Who Decides the Color of the Season? How a Trade Show Called Première Vision Changed Fashion Culture

Abstract

In this chapter, Mary Lisa Gavenas investigates the widely acknowledged, but previously unexamined status of Première Vision, a French trade show, as the single greatest arbiter of color trends for fashion and allied industries. Tracing its growth from an ad hoc assemblage of 15 weavers in 1973 through its 2005 incorporation as Première Vision Pluriel, a powerful producer of trade fairs on four continents, Gavenas demonstrates how this insiders-only event upended conventions of fabric buying, fabric production, and trend forecasting, became a fixture on the fashion calendar, changed the role of the designer, and became a major force in the globalization of fashion.