Colored Consumerism

http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article01071301.aspx

Colored Consumerism
After the Industrial Revolution the world found something new to mass-produce: color.

By Nathaniel Popkin

Blaszczyk, I sense, made the choice to tell her story chiefly through people because history so often obliterates the product designer, the middleman, or the bureaucrat. In a certain sense she believes this is the real history — and it involves all of us as consumers. Still, I would have preferred to have her frame some of the guiding moments and the tensions in a story that’s full of conflict — what revolution isn’t? — more clearly, particularly what she quietly calls “the uneasy marriage of standardization, free enterprise, and fashion.” This tension helps define our consumerist world and lies at the heart of the color revolution.