashion Council from its inception in 1979, and later as CEO until 2002, I followed the Swedish fashion forecast market and interacted with various stakeholders.32 The Swedish Fashion Council is today the only Swedish player in the fashion forecasting arena in Sweden, and over the years it has built up a safe position by using information tools from the “classic” model: a variety of trend books published several times a year, with a focus on fashion (womenswear, menswear and childrenswear), color and materials, lifestyle, and interiors. The printed materials are complemented by lectures, seminars, consultations, and conferences held at trade fairs for the benefit of the industry and by one-on-one meetings with individual companies such as H&M. The Swedish Fashion Council was a pioneer in one particular area: trend forecasting for the mature fashion consumer. As head of the council in 1997, I initiated a special trend document with ideas on how the customer segment of women aged forty-five years and above would evolve and how these consumers would like to dress. This was long before the current debate on the influence of aging on fashion began in the international press and in the Swedish media. The report drew on a number of interviews with women who were aged fifty and above. The document attracted great interest even in the foreign trade press.33

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In the interviews questions were asked about what kind of problems the women found in the ordinary offer of styles in fashion collections, as well as what hopes they had to find garments and styles that would correspond to their age groups.

International trend agencies enter the Swedish market Starting around 1980, the major French trend agencies were becoming interested in the Swedish market. Promostyl, NellyRodi, Carlin International, and Peclers Paris were all represented by local agents. Cay Bond, the agent for Promostyl in Sweden, reminisced about these early days: I introduced Promostyl’s trend information to the Nordic countries in 1979 and worked as their agent and trend analyst . . . My first customer in Sweden was . . . Millie McNaughton who was then design coordinator at KF [Koperativa Förbundet]. She was the only person familiar with Promostyl and trend books at the time. Later, H&M became my largest customer. Erling Persson (H&M’s founder), who had heard about these trend books, asked me to present to him personally. He was delighted and ordered his buying and design department to subscribe to all of the fifteen books published at the time.34 In the mid-1990s, the Swedish Fashion Council invited the Dutch forecaster Li Edelkoort, who had just launched her Paris agency, Trend Union, to a seminar in Stockholm to talk about her views on fashion and trends. Since then Edelkoort has visited Stockholm every year and organizes seminars around style forecasts from Trend Union.35 For a long time, the French forecasting agencies only produced reports of the “classic variety,” that is, printed documents published one or two years prior to the season. But in recent years they have faced growing competition from the digital information that is available on the Web. The largest player in this new field is WGSN, which, from its launch in 1998, has taken a growing share of the Swedish market for trend information. This digital giant of fashion forecasting has a huge competitive advantage because it continuously publishes information on daily events and trends in addition to issuing longer-term forecasts.

Players in Sweden now Today, the players in the Swedish trend analysis market can be divided into producers and users. As discussed above, the producers are the creators of trend materials operating in Sweden and abroad. The customers for trend materials include users from apparelmanufacturing corporations and retail chains to small garment producers, individual designers, accessory manufacturers, home and interior designers, and stakeholders in the

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so-called “lifestyle sector.” Most major international trend agencies are represented in the Swedish market, although the market is somewhat limited. Despite its small size, Sweden has a considerable number of companies who want to be well informed and will pay for trend materials. The desire to be “right” and to be informed appear to be important criteria for most commercial users, but is also evidence of some insecurity. Anyone can theoretically call themselves a “trend analyst” and try to convey information about the future. Expressions like “trend oracle” and “trend guru” are common in the Swedish media; a fascination with soothsayers or fortune-tellers is widespread in the fashion sector. A dozen of the foreign forecasting agencies active in the Swedish market are acknowledged to be credible in Sweden. Many of these companies are based in Paris: Carlin International, NellyRodi, Peclers Paris, Promostyl, and Trend Union, most importantly.36 The Swedish fashion forecasting market is small enough that “everyone knows everyone.” The producer side in Sweden is mostly comprised of agents who represent international players and who play a significant role in their parent company’s success. Some agents call themselves trend consultants or market analysts and also work as trend advisors and lecturers along with conducting their agency business. The boundaries are sometimes blurred between the agent and principal. Often, the agent can be seen to be expropriating the principal’s symbolic capital.

A changing field A clear problem among the field’s traditional producers is timing. New trend documents, published in accordance with the industry’s seasonal approach, anticipate a fashion picture that is one to two years in advance. But these long-term forecasts, which were once perceived as the field’s strength, can today be seen as its Achilles’ heel. Publishing early information was proof of the forecaster’s special knowledge and was seen as a legitimizing practice. Today this practice is strongly questioned and is perceived in many quarters as unrealistic and passé. Long-term forecasts are dismissed by some customers who consider relevant and instant updates more helpful. This is the case with some major retailers who depend on being able to present constant news in their stores. But in spite of that, these forecasts still sell. In 1998, the British trend-forecasting agency WGSN took a dramatic new approach to delivering trend data to subscribers. WGSN decided to provide information solely online, providing multi-faceted fashion and market information that is updated on a daily basis. WGSN’s online service met with instant success (see Chapter 13) and is today well established in many markets, including Sweden. A number of smaller online players operate in a similar way, but in Sweden they have not reached the same commercial importance as WGSN. These players can be seen as practitioners of disruptive strategies, directed against “traditional” bureaus such as WGSN. The new online providers have the same goal as the traditional providers, that is, to create good trend information, but they provide their reports exclusively through digital subscriptions. On the demand side, the use of trend information in Sweden was growing for a long time (Figure 11.5) but seems to be diminishing today. Some large international retail chains,

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FIGURE 11.5  Interior exhibition (bedroom view) from an exhibition “Home” by the Swedish Fashion Council. A growing interest in interior trends led the Swedish Fashion Council to establish a special forecasting section in the beginning of the 1990s, producing trend documents for the interiors market. For many seasons the Fashion Council also presented exhibitions on interior trends. This room was part of the exhibition “Home 92–93,” presenting interiors for 1992–3. The theme of the room was “Nature; concept Ewa Kewenter” © Swedish Fashion Council.

fashion brands, designers, and retailers are still interested in trend reports. In addition, a few subcontractors on the textiles and materials side buy trend information, as well as some representatives from the accessories industry that makes shoes, bags, watches, and jewelry. Companies in advertising, media, lifestyle, design, and marketing are still among the Swedish customers using trend information, as well as consumer and lifestyle-oriented businesses, technology producers, and the manufacturers of automobiles, garden supplies, and packaged foods.37

A global temporal and spatial perspective In the past four decades, the temporal and spatial perspective of the fashion business has shifted from Paris to the global arena. International fashion forecasting now underpins a global fashion system and seems to have little or no interest in conveying a national

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interpretation of future fashions. The pre-eminence of the French fashion industry is today challenged by London, Milan, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Seoul. Fashion as a globalized phenomenon is an obvious fact of life for everyone working in the international fashion industry. Across the Western world’s major cities, one finds the same clothing styles, brands, and pictures in magazines, newspapers, and stores. In their own way, the international trend agencies have contributed to this evolution. Their information looks the same whether it is sold in developed economies such as Sweden, Japan, and the United States, or in emerging markets such as China, India, and South Africa. Today’s consumers seem to dress themselves to the same standards and the same fashion image, no matter in what country they are living. The Western world is becoming, from this perspective, extremely homogeneous, which benefits the business of international trend analysis. The same fashion is “in fashion” regardless of nationality or country. The players use the same tools across all markets. The notion that fashion is international is cemented by large sectors of the media. For Swedish clothing retail chains, which in many cases perform well on the international market, this development is an advantage. Internationalized trend information helps to create a belief in a global fashion and confirms the player’s position on the world market. However, there are today multiple voices discussing the possibility of national fashions, for example, Swedish or Danish.38 The French agency NellyRodi states that a growing interest in “national” fashion trends has appeared on the horizon. Research is being done to present nationally inspired trends in specific markets; “Indian fashion trends” or “Chinese and South Korean fashion looks” might be the next new themes in trend information.39

Market and media Fashion forecasting is a business-to-business, or B2B, operation. Customers’ economic realities are considered in relation to the status and the position that each trend agency has managed to create. The pricing of trend books in Sweden is also revealing. Materials from Trend Union and NellyRodi are the most expensive.40 Advertising agencies, trade journals for the fashion industry, and mainstream fashion magazines such as the Swedish edition of Elle gladly send employees to prestigious trend seminars. The trade journals report on the trend agencies’ messages for each new season.41 This is a competitive situation because the trade journals see themselves as trendsetters and make their own predictions. They thus produce trend information by using materials from the trend agencies. The regular fashion press also conveys information about upcoming fashion trends. The difference is that fashion magazines are aimed at consumers, rather than producers. Fashion magazines can therefore not be seen as real actors in the field.

Contemporary and future fashion In the trend-makers’ world, contemporary fashion means fashion for the future because trend forecasters look far into the future, meaning two years in advance. But with the accelerating pace of the “fast fashion” market, a lot happens quickly, making it practically impossible to

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anticipate fashion trends two years ahead. Long-term forecasts are now dismissed by many trend predictors and customers in Sweden. It is now believed that a demand will grow for specific information related to particular niches and particular companies, along with customer and market analyses for other lifestyle areas. The market is moving faster and faster, with new impressions constantly bombarding the Swedish consumer. No one can escape information overload. New trends, products, celebrities, and entertainment assault us every day. The stage has been set for new cultural practices. Swedish fashion trends are no longer dictated or predicted from a specific direction. Trends emanate from celebrity galas, makeover TV programs, and musical artists. Electronic media are also playing a major role, with the growing popularity of text messages, fashion blogs such as Kenzas.se, and social networking sites such as Facebook.42 New icons on the Web continually emerge in the trend firmament and willingly share their best tips, at the same time as an army of trend spotters on the Web help to keep track of the “latest whatever.” Today’s Swedish consumers, especially younger urban dwellers, are extremely well informed about the rules of the social group to which they belong. These groups can be seen as versions of a “social space.” But taste preferences are no longer channeled through groups divided by social class, as had been the case in past centuries. Taste becomes an expression of the postmodern individual’s ambivalence, which moves in perpetual motion among his or her different preferences. Consumption is driven by an emotional and hedonistic logic, which means that people make product choices for their own pleasure, rather than in competition with their neighbors. The private pleasure of buying a piece of branded clothing or a designer handbag is far more important than raising one’s status or social recognition. The market is aware of these needs and constantly pushes to develop new products. The hamster wheel turns, and the “speed pollution” can hardly be stopped. At the same time, everyone seems to realize that today’s consumers are extremely aware of everything going on around them. When I first met Li Edelkoort about twenty years ago, she hinted that the trend analyst would probably eventually eliminate herself—people would learn to listen to their intuition and would interpret the future on their own. Are we there yet? Today’s digital trend analysts offer their forecasts directly to customers and consumers, without passing through interpreters such as magazines and newspapers. The layers have been pared down, so that the trend analyst speaks directly to the consumer through the Web. Edelkoort sees this as an interesting strategic new approach. “Then we would be able to inspire people without using intermediaries such as the press or the media,” she said.43 But, no, we are not there yet. WGSN and other Web services still coexist with traditional paper-based trend providers.

What is the future of the Swedish fashion-forecasting scene? Increasingly, developments in Sweden show that “classic” trend reports are declining in importance. Printed information, published between one and two years before the current season, cannot compete with data that is immediately available and continuously updated on the Web. Large companies such as H&M still subscribe to many of the major

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FIGURE 11.6  H&M trend department. In the H&M department for Trend and Forecast, a part of the well-known White Room, H&M trends for coming seasons are produced for various users in the company. © H&M Archive, Center for Business History, Stockholm.

international corporate trend books, but find them less and less useful (Figure 11.6). “The interest in materials from the classic trend bureaus has waned in recent years,” explained Liselotte Löveborg, head of fashion forecasting at H&M. “The flow of information is so fast today that they easily feel dated.”44 While the collective information regarding fashion trends is based on an international view of fashion, the significance of trend materials in Sweden has probably also declined in the context of a growing number of successful Swedish clothing brands, most of which were launched in the last twenty years. Many of these present a look, characterized by simplicity, purity, and function, often mentioned as typical for Swedish design. The Swedish look, explains the design historian Christina Zetterlund, “is grounded in the functionalist approach and is closely linked to modernism, modernity, and urbanity. The objects’ practical function is emphasized. Form grows from function, expressed in ‘pure’ materials” (Figure 11.7).45 Brands such as Filippa K. Hope, and Acne Jeans seek to differentiate themselves from international fashion trends, and instead offer a fashion characterized by a style that is “Swedish” in style, spirit, and coherence. The new Swedish fashion of the last twenty years was recently the subject of an exhibition, Svenskt mode 2000–2015 (Swedish Fashion 2000–15) at Sven-Harrys Art Museum in Stockholm.46 This exhibition “revealed the main aesthetic features of Swedish design” and “played a significant role in institutionalizing Swedish Fashion and constructing the Swedish fashion identity in the contemporary fashion world.”47 A desire to make their own judgments and interpret fashion in a way that suits them as customers is perceptible among other designers and retail chains in Sweden. Today a global fashion retailer, H&M has its own “in-house trend agency” which compiles information from a variety of sources in combination with conducting its own research.48 The constant traveling of the H&M designers and buyers to fashion centers in different parts of the world in combination 228

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FIGURE 11.7  “Swedish Style” is often said to be inspired by Nature. In 2005, The National Museum of Stockholm (Nationalmuseum) held an exhibition called Ten Views of Sweden. The exhibition presented ten dresses, representing different concepts and ideas from Sweden. One was called “Water” and illustrated a phenomena of life in Sweden today with the following text: “Clear, clean water. From the endless ocean to the calm lake, from the river to the dark forest tarn, from the babbling summer brook to the white winter ice. For Swedes clean water is a privilege that we take for granted, for many others an unreachable dream.” Exhibition concept by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson; dress design by Hjördis Agustsdottir. © Hjördis Agustsdottir, courtesy National Museum; photographer Erik Cornelius.

with an input of news from international sources means that the “in-house trend agency” can produce reliable trend information, suitable for the various and specific needs of H&M. There also appears to be little interest in professionally generated trend data among today’s Swedish fashion design students. Pär Engsheden, head of the fashion department at Beckmans College of Design, says that the school no longer subscribes to any trend materials, but often acquires historical documents from various trend agencies for its SWEDISH FASHION FORECASTING

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library. Invitations to trend presentations from both the Swedish Fashion Council and foreign agencies are received, but students mainly take much of their information and inspiration from the Web and social media.49 In another corner of the universe, Swedish academic scholars have not done much research on the world of fashion forecasting. When I presented my MA thesis at Stockholm University, “Looking into the Future: A Study of Trend Analysis in the Fashion Industry” in 2006, it was seen as a completely new area of research. More recently, some Swedish scholars have started to show interest in this part of the fashion industry, with one major study of trend forecasting published by Jenny Lantz in 2013.50 The rapid and revolutionary developments in digital communications and a focus on social media have obviously had a major impact on how consumers, retailers, and brands view trend information. Both consumers and businesses now have lightning-fast access to a wealth of information on the Web—if they have time to search for it. Here WGSN, which offers a sampling of international information, is of great appeal to Swedish companies that can afford the subscription. For a global company like H&M, WGSN is one trend source among the many that are used by employees in product design and merchandising.51 Elin Frendberg, CEO of the Swedish Fashion Council since 2014, gives her views on the current situation of trend information in Sweden. The council once had a broad remit, but has started to narrow its range of forecasts. “Today we produce only three trend books every season . . . Even if our references are global, our material is more adapted to Swedish and Scandinavian conditions compared to, for example, material from Promostyl, which is more driven by Paris. Our printed materials are now also available in digital form.”52 She also points out that the price of the council’s information is much lower than that of its foreign competitors due to its non-profit status. But Frendberg is aware that classic and printed information will fade as a supreme and stand-alone source. “Trend books will be more and more outdated, but the content, i.e. the information they provide, will remain significant. It is therefore important to update the old printed format and find other additional forms.”53 Today’s market developments also suggest that trend information in Sweden, which was previously mainly focused on fashion, will become more inclusive of other areas that are relevant to taste and style. There is a demand for information on consumer preferences, business models, and issues around sustainability, digitization, and technological development.54 Both Swedish and international trend agencies today offer this type of reporting in print and digital formats, in lectures, and through face-to-face consultations. The Swedish Fashion Council, for example, has recently launched a project called Digitizing Fashion in collaboration with the fashion industry and Stockholm University. The objective is to make Swedish fashion more accessible in the digital age. The agenda includes the future of wearables, Internet sales, and technical innovation in textile production.55

Conclusion Fashion forecasting can be seen as a representative of modernity, with its demands for individuality, diversification, and expanding consumption. The range of strategies among trend forecasters in Sweden shows how they are adapting new ways of marketing and communication to reach the consumer.

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Traditional forecasting is losing ground. The young generation of Swedish designers and consumers find their inspiration in a globalized world where the explosive development of “trendspotting” on the Web, in fashion blogs, and on social networks is leading consumers to develop a more individualized approach to fashion. The contemporary fashion scene is an arena where the “creative consumer” is the new tastemaker who designs his or her personal fashion trends and communicates them to friends and experts all over the globe via social media. This bottom-up development has the potential to challenge the hegemony of the homogenized international fashion that is increasingly found all around the world and to create space for independent trends, inspired by national cultures and movements. However, professional forecasters on the Swedish scene can still offer some value by organizing existing information into easily understandable categories. They will be expected to “curate” the information into messages that help save time for their customers and to shape what is happening in cyberspace into real, commercial fashion movements for those who are willing to pay the price.

Notes 1

Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

2

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “Rethinking Fashion,” in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1–18.

3

Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, “Looking into the Future: A Study of Trend Analysis in the Fashion Industry” (MA diss., Stockholm University, 2006).

4

Statistisk årsbok för Sverige (Stockholm: SCB, 1945); Statistisk årsbok för Sverige (Stockholm: SCB, 1960).

5

“Kristidspolitik och kristidshushållning i Sverige under och efter andra världskriget” (1949), SOU nr 152:49.

6

“Skobranschrådet konstitueras,” Skohandlaren, 9 (1945).

7

Minutes of SBR meeting, September 11, 1945, Svenska Moderådet Archives, Stockholm, Sweden (hereafter cited as SBR Archives). The documents in this archive are not numbered and the archive does not possess any finding aids.

8

Ibid.

9

“Lädertidningen presenterar Skobranschrådet” (1966), Lädertidningen, 21 (1945).

10 “Kort resumé över Skobranschrådets arbete och utveckling,” n.d. [c. 1968], SBR Archives. 11 Aili Pekonen described her mission for the future in a document in the SBR Archives, February 1946. 12 For more on the Textile Color Card Association and Margret Hayden Rorke, see Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 13 Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, “Ten Views of Sweden: Can Design Reveal the Essence of a Country?” in Ten Views of Sweden, exhibition catalogue no. 648, ed. Michael Ernstell (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2005).

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14 Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, “Modeurop: Using Color to Unify the European Shoe and Leather Industry,” in Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 15 SBR Archives. 16 Kawamura, Fashion-ology. 17 The color names are Havana, Mahogany, Chestnut, Golden Oak, Hazel, Club Brown, Swedish Tan, Marine, Morocco, Walnut, Sahara, Malaga, Poppy, Ruby, Japanese Blue, Turquoise, Shale, Pine, Cypress, Tobacco, Benedictine, Pastel Violet and Pastel Rose. SBR Modeprognos (SBR Fashion Forecast), 1954, SBR Archives. 18 Examples are found in “Modeprognoser 1950–60,” SBR Archives. 19 A document in the SBR Archives from 1968 gives the background of the foundation of Modeurop as 1960. 20 Giertz-Mårtenson, “Modeurop.” 21 Didier Grumbach, Histoires de la Mode (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993). 22 Ulrika Berglund, “Från hovdräkt till New Look,” in Kunglig Vintage, ed. Fredrik Andersson (Stockholm: Livrustkammaren, 2011), 69–77. 23 Giertz-Mårtenson, “Looking into the Future.” 24 Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution. 25 Giertz-Mårtenson, “Looking into the Future.” 26 Grumbach, Histoires de la Mode, 150. 27 Ibid. 28 Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, “H&M—Documenting the Story of One of the World’s Largest Fashion Retailers,” Business History 54, no. 1 (2012): 108–15. 29 Peter Sandberg, “Näringsliv och stat i nya roller,” in Det svenska näringslivets historia 1864–2014, ed. Mats Larsson (Stockholm: Dialogos Förlag, 2014), 512. This was happening in many countries in the West: in the Netherlands the textile industry disappeared completely; in Germany over 1 million people worked in textile industry in the 1960s and ten years later no more than 100,000. 30 Carina Gråbacke, Kläder, shopping och flärd. Modebranschen i Stockholm 1945–2010 (Stockholm: Stockholmia Förlag, 2015). 31 Ibid. 32 Giertz-Mårtenson, “Looking into the Future.” 33 Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, 45+: Some Ideas on How One of the Future´s Most Affluent Consumer Groups Wants to Look Like (Stockholm: Svenska Moderådet, 1997). 34 Cay Bon, email message to author, May 28, 2016. 35 Giertz-Mårtenson, “Looking into the Future.” 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Marie Riegels Melchior, “Hvad er dansk mode?” in Dansk Mode, ed. Thomas Schödt Rasmussen (Copenhagen: MOKO, 2006). 39 Nelly Rodi, interview by author for The Enterprise of Culture Oral History Programme, Paris, April 28, 2016.

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40 The price of documents from TrendUnion and NellyRodi were approximately €2,000 and €4,000. 41 For example, “Märkesguiden,” in Habit 7 and 13 (Stockholm: Mentors Förlag, 2005). 42 Christofer Laurell, Commercialising Social Media (Stockholm: Stockholm University School of Business, 2014). 43 This conversation took place during one of Li Edelkoort’s visits to Stockholm in the end of the 1990s. 44 Liselotte Löveborg, interview by author, Stockholm, June 3, 2016. 45 Christina Zetterlund, “Design 1995–2005,” in Design: Stockholm, ed. Kerstin Wickman (Stockholm: Stockholms Stadsmuseum, 2006), 163. 46 As presented in the exhibition Svenskt mode, 2000–2015 (Swedish Fashion, 2000–15) at Sven-Harrys Art Museum, Stockholm, 2015. 47 Yanqing Zhang, “Constructing Swedish Fashion Identity,” Fashion Theory 4 (2016): 475–84. 48 Löveborg interview. 49 Pär Engsheden, interview by author, Stockholm, June 6, 2016. 50 Jenny Lantz, Trendmakarna (Stockholm: Atlas akademi, 2013). 51 Löveborg interview. 52 Elin Frendberg interview by author, Stockholm, May 27, 2016. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Institutionen för data-och systemsvetenskap, DSV, “Pressklipp: Bärbar teknik på modet,” accessed June 6, 2016, dsv.su.se/omdsv/nyheter/pressklipp-bärbar-teknik-påmodet-1.230873.

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12 TRENDING ONLINE Valerie Wilson Trower Discusses Stylesight in the Asia Pacific Region

E

stablished in New York in 2003, Stylesight, Inc., was one of the pioneers of online fashion and trend analysis. It was the inspiration of Frank Bober, an experienced designer and senior executive from the Seventh Avenue fashion district. Bober launched his fashion career in the 1960s designing a menswear collection that was sold under his own name. He then held executive positions at two major New York brands— Arthur Richards and Polo Ralph Lauren—before establishing his own company, CMT Enterprises, in 1979. This firm, which Bober ran until 2000, helped major retailers to develop apparel under their own private labels. His next big venture was the Primatech Corporation, subsequently called Stylesight, which Bober owned and directed for ten years. In 2013, he sold Stylesight to WGSN for a fee “in the $100 million area.” The two online trend services merged to form a single technology platform, which today operates under the WGSN brand.1 In a 2011 interview with the London Telegraph, Bober offered his insight on trend forecasting as practiced by Stylesight. “Trend forecasting is really the synthesis of a tremendous amount of information that is gathered by our forecasters that takes into account the past, the present, elements of the art world, elements of past forecasts, elements of current forecasting, elements of what’s happening in the retail world and in the manufacturing and design world today.”2 Stylesight’s expert forecasters used information in a very specific way. “They actually build forecasts,” Bober explained. I think that’s a key phrase, because this idea of getting a forecast from the top of the mountain is really not a business-to-business [approach]—business people don’t want to hear about things like that. So we are building our forecasts based on the history (vintage), what’s currently happening, and then the intuition and expertise of our senior forecasting executives.3 Bober’s concept of building a forecast dovetails nicely with discussions by some of the other forecasting professionals whose oral histories are included in this book. Valerie Wilson Trower, interview by Regina Lee Blaszczyk, London, October 13, 2016, for The Enterprise of Culture Oral History Programme. Blaszczyk selected the excerpts from the transcript, edited them, and wrote the historical introduction.

This chapter draws on an oral history with Valerie Wilson Trower conducted by Regina Lee Blaszczyk in London in October 2016. Between 2010 and 2012, Trower was the trend director at Stylesight’s office in Hong Kong, handling accounts from Beijing to New Zealand (Figure 12.1). In this capacity, she worked with premium fashion clients in several sectors: fashion, beauty, accessories, automobiles, timekeeping, and technology. Her job as a trend director entailed liaising with top clients, giving media interviews, developing webinars, writing content for print and online venues, and presenting the Stylesight vision at major international trade shows such as Kingpins for denim and those sponsored by Messe Frankfurt for textiles. Born in London in 1958, Trower went to the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design to study textiles and fashion with a specialty in accessories. After graduation, she initially worked for Mothercare stores in the UK and then at a fashion retail consortium called Mademoiselle in the Bahamas. After returning home, she spent eight years at Southcombe Brothers, Ltd, a Somerset-based company that developed leather and fabric accessories tailored to the British high street, for international designer brands such as Paul Smith and Betty Jackson, and for special customers such as the Royal Opera House and the National Theatre. Returning to university for an MA at the Winchester School of Art and a PhD at the London College of Fashion, she worked in various positions as a buyer and product manager in the UK and relocated with her husband to Hong Kong, where she worked in the education sector and eventually hooked up with Stylesight in the Asia Pacific region. At the time when Trower worked for Stylesight, the firm’s headquarters were in New York. The IT people who had creative responsibility for the website were based there. The website was translated into six to eight languages to accommodate clients around the world. The firm had regional offices in California and Florida; in Hong Kong and Shanghai; in Australia, India, Japan, and Korea; and in Latin America. The European office was in Paris. Trower was one of eight trend directors globally. *** Regina Lee Blaszczyk (RLB): Can you discuss the history of Stylesight and your early experience with the company? Valerie Wilson Trower (VWT): Frank Bober was very hands-on as a founder. His background was in the fashion industry, and he knew that there was an enormous need for people to be able to present a crystal ball to see the future—the future of the fashion seasons. Frank’s initial idea was to take a body of images and to catalogue them so that he could actually predict the future by, say, analyzing the number of short skirts in a particular season’s runway collections. I first met Stylesight in 2007/8. At the time, WGSN was the only alternative online. I used it for my work as an academic; I was a course leader for Nottingham Trent University top-up degree courses run at Hong Kong Design Institute. A colleague of Frank’s turned up with Virginia Lau, a Hong Kong girl and an ex-student of mine in visual merchandising who’d just joined Stylesight. They gave us a demonstration of their online service. That’s pretty much all I knew about Stylesight until 2009, when I saw a job advertisement in the South China Morning Post for a trend director in the Hong Kong office. I was offered the job and started in January 2010.

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FIGURE 12.1  Valerie Wilson Trower making a presentation at InShow, a private summit sponsored by the Invista marketing team for intimates manufacturers, Shanghai, June 22, 2011. The morning consisted of speakers from Invista, a fiber manufacturer, on new technology and marketing campaigns as well as trend specialists, including Stylesight. The afternoon included a runway show of intimates, sleepwear, and swimwear. Courtesy Valerie Wilson Trower.

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I realized quite quickly that it was an unusual company. Virginia Lau was working there as an account director cum office manager, if you like. There were two other account directors, who looked after new business and repeat custom, and a site genius. The site geniuses did the technical side of client support; they were based in the various offices around the world. They looked after people’s problems with the site, but they worked quite closely with the trend directors as well. Besides that, there was a correspondent, who took photographs of events and street stuff, anything. Both the site geniuses and the correspondents tended to be quite junior people. It was quite often somebody’s first job after graduating, not necessarily in fashion—they might have come from another background. What was distinctive was that everybody worked on Macs, and everyone was very computer literate. The staff turnover, particularly for correspondents, tended to be very high, mostly because the job is quite nice in the summer—but it’s absolutely horrible in the winter because you’re outside most of the time, and it’s just relentless. The job of trend director was described as me giving a presentation every other week, but in reality, there was an enormous concentration of talks in the spring for the winter season. There were a few clients who worked seriously in advance. The website offered current information and looked two seasons ahead. If I offered a “futures” presentation—something that was very “blue skies”—to people in activewear, I found that they were more or less already wrapping up the season for themselves. They would be very happy for me to come along and talk with them, but all my presentation really did was to confirm their thinking. It didn’t actually inspire them because they worked so far in advance. My friends laughed at me when I said, “I’ve got a job as a trend director. I’m responsible for APAC.” They teased me endlessly, “What’s the trend on this then?” But I want to make it very clear that the reason for the job of trend forecasting is because many people’s jobs have an element of trend in them, but in actual fact, they do many other things as well. As a trend director, all you do is look at trends. You get to a point where you can look at an image, and you will know that this particular trend will be in Topshop [a UK high street retailer that is part of the Arcadia Group] in three weeks’ time or six weeks’ time. Or you look at a textile print—and you know that you’re definitely going to see it again, and you can think of clients who would love it. You develop a sense that “this is a winner.” You might have an image, say, from a runway show, but you know that it will appeal to a completely different market, a completely different customer and user from the market that it was aimed at in the first place. The same is true for a color or a piece of knitwear. RLB: How do you develop this skill? VWT: You develop it because you are relentlessly looking, and also you’re reading. That’s what was so wonderful about the way the Stylesight company was structured and the way the job of trend director was structured. You are reading reports all the time, reports that somebody else in the office has produced. You can see where their thinking is going. So when you come across an image and you think, “Yeah, that fits perfectly,” you know that other people will see it too. Your job is to help your clients see the connections because your clients are busy doing a lot of other things. They may not have time to look.

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My knowledge of Asia was enormously useful as well. A lot of trend reports, of course, are based on themes. The trend report may be relying on something that the head of design in an Asian company can’t connect with because they don’t necessarily have a background in, say, design history, or are not particularly familiar with British subcultures. To some extent, and in the seminars particularly, the job of trend director is to educate the customer, but in a covert way. Baroque is a really good example as nobody in Asia, no matter their education, would have studied Baroque. But if you presented it as, “I’m sure lots of you have been to Versailles,” they’d know what Baroque was, so you could then talk about Baroque. It was a way of putting people on the scent. We were free to do that how we liked, and it was one of the joys of the job. RLB: Can you discuss the presentations that you made to clients, and who attended them? VWT: The annual subscription for Platinum clients was $16,500 a year, which gave access to about twenty-two to twenty-five users. The Gold subscription was $12,500 for ten users, and the Regular subscription was $8,000 for five users. When I joined initially, there was a Single-user subscription, but that was scrapped. The Platinum clients got two presentations, if they chose to have them. I probably had 250 Platinum clients, so if you said I did 200 presentations to clients per year, I would think that’s about right. Many of our clients were global. We had a number of clients who were based in the United States but who had a team in China. So I would do the presentation for the team in China, even though the account was handled by another office. WGSN did not offer presentations to their clients. The people who attended the presentations included the client’s creative director, the head of the design team, and the whole of the design team. It was quite normal to have fifty to sixty people in a room. Sometimes, they did link-ups with other teams who were based at other factories elsewhere. Equally, it could be quite a small group. With Disney, for example, I worked with the visual merchandising and the print staff, so there would probably be a dozen people in the room. For Lane Crawford [a retailer with specialty stores selling designer luxury goods in Hong Kong and China], it was only their visual merchandising team, so it varied enormously. My job at trade shows was a piece of covert marketing. The clients are extremely busy people, and if you turned up at a trade show and said, “Please sit down for an hour while I tell you how wonderful Stylesight is,” they would have run away. But if you sat them down and said, “I’m going to talk about trend for (whichever season it was),” then they would actually, quite happily, sit there for an hour. Somewhere in the presentation, maybe repeated up to about five or six times, you’d say, “We posted lots more images of this on the site” or “We wrote a report on this last week, and you can have a look at it on the site.” So it is covert marketing, and certainly the trade shows were the most efficient way of getting new clients. RLB: Can you discuss the Stylesight online presence? VWT: What was so lovely about Stylesight’s online offer was that it had a calendar of reports. It was completely systematic. The calendar of reports was very much dictated by the clients’ needs. Not only were countless images posted on a regular daily basis, but there would be weekly reports on womenswear and childrenswear

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and a monthly report on visual merchandising. This was in line with what most trend companies do; they are all tailored to maximize the return for their clients. I think it’s important to remember this because I think we assume that trend is sort of universal and static, but it’s not. Any trend provider is trying to make their clients as happy as possible. Let me say something about the structure of the Stylesight website. The analytics were checked in a number of ways, for usage and across time. Any reports that weren’t really being looked at were replaced by something that was more relevant. So the website wasn’t set in stone and it all changed. Stylesight was extremely responsive to the clients in terms of the website. In one instance, I’d been asked by our new site genius to come along and talk to one of the Gold clients. The guy who ran the company, which did an awful lot for Primark [a Dublin-based international clothing retailer, a subsidiary of Associated British Foods], was based in Hong Kong and was British. They made a huge number of parkas and, at that time, parkas were not at all fashionable in Hong Kong. Why would you buy a jacket that would take up so much space in your very limited wardrobe when you’d only wear it for a few weeks of the year? So his design team for the parkas had very little idea of how parkas looked. When he went to the UK, he’d try to buy them, but that didn’t work if it was the wrong season. So the poor thing was going crazy trying to get his designers to do more with parkas but not being able to understand what it was that they were trying to do. We checked the website and came up with eight images of parkas. We asked the website people, “Can you add the keyword ‘parka’ for us?” I think that parkas were actually catalogued under “green jackets” or “coats” or something like that. They added parkas as a keyword, and the correspondents worldwide were asked to go and take photographs of parkas. Within a week, there were probably thirty images of parkas that had been loaded on the website, so the customer was absolutely delighted. In 2010, there were seven million images on the website, and by 2011, there were eight million. Some of the images came directly from PR companies, and a lot came from runway shows. Stylesight relied on other websites as a source for images, particularly for design or 3-D things. Trade shows were an important source for images, particularly again for 3-D. 100% Design [the annual trade show for architects and designers held at Olympia London every year during the London Design Festival] was mined for images and iconic-looking pieces of furniture. Any image from trade shows—Première Vision, for example—would be photographed completely, with people’s agreement. Festivals were completely covered as well— South by Southwest [SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas], Goodwood Revival [a vintage motor racing event in Chichester, England], Glastonbury [a contemporary performing arts festival near Pilton, in Somerset, England]—and suppliers’ events. The reason that all-online trends work is because you’re only paying one license for the business. The image, of course, is then accessed globally by a lot of people. It does not involve lots of licenses, which would not be financially viable. RLB: What is the future of trend forecasting? VWT: I would like to say that it’s like Stylesight, but more tailored, if that’s possible. I mean in a holistic way, the whole business is tailored to particular types of clients,

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depending on who has accounts with the business, but it would be nice to offer something that was more bespoke, rather than try to sort of re-tailor something that had already been written for another purpose. I think there are trend forecasters who work, maybe on an individual level, with say, five clients, and what they do is tailor for each of them. That, I think, is a viable business. When you get to Stylesight, which had over 200 employees globally, then I don’t know if you can do that. Fashion trend analysis is a specialized form of fashion journalism. Frank’s motto for the business was “We Sell Subscriptions,” and he was perfectly right. He would check to make sure everybody knew that about the importance of subscriptions. We were repeatedly told that Stylesight was bigger than WGSN, and that, every week, WGSN employees applied for Stylesight jobs. The product, the Stylesight website, was totally and utterly brilliant. It was streets ahead of its time. The layout was excellent. It was very clear and very easy to use. The keywords were fantastic. My fashion business friends were always curious about how much money Stylesight made, and I had to say, “I ask myself the same question.” WGSN was part of a much larger company; they were within an umbrella. Stylesight was not, and when you did the maths and tried to work out what the costs were, it was difficult to see how it made money. Anyway, it was fun while I did it, but I wouldn’t wish to do it forever. I think I learned a huge amount. Would I recommend it to anybody? I don’t know. It’s a bit of a niche thing, really. I think to have a career in trend, you’ve probably got to have very wealthy parents or something. It’s not well paid, and the competition is horrendous, but the people who are the survivors—credit goes to them. They do a great job.

Notes 1 “Sportswear Briefs,” Women’s Wear Daily, March 7, 1979; “Career Chic,” Women’s Wear Daily, June 6, 1979; “Ed’s Excellent Adventure,” Women’s Wear Daily, July 14, 1993; “Where Have All the Great Merchants Gone?” Women’s Wear Daily, June 9, 1997; Rosemary Feitelberg, “What Goes Around Comes Around Taps Frank Bober as Vice Chairman, Opens Miami Store, Relaunching Site,” Women’s Wear Daily, January 11, 2017; Bloomberg.com, “Frank Bober,” accessed January 14, 2017, www.bloomberg. com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=46334718&capId=46334347.

2 “Stylesight’s CEO Frank Bober: How to Stay Ahead,” Telegraph, April 22, 2011, accessed January 14, 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8435216/Stylesights-CEOFrank-Bober-how-to-stay-ahead.html.

3 Ibid.

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13 FAST FASHION, FAST FUTURES Catriona Macnab on WGSN and the Global Digital World

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atriona Macnab is head of fashion at WGSN in London, where she has worked since 2004 in various positions, including chief creative officer, head of trends, and director of product development (Figure 13.1). WGSN is a global businessto-business service that sells subscriptions to an online portal that provides users with an endless flow of visual information on current and future trends. In her current position, Macnab manages the WGSN trends team, which is responsible for identifying upcoming trends in the areas of fashion and lifecycle and for analyzing the motivations behind those trends on behalf of WGSN’s clients.1 Born in 1960, Macnab grew up in rural northwest Scotland. She recalls that there was “No fashion, no stores, no television, no Internet—very little as far as culture is concerned.” Her father was a shepherd, and the family lived on a small farm. In school, Macnab had an inspiring art teacher who encouraged her to pursue advanced studies in design. She received a BA from the Glasgow School of Art in 1978, specializing in textiles, and a MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 1984. By this time, the British textile industry was in steep decline, and there were few design jobs. Macnab spent two years working for an East End creative hub called Design Station before landing her first job in trend forecasting. In 1986, she joined Nigel French Enterprises, which by that time had offices in both London and New York and between seventy-five to one hundred employees. Macnab remembers the company as “a British version of Peclers,” the well-established Paris-based style service that kept customers informed with paper trend reports. “We’d be producing seasonal books, seasonal catwalk edits,” she recalled of her time with Nigel French. “Everything was printed, all the yarns for the color forecast would be dyed. It was quite a lot of work. Everything was handmade and handcrafted because we didn’t have huge runs. All of the little swatches would be glued in by hand.” Most of the subscribers were in the United States and Japan, and Macnab went to both countries several times a year to deliver seasonal presentations or to consult individually with the clients on trends.

Catriona Macnab, interview by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, London, May 13, 2016 for The Enterprise of Culture Oral History Programme. Regina Lee Blaszczyk selected the excerpts from the transcript, edited them, and wrote the historical introduction.

One source of Macnab’s ideas on future trends was the textile trade shows in Europe, mainly in France and Italy. “Première Vision had a huge influence on Europe, and on the Japanese and American buyers who used to attend,” she explained. “They would launch the colors of the season, and say, ‘These are the trends.’ They’d have big trend forums. We used to look forward to these trend forums. The best thing we did was sit down and look at Li Edelkoort’s Trend Union video—it was like being transported into another world.” In the mid-1990s, Macnab joined the International Wool Secretariat (IWS), which was renamed the Woolmark Company in 1997. In charge of global trends, Macnab traveled around the world to encourage the textile and fashion industries to use virgin wool in their products and to mark them with the Woolmark logo. As in the days when Nelly Rodi worked in the Paris office of the IWS, Woolmark produced shade cards and trend reports expressly for wool fabric manufacturers and users, and Macnab was involved in those efforts in the London office of the IWS. Woolmark became a client of an upstart forecasting company called the Worth Global Style Network, later simply WGSN. With the exception of the new trend forums at the trade fairs, fashion forecasters of the 1990s were in somewhat of a rut. They still delivered information as the Textile Color Card Association of the United States had in the 1920s and IM International in the 1970s. They used hand-assembled shade cards and trend books printed in small runs. Most Paris-based companies published their books in French. The dot-com boom pointed to a promising new online world. Everything was going to be digital, and English would be the language of the Internet and global commerce. In 1997–8, Julian and Marc Worth, siblings who owned Heatseal (a company that made labels, badges, and T-shirts), realized the commercial possibilities of the Internet and created a Web business model that would help to modernize fashion forecasting. The Worths decided to maximize the value of the artwork created by the Heatseal graphic design staff by setting up a website for people to buy the images and the rights. Within a few months, their website was not only selling graphics but was also providing customers with mood boards and other inspirational materials. Why not, thought the brothers, apply this idea more broadly to fashion? Why not make instantaneous design inspiration available to the entire fashion industry?2 “They could see that a disruption needed to happen in the old world of trend forecasting,” Macnab explained, “and they did this quite dramatically.” Launched in August 1998 as the Worth Global Style Network, the new online information service rode the crest of the dot-com boom. By 2005, WGSN had 1,500 clients, and the Worth brothers, keen for new challenges, sold the business to EMAP (East Midland Allied Press), a giant business-to-business (B2B) publisher and exhibitions company, for £140 million ($224 million) in cash.3 According to the Financial Times, by 2011, EMAP had dramatically expanded the client list, and WGSN was serving 38,000 users, reaching up to designer brands and down to discount retailers, “from Armani to Walmart.” For an annual subscription fee of £16,500 for five users, fashion companies could study current and future trends, read expert analysis on knitwear or denim, and create their own mood boards using color palettes, design suggestions, and catwalk photographs.4 The creative staff no longer had to wait for the mail to deliver their monthly trend books. The latest visual information was at their fingertips. Macnab joined WGSN in 2004, just before the change in ownership. She had used the WGSN platform at Woolmark, but the career decision to plunge into the digital world

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happened over lunch with the creative director of WGSN who was a fellow alumna of the Royal College of Art. “Everything was online,” Macnab recalled. “You didn’t have to print any ghastly books any more. It was perfect. It was trend forecasting but in a very new, different, exciting way.” The material that follows is drawn from an oral history interview with Macnab conducted by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson at WGSN headquarters in central London in May 2016. The excerpt focuses on Macnab’s recent experience at WGSN with reference to globalization, digitalization, and sustainability. The text ends with her reflections on what it takes to be a successful trend forecaster. *** Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson (IGM): We know that fashion today is said to be international, at least in the Western world. Do you find that this is true or are national fashion trends becoming more important? Catriona Macnab (CM): Do you mean that if I’m in China, is China fashion more important than Paris, than French fashion? Definitely, without question. The West, the old Western world, is not as important as it used to be. People in the local market want to know about what is happening in their own region or their own country. So the home-grown fashion companies that are developing everywhere—they’re the ones that WGSN is looking at now. In our first ideas for spring/summer 2018, we are looking at South Korean designers and Brazilian designers. There’s not one Italian, not one French, not one American, and not one British. So WGSN is now looking at the world in a very different way. Those home-grown designers from outside of the West are not just influential in their own local market, but their designs are beginning to look newer and fresher than what’s happening in the traditional markets. Everyone is looking at the catwalks of the big four cities, so if you want to find something new you’ve got to go further afield. And we’re finding amazing things happening in South Korea. Fashion in South Korea is very hot at the moment, so we’re sending a lot of people out there to do research. And it’s fantastic for women’s, for youth, for beauty; there’s a great amazing beauty industry in South Korea. So a lot of what we are finding in South Korea we’re bringing back here to London and disseminating it, editing it, deciding what is right for our bigger global market. IGM:  We talk a lot about the consumer and how important the consumer is, but some brands are lagging behind the so-called “connected consumers” who use digital media to shop. So how does WGSN approach that problem? CM:  There are three different parts of the triangle to what we do. We publish a lot of information on what brands are doing, on our retail section of the site, so we’re continually up-to-date with new things that are happening, either from going to conferences or talking to the leaders in the field. We publish a lot of information on what is happening in the digital world. It can be about boring stuff like payment, because payment is hugely important in e-commerce. If you can change payment from five clicks down to three, your sales will go up hugely. And so we do a lot to help our customers strategize on how to build and how to entice your customer in, how to keep your customer on the site, because most e-commerce sites fail at the check out.

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The customer shops, puts their merchandise in the basket, in the cart, and they get to payment and the transaction stops because the technology is not seamless enough for them to continue. Second, we do events, what we call WGSN Live. We’re having a big “futures” event in Australia this month, and the question of the future of retail is very much a part of that event. Third, we will work directly with our customers to help them understand what the online shopper’s journey is like. We will also look at branding with our customers. Today, for example, we’ve got a big American company working with us on a strategy for how they can better reach their customer. So what we do is threefold. There’s the WGSN website, there’s live—WGSN Live—and there’s bespoke. With bespoke programs, we work very closely with the customer. IGM:  Fast fashion has been a concept for some twenty years or so. For you, what is fast fashion? CM:  Fast fashion? To me, it stands for a company that can work very fast and close to the season. So if your turnaround time from producing the sketch in the design room to making-up the garment and getting the garment into the retail shop is three months, then that’s fast. So anything between six and three months is fast fashion. In China, obviously, they can do it in a week. That’s the extreme case of fast fashion. It’s in the speed of how quickly you can turn things round. But it’s not the Zaras and the H&Ms of this world who are driving it. It’s driven by the consumer. Companies wouldn’t do it otherwise. The consumer wants everything faster. It’s all about speed, immediacy, and “I want this now.” The speed of communication has changed, and everyone is communicating all the time, on several different social media at the same time. The Post-Millennial generation is looking at three screens all the time. So they’re looking at information and thinking, “I want to be surprised. I want someone to surprise me, then I’ll read what they’re doing, or I’ll buy what they’re trying to sell me.” The Post-Millennial generation is going to be difficult to sell to. So, fast fashion is not just about the speed to market. It’s about speed in the whole world, and the whole way we’re living in that world. Everything has become seamless and integrated. It’s more of a business model, a way of selling, than the fashion itself. IGM:  Sustainability is one the most important discussions today. How do you deal with sustainability in your trends? CM:  WGSN is very much embracing sustainability. In fact, we’re building up information about sustainability in the marketplace. And we’ve got our champion— our internal champion—Dio Kurazawa who’s our denim director. He’s worked in the denim industry for years. He’s worked with Levi’s, he’s worked at some other big brands, and he’s very much our internal sustainability champion. He gets our team together, and we discuss once a month what is happening in the world of fashion design. But it doesn’t have to be fashion—it can be anything to do with sustainability. And we’ve started publishing information on our site so customers can see what is happening in that world. Sustainability is also infiltrating our trends. So for instance, “Slow Futures” is one of our main trends for the spring/summer 2018 season, and it is completely influenced by sustainability. This trend comes from the consumer who buys the product. The consumer wants to a buy a product that’s not throwaway, that’s going to

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last, that means something to them, and that should be worn for as long as possible, rather than something they wear a few times and chuck away. IGM:  We are now living in a world where less change and the slower way of living is preferred by most people, and we’re even talking about it as something important for the future. Has this need to slow down influenced your trend predictions? CM:  Last winter we had a trend called “Pause,” and we have moved from “Pause” to “Slow Futures.” There’s a whole part of WGSN that is acknowledging the trend for slowness, for slowing down, for buying fewer things, and for not just buying something for the sake of buying. So absolutely, we’re acknowledging that the slow trend will continue, that it’s not just a six-month seasonal hit. It’s going to continue for a long time, I think. On the other hand, you still need stimulation for the industry. Not everyone can say, “I’m not going to do anything new this season.” You’ve still got people who want to buy things, who need to buy things, and it’s important that they have the choice. And I think that’s where it comes together because women—I’m talking about women here more than men—need the choice. If they’re going to work, they will need something to wear. I’m not talking about a special occasion; they need something to go to work in. They need clothes to wear in whatever they’re doing. I think women tend to buy more than men. They tend to be more interested in how they look. Although that’s changing, I mean, grooming for men is taking off phenomenally. There’s one area, though, that I want to talk more about—our “Slow Futures” trend. Our influence for that trend was quite funny. It was Mark Zuckerberg [CEO of Facebook, the social networking service based in Menlo Park, California]. Mark has a uniform, and he wears the same uniform every day. A hoodie, a T–shirt, and a pair of jogging pants or something. But it’s all very casual, the same color, and never changes. His philosophy is “I don’t want to be wasting my time thinking what am I going to wear today, because I’ve got better things to think about.” And I think that’s quite a wonderful philosophy. And we think that it is very, very important for the consumer to pause and think, to ask if you really need something new every day to wear. Because you should have other things to think about. So there are two things happening, it’s not one, it’s not the other. You’ve got both happening at the same time. But I think that’s why it’s good to have choice. IGM:  Do you think that you will get negative feedback about the slow trend from your subscribers? Will retailers, designers, brands, and so on say, “Well, what are we going to do if we don’t sell?” CM:  It could be seen as a negative, but I don’t think it is. It’s just a way of life. We haven’t published the “Slow Futures” trend yet. Let’s see how our customers respond when it is published. But we are just saying, “This is what’s happening, and you need to be aware of it.” IGM:  This leads to the question of actually how relevant forecasting is today. Do brands really need some kind of insight beyond right now? With all of the information that is available on the Web, will there be a place for a company like WGSN in the future? CM:  The fashion industry is changing and will keep on changing. As you know, it changes from one country into another. Manufacturing will change. Everything

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keeps on moving, and I think there is a need, or a space, for a company that knows what’s happening ahead of time. Because people do respond well when they get direction. They say, “Right, I’ve got to get to work today, and I need to know how to do my work quickly, fast, and efficiently and, hey, this company can help me do it.” And as long as we’re doing that and keep on doing that for our customer, and are always thinking ahead of what they’re going to need, then yes, I think there is a future for a company like WGSN. IGM:  What is your view on fashion bloggers and blog platforms? Do you collaborate or cooperate with bloggers? CM:  We invite them a lot to participate in our events. That’s mainly so they’ll be bloggers at our events, our futures events. They’re a huge part of the fashion world now, and you know, they have very big followings. So, yes, we want to embrace bloggers as much as we can. The big geographic area where we work very closely with them is in Brazil. There’s a very big fashion blogging community down there. It’s very important from not just a trade point of view, but from a consumer point of view. I think that’s where it works really, really well. The bloggers will come to our events, to our big shows down there. But I can’t say we work with them very closely. They don’t work for us, or anything like that. I don’t feature them on the website, and we don’t have guest bloggers that often, only now and then. I think that bloggers are great when it comes to “This is what I think about what’s happening right now.” The limitation from our point of view is that at WGSN we don’t think about just what’s happening now. We have to think about what’s happening in six months, in twelve months, in two years, in five years. So it’s quite different. IGM:  What does it take to be a good trend forecaster? Do you find this is an innate gift, or can you learn to be a good trend forecaster? Is there something that can be called “trend pitch” or “trend ear,” like musical ear and musical pitch? CM:  I don’t think that it’s something that you’re born with. I think it’s something that you learn. Curiosity is absolutely, hugely important, but it’s also being able to be decisive. We have so much information everywhere now. So you’ve got to be very decisive and very confident. You need to be able to say that this is the right information you need to take now and feed it into the overall information picture to create a trend that you can present to my customer and say, “Go and do this because it’s going to help your business.” And to be able to do that you have to have a certain amount of confidence, to know that you’re right. Because if you get it wrong, it can cost a company an awful lot of money. So we question ourselves and challenge ourselves all the time about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. And we look at our customer feedback, and take it very, very seriously. If we do something wrong then we’ve got to correct it and do something about it. So it’s not just about putting stuff out there. It’s about putting stuff out there to our customer, and then understanding what they do with it and what’s successful and what’s not. As you know, everyone learns from their mistakes. You fail, you fail faster, and you move on. So I think to become a great trend forecaster, you’ve really got to have a great team of people. Talent is paramount, skilled people. But it’s also about being confident and decisive. And you can learn that, you can absolutely learn those skills. Those skills are not something that you’re born with. You can learn them.

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FIGURE 13.1  Catriona Macnab. Copyright Natalya Headshots; photographer Natalya Chagrin

Notes 1 Linked In, “Catriona Macnab,” accessed January 5, 2017, www.linkedin.com/in/

catriona-macnab-a73ab6b; Bloomberg, “Catriona Macnab, Head of Fashion, WGSN Limited,” accessed January 5, 2017, www.bloomberg.com.

2 Hannah Littman, “Serial Entrepreneur Marc Worth Explains How He Turned a Simple Idea into a Successful Business,” getabstract, last modified July 29, 2014, accessed January 5, 2017, https://blog.getabstract.com/serial-entrepreneur-marc-worthexplains-how-he-turned-a-simple-idea-into-a-successful-business/.

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3 Georgina-Kate Adams, “Marc Worth: WGSN and Stylus,” Startups, last modified

October 3, 2013, accessed January 5, 2017, http://startups.co.uk/marc-worth-wgsnand-stylus/; Jonathan Moules, “My Liquidity Moment: Marc Worth,” Financial Times, September 29, 2011; “The £4m Venture that’s ‘Worth’ It,” Jewish Chronicle, February 24, 2011, accessed January 5, 2017, www.thejc.com/business/features/the-4m-venturethat-s-worth-it-1.21400.

4 Esther Bintliff, “Emap Boosted by Online ‘Intelligence’,” Financial Times, January 30, 2011.

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PART FOUR

CONCLUSION

14 FASHION FUTURES Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Ben Wubs

I

n January 1999, the American multinational toy company, Mattel, Inc., added the Trend Forecaster Barbie Doll to the Barbie Collection, a special collectors’ series aimed at adults who grew up with earlier versions of the teenaged fashion doll. The original Barbie, a teen fashion model doll introduced at the American International Toy Fair in 1959, became Mattel’s best-selling product; the collector line of themed dolls was launched in 1988 followed by the Official Barbie Collectors’ Club in 1997. During the 1990s, designers and brands such as Bob Mackie, Vera Wang, and Christian Dior created clothes for Barbie, so it was only fitting that dolls of fashion professionals would be created next. Still available for purchase on the Barbie Collector website, the Trend Forecaster Barbie Doll is “dressed for a day in the global business arena in a trend-setting look that speaks to today’s woman and her intelligence, talent and individual style.” She wears a stylish faux leather coat with a lavender lining, a matching miniskirt with a “sassy little camisole,” and platform shoes, touting a look that is “ahead of her time.”1 Trend Forecaster Barbie embodies the popular perception of the fashion business as the ideal profession for those who aspire to glamour and globetrotting. She looks smart, sleek, and poised to stand at the podium and predict exciting trends. As this anthology has shown, the job of color forecaster and trend forecaster has always involved international connections, but, like other aspects of the fashion industry, it has also entailed a good deal of nitty-gritty work behind-the-scenes in the home office. In early nineteenth-century Paris, Victor JeanClaude roamed the streets and shops of Paris to study the latest modes, and then squirreled away in his atelier to create sketches and assemble samples for his customers, the fashionhungry textile mills in the remote industrial areas of France. In Jazz Age America, Margaret Hayden Rorke collected swatches from members of her trade association, and, using her knowledge of the fashion scene in New York and Paris, sorted through the mountain of samples to select the best shade of navy, white, and green for the upcoming summer. Claude and Rorke both determined new hues by looking, analyzing, and speculating. Like many other experts, they formulated educated guesses based on years of experience, careful observation, judicious analysis, and intuition. Mattel got it right. Trend Forecaster Barbie carries at her wrist a small faux leather handbag, far too small to hold a crystal ball.

History, biography, and fashion forecasting This book has unveiled the hidden history of color and trend prediction, opening the doors onto a rich and little-studied dimension of fashion production. If you type the phrase

fashion forecasting into a library catalog search engine, you will find numerous books about contemporary practice. Many of these books are written by authors with little or no historical training. Those books treat the past like a black box or reduce it to historical events on a heritage timeline. The past is seen as what came “before” the “relevant” developments of “today.” For professional historians, however, the past is a treasure box of insights. Trained in the liberal arts and humanities, historians see the past as a rich repository of stories about human struggles, and understand how those stories can serve to inform our understanding of the present and future. But they are cautious when asked to predict the future because they know, through the study of human experience, that contingency can lead to the unexpected—and the unpredictable. This perspective is not unique to professional historians. Top executives, for example, are often astute historical thinkers, who read books on biography and history to better understand human behavior and strategic thinking as a way to gain insight into how contingencies emerge and evolve. The most experienced executives can speak with authority about their firms and industries from a deep historical knowledge of their companies and the context in which they have operated. We believe that the discipline of fashion studies can also benefit from the humanistic insights of history, particularly if the analysis is rooted in extensive archival research and explores the relationships among enterprise, society, and culture. This book has drawn on historical archival materials—trade journals, newspapers, magazines, forecasters’ reports, corporate records, and oral history interviews—to analyze fashion forecasting as an activity and a career path with a long history within the creative industries of the modern West. In many respects, this book has presented a series of cultural biographies of influential forecasters and forecasting entities. The book is impressionistic, rather than encyclopedic; it has offered a sprinkling of intriguing and informative stories to suggest the richness of the past. The historical chapters focused on a select group of people and institutions: the Textile Card Association of the United States and the British Colour Council; Tobé Coller Davis and her fashion reporting service; the Chori trading company; Messe Frankfurt and the Interstoff trade fair; the Pitti Uomo trade fair; the Swedish Shoe Fashion Council; and Modeurop. Other historical examples were cited as they complemented or enhanced the main cases: the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company; the Doneger Group; General Motors Corporation; the International Wool Secretariat; J. Claude Frères & cie; Mafia; Rhodiatoce; Nigel French Enterprises; and Toray, to name just a few. The oral history chapters homed in on the professional experience of five late-twentieth-century forecasters with different types of experience: David Wolfe, Nelly Rodi, Ornella Bignami, Valerie Wilson Trower, and Catriona Macnab. Each of these individuals came of age professionally at a slightly different time in the history of forecasting, and each helped to develop new approaches to the challenge of predicting colors, silhouettes, and themes. The case studies in this book were selected because they highlighted different facets of the history and evolution of fashion forecasting. The examples can be roughly divided into four categories based on the organization of the business: (1) entrepreneurial firms; (2) trade associations or scientific bodies; (3) trade fairs; and (4) corporations. In the nineteenth century, forecasting entities were entrepreneurial ventures such as J. Claude Frères & cie, a niche business that exported French color cards to fashion centers around the world. Most twentieth-century fashion forecasters also started as entrepreneurial firms. In New York, Tobé Coller Davis set up her own consultancy during the Jazz Age, just as the American ready-

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to-wear industry was taking off and retailers around the country scrambled for information on the latest Parisian styles that would be interpreted by the Seventh Avenue garment district. A decade later in Paris, Fred Carlin established a firm that created sample books on French fashion information for sale to foreign customers. In the postwar era, several other entrepreneurial styles offices were established in Paris in response to the rise of the French ready-to-wear industry, which catered to the new young fashion-hungry consumer. These agencies included Promostyl, Mafia, and Peclers. During the 1980s, Nelly Rodi and Lidewij Edelkoort also started their own trend agencies and began to provide trend information to customers in the fashion business and beyond. While early forecasting entrepreneurs were men, it is striking to note the dominant role of women in the twentieth-century industry. Whether in dressmaking or color styling or fashion prediction, gender stereotypes deemed fashion to be a suitable job for a woman. Many women took advantage of this cultural bias to build successful businesses for themselves as fashion and color forecasters. In the early twentieth century, American industry was heavily invested in trade associations, which provided firms in similar businesses with a forum for exchanging ideas and information without violating the country’s strict antitrust laws. One of these trade groups, the Textile Color Card Association of the United States (TCCA), saw vast opportunities in the growing ready-to-wear industry, which needed color information to help streamline production and co-ordinate styles. Through the TCCA, firms in the millinery, leather, shoe, textile, and apparel sectors developed a tripartite system for color management. That system, which consisted of color standards, seasonal color forecasts, and occasional color reports, is the basis for many forecasting operations today. Trade associations played an important role in the evolution of French fashion prediction after the Second World War. In 1955, the Comité de coordination des industries de la mode (CIM) was launched by the French ready-to-wear trade association in direct response to a French productivity mission to the United States. The CIM’s aim was to encourage the growth of the nascent French ready-towear industry, and other actors in the French fashion system, by interpreting and explaining the latest trends. Within a few short decades, however, the CIM became superfluous, as new entrepreneurial private ventures gained a toehold in fashion forecasting. Some of these entrepreneurs, like Nelly Rodi, had gained a good deal of experience working for the CIM. Trade fairs jumped into the forecasting arena in the second half of the twentieth century to serve the globalizing fashion industry. As early as the 1920s, textiles began to play a key role in the international general consumer fairs that were organized by Messe Frankfurt, but, by the late 1950s, the textile component of the general consumer fairs in Frankfurt had become so large that it was split off into a separate event called Interstoff. Soon Interstoff became the most important international apparel and fashion fabric market in the world, bringing the most important actors in the industry together and creating cross-industry networks. In due course, the significance of the information dissemination function, particularly color and trend forecasting, increased (Figure 14.1). Starting in the early 1980s, trend and color forecasting became an ever more important part of the Interstoff trade fair. Nevertheless, Interstoff ’s competitor in Paris, Première Vision, was better able to exploit the rising demand for new trends through a highly selective jury process that admitted only the highest quality fabrics, mainly made in Europe. Gradually, many high-end European mills shifted their loyalties to the Paris trade show, and customers who wanted to see the latest trends followed suit. By the 2000s, Première Vision was the fashion fabric event on

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FIGURE 14.1  Cohama’s Color Forecast for spring 1966 as displayed at the Interstoff 1965 fair in Frankfurt am Main. Courtesy Hessisches Wirtschaftsachiv, Darmstadt, Photo: Sepp Jager.

the European continent. However, on a global scale, Messe Frankfurt today organizes significantly more trendsetting textile fairs than its Parisian rival. Corporations also played a role in trend forecasting starting in the twentieth century and even more so in the twenty-first century. As we saw above, trade fairs are operated

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by highly specialized firms that have learned to exploit the demand by busy fashion professionals for one-stop shopping for fabrics, other materials, and trend information. Until 1999, the Interstoff trendsetting shows represented only a small part of Messe Frankfurt’s entire trade-fair business. Messe Frankfurt is a state-owned enterprise (owned the city of Frankfurt and the state of Hesse, Germany), but it has always been managed as a private venture aiming to make a profit by renting out floor space, and not necessarily for fashion fabrics. In 2015, Messe Frankfurt organized 133 trade fairs on four continents, including twenty-three textile events, which explicitly mirrored the latest trends.2 Première Vision started as an entrepreneurial association that was exclusively dedicated to organizing trendsetting fairs for high-end textiles. In 2010, the ownership of Première Vision SA fell into new hands; 51 percent is controlled by Association Première Vision, and 49 percent by GL Events. The latter is a large integrated international event group listed on the Euronext stock exchange in Paris; it organizes nearly 250 trade fairs around the world and manages convention centers, exhibition centers, and concert halls.3 Business historians often examine the relationships among firms and technology, whether the company is a multinational corporation that is focused on the quantity production of standardized goods or a smaller firm that is invested in the style industries. One important question is whether technology drives innovation, or whether technology is the handmaiden to social, cultural, and economic change. In the arena of fashion forecasting, we see a give and take between these two points, particularly when engineering expertise and computer technology were engaged to forge new ways of doing. In Japan, fashion forecasting was carried out mainly on a corporate level. The Fashion Technology Group (FTG), set up by the engineer Kentaro Kawasaki in 1976–7, was a collaborative venture among experts from various textile, apparel, and fashion companies. Kawasaki worked for Chori, a small trading company that specialized in silk and artificial fibers. He saw the need to develop a deeper understanding of consumer expectations, and, as an engineer, he sought to analyze and predict consumer desires in a scientific way. FTG’s fashion forecasting activities were mainly driven by technology—by computers, statistical sampling, and mathematical models—much less than by developments in the market, yet they aimed to help companies understand the market. The technology thread continued with the advent of the World Wide Web. As the New Millennium approached, Julian and Marc Worth founded the Worth Global Style Network (WGSN), an online London-based trend-forecasting service that targeted the global fashion industry. With WGSN, the desktop computer with an Internet connection began to act as a window onto the world of fashion futures, providing an immediacy not available in paper trend books and color cards that had to be prepared weeks in advance, printed, and then mailed to the customers. In 2005, the Worth brothers sold WGSN for a small fortune to EMAP (East Midland Allied Press), a British media corporation now listed on the London Stock Exchange as Ascential. Trend forecasting, while still a relatively smallscale business, has attracted the attention of big business. WGSN, and its major competitor, Stylesight, Inc., took advantage of digital technology to develop a broader customer base, and digitalization in turn began to reshape the way forecasts were conceived and presented.4 This process is still going on. As one of Ascential’s brands, WGSN today is part of a global business-to-business information company with interests in exhibitions, festivals, and information services.5

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What the fashion forecasters did The fashion and color forecasters featured in this book were embroiled in the cultural contexts and business systems of their times, and, as such, they developed and applied forecasting methods that were appropriate for particular periods, places, products, and markets. Their activities can be divided into four major categories: (1) reporting; (2) predicting; (3) presenting; and (4) compiling. Some of these activities overlapped, and some of the individuals and entities engaged in more than one of these undertakings. This book starts and ends with two fashion plates from a 1678 issue of the French magazine Le Mercure galant (Figures 1.5 and 14.2). These fashion plates were geared toward ladies and gentlemen of fashion, and provided those consumers with visual tips on how to present the best appearance. No one knows why the publishers of Le Mercure galant decided to include fashion plates, or how they came to determine that these particular costumes were de rigueur. Most likely the magazine was reporting on trendy styles that someone of good taste and influence had praised. Certainly, these plates were used as marketing tools, giving details where future consumers of fashionable clothes could acquire the newest designs.6 Fashion plates had elements of prediction imbued in them. By showing the new outfits to readers, the fashion plates planted suggestions and, to one degree or another, probably became self-fulfilling prophecies. Fashion reporting continued to be an important responsibility for the forecaster well into modern times. Margaret Hayden Rorke digested long letters and cryptic cablegrams from Paris on the new French colors, and, using a brief newsletter called the Broadcast, she reported this information to the TCCA’s members. In a similar vein, Tobé Coller Davis collected information on the Paris haute couture collections and interpreted these developments for American retailers who subscribed to the Fashion Report from Tobé. Her subscribers found it helpful to receive Paris news before illustrations of French costumes appeared in the popular magazines and before the imports and spin-offs hit the show windows of the swank Fifth Avenue stores that were generally acknowledged to be the leaders in American retailing. Through their reporting function, these early color and fashion forecasters performed a useful service, passing on business information to other businesses with speed and accuracy. The forecaster’s job became more of a challenge when he or she ventured into bona fide prediction. The imported color cards from J. Claude Frères & cie and similar export services were guides to the newest hues, but, like early modern fashion plates, they merely suggested how the future might look if everyone followed. Some of the first real forecasts for the textile and apparel industries were created by Rorke at the TCCA. She expressly designed color cards that predicted the new color trends for the upcoming style seasons, either spring/summer or autumn/winter. It was impossible to force subscribers to adhere to these forecasts, but those who paid a fee to belong to the TCCA saw the benefits to cooperation and collaboration. The yellow of the straw would finally match the yellow of the ribbon. Not only would the hat look good, but the waste associated with mismatched hues would be avoided. Fashion prediction was taken to another level in the postwar era when a new generation of forecasters emerged out of the Swinging Sixties in London. The young entrepreneurs at IM International developed an eye for sizing up fashions on the streets, boutiques, clubs,

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FIGURE 14.2  Fashion plate from Le Mercure galant (1678). Courtesy Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Classification mark 807157.

and beaches, and combined these observations with the judicious analysis of cutting-edge fashions that resonated with the youthful consumer. The scouts at IM International learned to spot emerging trends, and introduced the idea of advance trend prediction in their published

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monthly reports to subscribers. They not only described, sketched, and photographed the new collections in Paris, London, and Milan, but they suggested that such-and-such a mode would gain currency with a certain group of consumers and develop into a major trend with that market segment. This approach, although based on observation, made forecasting seem more akin to market research, and superseded the more reportorial approach of the early twentieth century. The idea that major styles and colors could be predicted well in advance sometimes subjected fashion forecasters to ridicule. Their experience with naysayers paralleled that of the early-twentieth-century economic forecasters such as Roger Babson who received his share of negative press. The fashion forecasters struggled with the popular perception that style and color prediction was nothing but hocus-pocus, and some handled the criticism with a good deal of aplomb. In June 1975, the Interstoff Report Spring 76, published by Nigel French Enterprises, Ltd, tackled the soothsayer image head-on. A two-page sketch of “Gypsy” styles showed young women in flowing bohemian skirts, shawls, kerchiefs, and peasant blouses, with the model in the foreground holding a crystal ball (Figure 14.3). The

FIGURE 14.3  Nigel French Enterprises referenced the idea that fashion forecasters were fortune-tellers in this sketch of pretty gypsy dresses. Source: Interstoff Report Spring 76 with Womenswear and Menswear Styling Directions Spring 76 (London: Nigel French Enterprises, Ltd, June 1975). Courtesy of Nigel French and Fashion Institute of Technology|SUNY, Gladys Marcus Library.

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gypsy theme provided Nigel French Enterprises with the opportunity to have a little fun, playing on the fact that forecasters were often associated with crystal balls.7 The presentation of fashion forecasts depends very much on the technology that is available at the moment. After the development of the printing press, printed images became the perfect instrument to diffuse information about the latest trends among the citizenry in Europe’s fast-growing cities. Fashion plates were also used to provide information to textile mills and dressmakers for business-to-business purposes.8 Traders began to use sample books to communicate the latest structure and color of the fabrics to buyers and sellers. To this very day, expensive trend books, or whatever fancy name they may have, are used to provide direction to fashion designers, apparel makers, and retailers. At the beginning of the 1980s, fashion fabric fairs like Interstoff and Première Vision began to present the latest trends in a more experiential way. In Paris at Première Vision, Nelly Rodi and Li Edelkoort began to create extravagant fashion forecasts; the latter’s innovative audiovisual trend presentations would become famous around the world. Simultaneously, Interstoff in Frankfurt was putting more emphasis on fashion and color forecasting. Trend forums and dedicated spaces were set up at Interstoff to display the forecasts provided by important trend agencies like Promostyl, Carlin, the Dutch Fashion Institute, and later Ornella Bignami’s firm, Elementi Moda. New halls were introduced for showing the latest fabric trends on catwalks and via expensive installations and displays. However, the established way of conveying information did not disappear. Visitors to both PV and Interstoff would still receive printed paper summaries of the fashion and color forecasts. The shift to the digital age came before and just after the New Millennium. WGSN and Stylesight completely revolutionized the presentation format when they began to provide trend information via the Web. Compiling is the fourth major task. Hunting and gathering have always been at the core of the fashion forecaster’s job. Victor Jean-Claude, after all, combed the workshops of Paris for discarded pieces of cloth that he could turn into stylish fashion reports from the world’s fashion capital. The digital age has put a wealth of information at everyone’s fingertips, and many fashion professionals appreciate the immediacy of receiving style reports via the Web. When WGSN and Stylesight pioneered the use of digital media, they opened a Pandora’s box. The use of the Web as tool for disseminating forecasts introduced the problem of information overload combined with the lack of tactile experience. All of these activities—reporting, predicting, presenting, and compiling—are part and parcel of the fashion forecaster’s larger remit to interpret the broader culture and make educated guesses on new directions. Like the Trend Forecaster Barbie Doll, their main orientation is the “global business arena” and its relentless drive to ensure the perpetuation of consumer society into the future. Lacking the fortune-teller’s crystal ball, however, the fashion forecasters have necessarily looked elsewhere for clues about the future. The past, rich with patterns of cultural change, is one of the most helpful guides for fashion forecasters. In many ways, these future-oriented professionals are not unlike historians, who look broadly through the past to delineate and explain patterns of change. But while fashion forecasters use the past to speculate about the future, we as fashion business historians draw on the past to develop a deeper understanding of human behavior as it relates to the evolution of capitalism and the fashion system.

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In conclusion This anthology has demonstrated that fashion prediction and color forecasting have a long and complex history. That history has evolved in response to and in tandem with technological innovations, new market conditions, and changes to the supply chain. It is a history that is largely hidden, generally unseen by consumers and unexplored by fashion studies researchers. But the work of forecasting professionals clearly drives fashion, or at least determines the direction in which it moves, sometimes as a prediction, sometimes as a trend-setting activity, and possibly also as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Clearly, fashion is not a spontaneous process; it is a complex social and cultural phenomenon that is directly influenced by tastemakers, among them the fashion forecasters. This book has highlighted important points about the business of fashion forecasting within the fashion system. The messages of fashion forecasters on colors, materials, shapes, and styles can be contradictory, vague, and open to multiple interpretations. Nevertheless, fashion prediction is not a surreptitious business that colludes against humanity’s freedom of choice and taste. Although it is largely invisible to consumers, this intermediary businessto-business activity helps to lower risks for manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, and other actors in the global fashion system. The demand for fashion forecasts has increased tremendously in the last fifty years and has moved far beyond the fashion and apparel business, just as fashion has penetrated nearly all industrial and service sectors in the global economy. As historians, we are always skeptical to act as futurists, because we know on the basis of long-term cultural developments that contingency can change the course of history, often unexpectedly. Nevertheless, by exploring the hidden history of color and fashion prediction, we have observed the growth of one segment of the forecasting business, which includes social scientists concerned to anticipate population trends and mathematical statisticians whose complex models predict the up-and-downs of the stock market. Within fashion, the business of trend forecasting is constantly evolving and transforming itself through the interventions of new actors, and it is likely to remain a vital part of the production system as long as volatile free market economies exist and consumers take pleasure in changing styles.

Notes 1 Mattel, Inc., “The Barbie Collection,” accessed May 1, 2017, http://www.

thebarbiecollection.com/more-fashion-dolls/trend-forecaster-barbie-doll-22833, and Mattel, Inc., “The Barbie Story,” accessed May 1, 2017, http://web.archive.org/ web/20071007161211/http://www.barbiecollector.com/collecting/story.aso.

2 Annual Report, 49 (Messe Frankfurt GmbH, 2015); Trade Fairs, Congresses and Events (Messe Frankfurt GmbH, October 2016), 5.

3 GL Events, “GL Events Strengthens Its Stake in Première Vision,” 2010, accessed May 12, 2017, http://www.gl-events.com/gl-events-strengthens-its-stake-in-premierevision.

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4 Emma Barnett, “Trend-spotting is the New £36bn Growth Business,” Telegraph, May 1, 2011, accessed May 12, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/ mediatechnologyandtelecoms/8482964/Trend-spotting-is-the-new-36bn-growthbusiness.html.

5 “About Ascential plc,” accessed June 3, 2017, https://www.ascential.com/~/media/ Files/A/Ascential-V2/press-release/heritage-brands-01-06-17.pdf.

6 April Calahan and Karen Trivette Cannell, Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 3.

7 Nigel French Enterprises, Ltd, Interstoff Report Spring 76 with Womenswear and

Menswear Styling Directions Spring 76 (London: Nigel French Enterprises, Ltd, June 1975), in Forecasting Collection, Gladys Marcus Library, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.

8 Ibid., 4.

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INDEX

Note: Brands and businesses are given with first names first; italics indicate an illustration. A. Cardinet & cie (Adeline Cardinet) 46 Abercrombie & Fitch 25 Abrams, Mark 112–13 Acne Jeans 228 acrylic fibers 17, 100, 142, 145. See also synthetic fibers Adachi, Masahiko 155 Adastria Holdings 160 Adkins & Rice 38 Adolphe Schloss Fils & cie 46 Albini 197 Alexon 109 Alland, Micheline 137 Amelia Earhart Sportswear 71–2 American Merchandising Corporation (AMC) 102, 103–4, 107, 117–18, 121 Anderson, Hilding 76 Aoki Holdings 160 Aoyama 160 Apparel and Fashion Industries Association 107 Arcadia Group 238 Ariel 109 Armani, Giorgio 125, 198–9, 244 Army and Navy Co-Operative Society 53 Arnaud, Michel 92 Arnodin, Maïmé 17, 116, 133, 138 artificial fibers 16, 55, 152–4, 155–6, 158, 162. See also man-made fibers; rayon fibers Asahi Kasei 152–3, 155–6, 158 Ascential 257 Associated Apparel Buyers 22 Atlas Buying Corporation (ABC) 102

B. Altman 22, 40, 44, 50, 66 Babson, Roger B. 42, 260 Baby Boomers (definition) 97 Barry, John 92 Bates, John 110 Bazaar 101 BCC. See British Colour Council The Beatles 97, 107, 110 Beckmans College of Design, Sweden 229 Bedwell, Bettina 46–7, 117 Beecroft, Vanessa 198 Bellarian, Linda 92 Benan, Umit 201 Benetton 159, 162 Bernays, Edward L. 43, 75, 80 Betty Jackson 236 Biba 120 Biennale di Firenze 197 Bignami, Ornella 17, 20, 141–7, 142, 168, 178–83, 254, 261 Bilbille & cie 1, 2–3, 12, 39, 116 Birren, Faber 91 Bis, Dorothée 120 Bloomingdale’s 17, 22, 136 The Blum Store 68 BMW 25 Bob Mackie 253 Bobbie Brooks 22, 118 Bober, Frank 235–6, 241 Bobergh, Otto Gustav 12 Bode, Frederick 39, 44 Bond, Cay 223 Bonner, Paul Hyde 45 Bonnie Doon 124 Botany Worsted Mills 42

Bradford Dyers’ Association 53 Branzi, Andrea 143 Brioni 198 British Celanese 55 British Colour Council Ltd (BCC) 14, 35–7, 51, 53–6, 54, 58, 117, 215 Broadcast 48, 49, 50–1, 58, 215, 258 Broadway-Hale Stores 22 Bulgari 25 Bundeskammer fűr gewerbliche Wirtschaft 178 Burberrys 107 Burlington Industries 118 Bus Stop 120 Butterick Company 107, 108 C&A Modes 25, 110, 117 Cacharel 120 Calvin Klein 26, 118 Cardin, Pierre 136 Carlin, Fred 15, 138, 174, 177, 223–4, 255, 261 Carlisle’s 90 Carnaby Street 90, 97, 101, 110, 112–13 Carnegie, Hattie 63 Case, Pomeroy & Company 76 Cashin, Bonnie 109, 113, 117 Castillo, Antonio Canovas del 221 Centro di Firenze per la Moda Italiana (CFMI) 191, 196–7, 199 Chambre syndicale de la confection & de la couture 39, 47 Chambre syndicale de la couture Parisienne 219 Chambre syndicale des fleurs et plumes 39 Chambre syndicale des teinturiers 35 Chanel, Gabrielle “Coco” 1, 44 Charles A. Stevens 68 Chase, Edna Woolman 73 Châtillon 142 Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company 42, 43, 56, 58, 69, 254 Chinese Sub-Council of the Textile Industry (CCPIT) 180–1 Chori Co. Ltd 18–20, 27, 154–9, 254, 257 Chow, Kai 181 CIM. See Comité de coordination des industries de la mode Clark, Ossie 120

CMT Enterprises 235 Coburn, Julia. See Tobé-Coburn School for Fashion Careers Coca-Cola 17, 100 Cohama 256 Color Association of America (CAUS) 58 color cards 1, 5–6, 11, 13–14, 19, 24–5, 28, 36, 39–40, 40–1, 44, 48, 49, 50–1, 54–5, 54, 90, 134–7, 139, 142–4, 178, 180, 186, 215, 218, 244, 254, 257–8. See also Textile Color Card Association of the United States Color Marketing Group 15, 59 Comitato Moda 219 Comité de coordination des industries de la mode (CIM) 16–17, 135–7, 174, 219, 255 Comité Français de la couleur 15 Comité international de mode 219 Concord Fabrics 118 Condé Nast 91 Confindustria (General Confederation of Italian Industry) 199 cotton 11, 14–15, 17, 51, 53–4, 58, 135–6, 150–3, 178, 182, 197, 219 Cotton Service Bűro 178 Cotton-Textile Institute 14–15 Courrèges, André 110, 118, 135–8 Courtaulds 53, 55 Creange, Henri A. 43–5, 56, 58, 69, 76, 113, 124 Cummings, Eileen 75 Daimaru 153 Daks 153 Dalmassy, Alice Chavannes de 221 D’Alroy, Marceline 42 Danish Association of the Clothing Industry 178 Davis, Tobé Collier. See Tobé Collier Davis Dayton Company 110 Dean, Marjorie 81 Debenhams 21 Design Station 243 Dichter, Ernest 113–15 Diesbach, Danièlle 17, 138 Diesbach, Sébastien de 17, 178 Dior, Christian 77, 109, 153, 253

INDEX

269

Directions Trend Committee 181 Disney 239 Doneger, Abraham “Abbey” 89, 94 Doneger Group 26, 81, 89–95, 93, 254 Dorothy Perkins 112 Doucet, Jacques 12 Drapery Trust 53 Dupasquier, Bernard 137 DuPont 17, 18, 20, 113 Dutch East India Company. See Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie Dutch Fashion Institute (Nederlands Mode Institute) 176, 178, 261 E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. See DuPont Earl, Harley J. 42 East Midland Allied Press (EMAP) 244, 257 Eastman Chemical Company 118 Ebury, Lord 53–4 Echo 92 École nationale supérieure des arts et industries textiles (ENSAIT) 135 Edelkoort, Lidewij 17, 24–5, 27, 135, 137, 172, 174, 176, 187, 223, 227, 244, 261 Elementi Moda 141–2, 144–5, 168, 178, 261 Elizabeth Arden 68 Engsheden, Pär 229 ePitti 204–5 Erhard, Ludwig 169–70 Eugene Gilbert Research Company 100 European Economic Community 218 European Free Trade Association 218 La Fabrique: École des métiers de la mode et de la decoration 133 Facebook 227, 247 Fairchild Publications and Seminars 75–6 Fashion Group of Great Britain 55 Fashion Group International 68 Fashion House Group of London 107 Fashion Institute of Technology 15, 74, 76, 117 fashion magazines 8–9, 13–15, 22, 25, 44, 46, 48, 73, 99, 100, 110, 112, 120,

270

INDEX

149–50, 191–2, 194, 196, 198, 215, 217, 221, 226–7, 254, 258 Fashion Report from Tobé 63, 64–5, 70, 71–2, 76–7, 78, 79, 81 The Fashion Service (TFS) 90, 92–4, 93 Fashion Technology Group (FTG) 155–6, 160, 162, 257 fast fashion (definition) 246 Fast Retailing 160–1 Fayolle, Denise 17, 116, 133–4, 138 feathers 40, 66, 146–7 Feathers 120 Federated Department Stores 102, 118 Fédération de la soie 35, 36 Fédération des industries du vêtement féminin 109 Fiorucci, Elio 142–4 Flurscheim, Herman A. 67 Foale & Tuffin 110 Fontana, Sorelle 196 Ford Motor Company 24, 42 Forstmann & Huffmann Company 40 Fortnum & Mason 90, 105 Frank, Gűnther “Gunnar” 176 Franklin Simon & Company 67 French Fashion Week 109 Frendberg, Elin 230 Fukami, Kiyo 155 Fuld, Felix 67–8 Furuse, Kazuhisia 155 Gage Brothers & Company 40 Ganz, Leo 169 The Gap 159–60 Gaubert, Jean-Claude 109 Gaunson 112 General Motors Corporation (GM) 3, 42, 58, 124, 150, 254 German Fashion Institute (Deutsche Mode Institut) 176, 178 Get Dressed 181 Gibbs, Clayton E. 75, 81 Giertz-Mårtenson, Ingrid 221, 229 Gilman, Edith 81 Gimbel’s 109 Giorgini, Giovanni Battista 195–6, 198 GL Events 257 Glasgow School of Art 243 Glastonbury 240

Global Color Research 181 Gloucestershire College of Art and Design 236 Godley, Edwin A. 76 Gold, Joseph 110 Goldschmidt-Rothschild, Benedikt von 169 Goldsmith’s College School of Art 101 Goodwood Revival 240 Google 27 Gudule 120 Gunze 160 H&M 139, 162, 221–3, 227–30, 228, 246 Hafner, Katherine 81 Hagley Museum and Library 2–3, 14, 18, 36, 40–1, 45, 47, 48–9 Halston 17 Hamasan Seishoku 155 Hammond, Fay 196 Harrods 101, 118 Hartnell, Norman 109 Harvard Business School 79–80 Harwood, Joan 81 Hawes, Elizabeth 63 Head, Edith 68 Heatseal 244 Hechter, Daniel 114, 120 Heimtextile 187 Hennes 221–2 Henry Doneger Associates. See Doneger Group Here & There 89, 138, 181 Hickson’s 66 Hjördis Agustsdottir 229 Hodgkinson, Harold D. 80 Holligan, Marjorie 45 Hong Kong Design Institute 236 Hoover, Herbert 42 Hope, Filippa K. 228 Horn, Marilyn J. 156 House and Garden Color Program 91 100% Design 240 IBM 27 IKEA 25 IM International 16, 26, 90–2, 117–26, 119, 121, 123, 125, 244, 258–9 Imperial Chemical Industries 219

Inez and Vinoodh 198 Ingram, John Michael 109 Inoue, Sachiko 181 Institute for Motivational Research 113 Institute Français de la mode (IFM) 133 Instituto Español de la Moda 178 International Institute for Cotton 135, 219 International Wool Secretariat (IWS) 18, 19, 117, 134, 178, 219, 244, 254 Interstoff 20, 24, 142, 167–87, 171–2, 175, 176–7, 179, 184, 186, 254–5, 256, 257, 260–1, 260 Interstoff Asia 168, 180–1 Intertextile 141, 168, 181 Itokin 158 Iwanaka Keori 155 Iwanaka, Shima 155 Izquierdo, Mitzou 109 J. C. Penney Company 105, 107, 109, 124 J. Claude Frères & cie 1, 2, 11–13, 37, 47, 150, 254, 258, 261 Jackson, Holbrook 35, 37, 47, 51 Japanese Research Center on Textile Economics 153 Japanese Science and Technology Agency 154 Jean-Claude, Victor 11–12, 109, 150, 253, 261 Jenkins, Jo-Ann 90–1 Jeremiah Rotherham & Company 116 Jordan Marsh Company 22, 68, 98, 99 Just Looking 120 Kanebo 153 Kashiyama Onward 158–60 Kawasaki, Kentaro 20, 27, 149–62, 157, 257 Kennedy, Jacqueline 105, 114, 197 Kennedy, President John F. 81 Kenzas 227 Kenzo Takada 149 Keukert, Stephanie 185 Kewenter, Ewa 225 Kiguchi, Toyotsura 155 Klein, Anne 91, 118 Knight, Anne 90 knitwear 19, 23, 110, 111, 115, 120, 136, 142–5, 147, 159, 197, 238, 244

INDEX

271

Koperativa Förbundet (KF) 223 Krizia 197 Kurashiki 152 Kurazawa, Dio 246 Kyoto Bunkyo Junior College 154 L. Bamberger and Company 67–8, 75 L. Harris (Harella) Limited 112 Lacks, Felix 66 Lacoste 153 Lacroix, Christian 93 Lane Crawford 239 Lanificio dell’ Olivo 144 Lanvin (and Lanvin-Castillo) 221 Lasersohn-Doneger 89 Lau, Virginia 236, 238 leather 35, 38, 50, 53, 57, 58, 101, 109–10, 214–15, 216, 217–18, 218, 221, 236, 253, 255 Leedy, Harold J. 114–15 Lelong, Lucian 46, 48, 65 Leonard Paris 153 Lerner Shops (now New York & Company) 102 Levi Strauss 25, 246 Liberty’s 24 Lichtenstein, Roy 143 The Limited 102 Littlewoods 112 London College of Fashion 236 London Design Festival 240 London Fashion Week 107 London Presents 107 Lord & Taylor 40, 50, 98, 100, 107, 118 Lord John 110 L’Oréal 17, 25 Löveborg, Liselotte 228 Lowenstein Fabrics 118 Lufthansa 25 LVMH 3, 25 Macnab, Catriona 17, 219, 243–9, 249 Macy’s. See R. H. Macy & Company Mademoiselle, Bahamas 236 Mafia (Maïmé Arnodin Fayolle International Associés) 17, 116, 133–4, 138, 143, 221, 254–5 MAIT (Mostra Campionaria della Maglieria) 197

272

INDEX

man-made fibers 15, 56, 152, 219. See also rayon fibers Marcus, Neiman 69–70 Marcus, Stanley 75, 81 Marks and Spencer Ltd (M&S) 101, 113, 117, 159 Marshall & Aston, Ltd 51, 52 Marshall Field 66, 94, 98 Marshall Plan 77, 107, 196–7 Märthaskolan 219, 220 Martorana, Marybeth 81 Mattel, Inc. 118, 253 Maurer, Ingrid 168, 176 Max Mara 144 May Company 22, 110, 118 May Department Stores International 22 McCardell, Claire 63 McNair, Archie 101 McNaughton, Mille 223 Meinhard-Commercial Corporation 115 Men’s Apparel Guild in California (MAGIC) 101 Le Mercure galant 9, 10, 258, 259 Merret, Rob 181 Messe Frankfurt GmbH 20, 141–2, 142, 168–71, 174–5, 180–7, 236, 254–7 Messe Frankfurt HK Ltd (Messe Frankfurt Hong Kong ) 180–1 Messe Leipzig 170 Metropolitan Museum of Art 50 Metzler, Albert von 169 Microsoft 25 Mikawa Textile Center 153 millinery 13, 37, 38, 39, 42, 45, 255 Missoni 197 Mitsukoshi 153 Modeurop 217–18, 218, 254 Molyneux, Edward H. 46, 65 Monsanto Chemical Company 118 Montefibre 142–4 Moody’s Investors Service 7 Morton, Digby 107 Moss, Martin 21–2 Mothercare 236 Napoleone, Raffaello 199, 201, 204 National Cloak and Suit Company 66 National Committee of Business and Professional Men and Women, USA 81

National Education Association, Washington 100 National Museum of Stockholm 217, 228 National Ribbon Company 40 National Theatre, London 236 Neff, Claude-Helene 134 Neiman-Marcus Company 73. See also Marcus, Neiman NellyRodi. See Rodi, Nelly Nelson, D. M. 76 Nelson, Roger 107 Newcomb, Florence 94 Newton, Helmut 176, 177 Nextatlas 204 Nigel French Enterprises 16, 21–4, 23, 26, 91, 117–18, 243, 254, 260–1, 260 Nordic Fashion Council (Nordiska Moderådet, or NMR) 216–17, 218 Nordiska Kompaniet (NK) 219 Noten, Dries van 199 Nottingham School of Art (now Nottingham Trent University) 54, 236 nylon fibers 17, 18, 20, 112, 154. See also synthetic fibers online tools and services 3, 5, 8, 24–8, 70, 81, 90, 93, 191, 194, 199, 201–3, 204–5, 223–4, 227, 230–1, 235–41, 243–8, 253, 257, 261 Organization of the German Car Industry 170 Osaka Cotton Spinning Company 151 Osaka Joint Spinning 151–2 Otahara, Akihito 155 Pacific Mills 7 Pacific Trail Sportswear 115 Packard, Vance 113 Pantone 3, 15 Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry 133 Parrish, Amos 73, 75–6, 79 Patou, Jean 46 Paul Smith 236 Pawsons and Leaf 116–17 Peclers, Dominique 17, 138, 145, 221, 223–4, 243, 255 Peclers Paris. See Peclers, Dominique

Pekonen, Aili 215, 216 Pelgram and Meyer 40 Persson, Erling 223 Peters, Michael 182–4 Pitti Immagine 191, 195–7, 201, 203–5 Pitti Uomo 20, 191–205, 199, 201–3, 254 Platt Brothers & Company 151 Plunket Greene, Alexander 101–2, 105, 107 Poiret, Paul 12 Polimoda 197 polyester fibers 17, 141–2, 145. See also synthetic fibers Prada 25 Première Vision (PV) 6, 20, 21, 24, 59, 135, 137, 141, 167–8, 172, 174, 176, 178, 181–7, 195, 201, 240, 244, 255–7, 261 Press Merchandizing Service 79 Primark 1, 240 Printemps 17, 116, 133, 138, 221 Prisunic 17, 116, 133–5 Proctor & Gamble 25 Promostyl 15–17, 20, 24, 138, 176–9, 183, 221, 223–4, 230, 255, 261 Pucci, Emilio 196 Pugh, Gareth 198 Puglisi, Fausto 198 Quant, Mary 16, 22, 97, 101–2, 105–10, 108, 112–14, 120, 124 Quinn, Bradley 8, 27 R3iLab 133 Ralph Lauren and Polo Ralph Lauren 3, 22, 26, 91, 118, 126, 235 Rayon and Silk Association 55 rayon fibers 15, 38, 42, 51, 53, 55, 152–4. See also artificial fibers; man-made fibers Redfern, John 12 Reldan-Digby Morton 107 Renown 158 Reville Ltd 45, 53 R. H. Macy & Company 15, 17, 22, 66, 71–2, 76, 110, 118 Rhodiatoce 141–2, 254 ribbon 28, 35, 39–40, 258 Ricerca & Comunicazione 185

INDEX

273

Richards, Arthur 235 Rist, Pipilotti 198 Rodi, Nelly 16–17, 26–7, 133–9, 134, 145, 174, 178, 181, 183, 223–4, 226, 244, 254–5, 261 Rolling Stones 97 Roosevelt, Eleanor 49, 68 Rorke, Margaret Hayden 13–14, 27, 40, 44–58, 57, 74, 76, 98, 113, 124, 126, 215, 253, 258 Roshco, Bernard 74, 77 Royal College of Art 107, 243, 245 Royal Opera House 236 Rubenstein, Daniel 184–5 Rudd, Leigh 16–17, 91–2, 117–26, 119 Rykiel, Sonia 120 S. I. Tex (Milan) 184 Saint Laurent, Yves 77, 109, 136 Saks Fifth Avenue 75, 118 Sankyo Seiko 153 Sanyo Shokai 158 Sassoon, Vidal 110 Scherpe, Michael 185 Schiaparelli, Elsa 46 de Schmidt, Maike, 142 Schwerin, Marg von 220 Scott, Ken 197 S. D. Leidesdorf & Company 76 Sears, Roebuck & Company 76, 102 Selfridges 45, 98, 118 shade cards. See color cards Shaver, Dorothy 98 Shimamura 160 Shinmura, Hiroyuki 155 Shiseido 146 Sidney Blumenthal & Company 45 Siemens 17 silk 3, 11, 11, 13, 17, 20, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 44–6, 48, 50, 53–6, 58, 101, 124, 142, 146, 150–4, 169, 181–2, 257 Simmel, Georg 4–5 Simon, Franklin 67 Simons, Raf 198, 202, 202 Simplicity 110 Snow, Carmel 73 Société de teinture & d’apprêt 14, 14, 35 Society of Fiber Science and Technology Japan 154

274

INDEX

Sombart, Werner 5, 9, 27 South by Southwest 240 Southcombe Brothers, Ltd 236 spinning 142, 144, 151–3, 161 Stehli Silk Corporation 45 Steinberg and Sons 109 Steinwartz, Rolf 182 Stephen, John 16, 97, 110, 112, 114 Stern Brothers 68 Stiebel, Victor 55 Stockholm University 230 straw 58, 258 Stylesight Inc. 25, 235–41, 257, 261 sustainability 230, 245–7 Sven-Harrys Art Museum 228 swatches 1, 6, 9–11, 11, 13, 15, 24–6, 28, 45–8, 48, 50, 55, 69, 139, 168, 243, 253 Swedish Fashion Council (Svenska Moderådet, or SMR) 214, 222–3, 225, 230 Swedish Shoe Fashion Council (Skobranschrådet, or SBR, also known as Swedish Shoe Council) 214–15, 216, 217, 254 Symonds, Edward H. 53, 55–6 synthetic dyes 11, 14, 28, 38, 39, 150 synthetic fibers 17–18, 20, 58, 115, 135, 142, 237. See also acrylic fibers; nylon fibers; polyester fibers Tada, Atsuko 155–6 Takashimaya 153 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 42 TCCA. See Textile Color Card Association of the United States Techtextil 187 Teijin 152, 155–6 Tennis, Estelle 46–7, 50, 58 Textile Color Card Association of the United States (TCCA) 13–15, 37, 40, 40–1, 44–51, 48–9, 53, 55–8, 105, 215, 244, 255, 258 Textile Machinery Society of Japan 154–5 TexWorld 20, 184–5 TOBE 81 Tobé-Coburn School for Fashion Careers 14, 68, 117

Tobé Collier Davis (also Tobé Inc and Tobé Associates) 14, 63–81, 64–5, 71–2, 78, 89, 102, 105, 109, 116, 124, 174, 254, 258 Tokai Senko 155 Tokyo Institute of Technology 154 Tokyo Style 158 Tomiji, Masaaki 155 Topshop 238 Toray Industries 152–3, 155–6, 158, 160, 254 Towle, H. Ledyard 42, 45, 58, 98, 113, 124 Toyo Rayon 154 Toyobo 151–2 Tozawa, Shigeto 155 Tracy, Ellen 118 Traub Associates Europe 21 Trend Forecaster Barbie Doll 253, 261 Trend Table 20, 142, 168, 176, 179, 183–4, 186 Trend Union 17, 24, 26, 223–4, 226, 244 Trower, Valerie Wilson 25, 235–41, 237, 254 Trussardi 201 TSI Holdings 160 Udoff, Harold 102 Ungaro, Emanuel 90 UNIQLO 160–2, 161 University of Kyoto 154 US Department of Labor 100 Valentino 197 Vera Wang 253 Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) 10–11, 11, 27 Versace, Gianni 26, 118, 125, 198 Viannay, Marie-Christine 24, 26 Victor&Rolf 199 Victorie 109 Vincent-Ricard, Françoise 16, 138, 221 Vionnet, Madeleine 46, 66 VOC. See Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie Volka, Hélène 42 Wacoal Holdings 160 Walker, Q. F. 76

Wallis Shops 107 Walmart 244 Wanamaker, John 40, 98 Warhol, Andy 143 Waterman-Johns, Deb 181 weavers and weaving 11, 53, 135, 144, 146, 150–2, 155–6, 161, 186 Weinberg, Arthur 169 Weitz, John 117–18 Westinghouse Broadcasting Company 112 Westwood, Vivienne 199 Wilde, Helen 81 William Filene’s Sons Company 80, 98, 102 Wilson, Prime Minister Harold 110 Wilson, Robert F. 54–6, 58, 98 Winchester School of Art 236 Wintour, Anna 73 Wolfe, David 16–17, 26, 89–95, 93, 118–22, 119, 124, 126, 254 Women’s Wear Daily 14, 17, 45, 48, 50, 55, 70, 75, 90–1, 97, 100–1, 105, 109–10, 120, 134. See also Fairchild Publications wool 17–18, 19, 35, 42, 51, 53–5, 54, 101, 134–6, 154–5, 182, 244. See also International Wool Secretariat Woollands 21 Woolmark Company 244. See also International Wool Secretariat World 155–6, 158–60 Worth, Charles Frederick 12 Worth Global Style Network (WGSN) 25, 27, 219, 223–4, 227, 230, 235–6, 239, 241, 243–8, 257, 261 Worth, Julian and Marc 25, 244, 257 Yamagawa, Masanori 155 Yanai, Tadashi 160 Yardley of London 107, 110 Young International Designer Collections 109 Zara 1, 25, 150, 159, 162, 246 Zayre 110 Zuckerberg, Mark 247

INDEX

275