16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
From King Louis IX to the birth of couture: The surprising history of fashion forecasting
In 1999, the American toy company Mattel released a Trend Forecaster Barbie, as a limited-edition collectors' item.
She was dressed in a faux-leather swing coat, matching mini-skirt, 'sassy little camisole' and ankle-strap platform shoes. If there were some who thought this derivative, unimaginative or silly, well, they could join the ranks of trend debaters dating to Ancient Rome.
These vestments, 'while they cover a woman, at the same moment reveal her naked charms,' he said.
His censure had little effect on the rolls of reflective fabric making their way west along the Silk Road. But through history, monarchs, royalty and aristocrats have often dictated fashion trends, from the royal blue popularised during the reign of King Louis IX of France (r. 1226-1270) to the Princess Diana haircut (c. 1990s).
Many have done more than simply inspire imitation.
France's King Louis XIV, for instance, is credited with birthing modern fashion as an industry, and establishing Paris as the heart of it.
The country's longest-reigning monarch ruled for 72 years, from 1643 to 1715 (a reign helped along by the fact that he ascended the throne as a child, at the age of four). In that time, he boosted domestic textile and jewellery production, in a bid to reduce the country's reliance on expensive imports.
He enforced a strict dress code at court, by royal decree. He popularised elements of high fashion that, incredibly, live on, including red heels and diamond-studded coats.
It was during his reign that the royal historian Jean Donneau de Visé launched the magazine Le Mercure Galant, perhaps the earliest publication focused (at least partially) on trends in fashion. Founded in 1672, it described the clothes of the king and his royal court, discussing in depth the quality of craftsmanship, the merchants responsible, and the upper-class customers who patronised the same dressmakers.
It even included advertisements from merchants of apparel and accessories.
In 1678, the magazine featured two sketches side by side, of a man and a woman dressed in the latest styles. These are generally considered the earliest fashion plates ever published.
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There's a term for people like de Visé. They're called 'fashion intermediaries'.
Through modern history, such people have worked to help manufacturers and retailers understand consumer demand, and perhaps shape it.
Today he is considered the father of haute couture, not just for his dramatic designs, but for something so small yet so impactful that it changed how the industry worked.
In the 1850s, he began to sew tiny tags into his designs, bearing his name. This made him, essentially, the inventor of the 'fashion label'.
The House of Worth ended up catering to the who's who of Paris for decades. It lived on long after the death of its founder in 1895, and only shut in 1956. An attempt to revive it in the late 1990s, however, failed.
The market had moved on, and was too crowded by then.
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Back to 19th-century Paris, it was also here that colour-trend forecasting was born. (There really is a reason they call it the fashion capital of the world.)
As the business of synthetic dyes boomed, textile-makers needed help deciding what shades to pick. And so, in another evolution of the intermediary business, 'style bureaus' began to watch the market and issue seasonal 'shade cards'.
'Mills across the UK, Europe and North America anxiously awaited the arrival, by ship, of the new shade cards. They used the Paris cards to plan the next season's colour palette, whether they were a textile mill making silk fabrics or a milliner making ladies' hats or an apparel maker specialising in shirts and blouses,' says Regina Lee Blaszczyk, historian, professor emerita at University of Leeds, and co-author with Ben Wubs of The Fashion Forecasters: A Hidden History of Color and Trend Prediction (2018).
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The next turning point would come in 1920s New York, via a woman named Margaret Hayden Rorke. This suffragette and former stage actress created the tripartite system of colour forecasting that still guides consultancies today.
As managing director of the Textile Color Card Association (TCCA) and later the Color Association of the United States (CAUS), she divided trends into three categories: colour basics, seasonal colour forecasts, and occasional trend reports. The colours basic were hues predicted to be popular for textiles over a seven- to 10-year window. Seasonal colour cards were issued several times a year, for special application in areas such as millinery, leather and silk. Trend reports were issued as needed.
'If Rorke saw an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on King Tut's tomb or French art, she would issue a trend report on the colours that might be of interest to her clients,' Blaszczyk says.
She too drew on the latest trends from Paris, using two scouts: Bettina Bedwell, a fashion journalist for the Chicago Daily Tribune, and Adolphe Schloss, a commissionaire with access to haute couture shows and fashion houses.
They telegraphed reports to her, and shipped sketches, photos and swatches across the ocean, all of which helped her create an American palette for the eventual consumer that blended her association's predictions with cues from the fashion capital of the world.
This is likely what Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep) meant, in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, when she said, in her 'cerulean' monologue: 'You think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.'
It's interesting to think, isn't it, that the idea that something is 'so you' (for whatever reason – aesthetics, rebellion, youthful exuberance), is often just the last link in a network of decisions and calculations; an entire metric, in fact, with roots going back over 350 years?
