IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/buhirw/v80y2006i03p485-528_03.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Styling Synthetics: DuPont's Marketing of Fabrics and Fashions in Postwar America

Author

Listed:
  • Lee Blaszczyk, Regina

Abstract

Scholars have studied innovation from various perspectives, but few have considered the interaction between big business and the fashion marketplace. This study examines the efforts of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company to create and expand the American synthetic-fibers market after World War II. DuPont described this work as transforming the “relatively simple ‘art’ of selling fabric†into the “complicated ‘science’ of marketing.†This process involved developing in-house marketing expertise and reaching out to sources as disparate as American fabric designers, Parisian couturiers, Seventh Avenue manufacturers, southern textile giants, and mass-market retailers. To promote the “wonders†of synthetic fibers, DuPont relied on “fashion intermediaries†to determine what customers wanted and how its fibers could meet those needs. This study suggests that the mass-market success of DuPont's synthetic fibers owed as much to creative marketing, styling, and performance as it did to industrial research and organizational innovation.

Suggested Citation

  • Lee Blaszczyk, Regina, 2006. "Styling Synthetics: DuPont's Marketing of Fabrics and Fashions in Postwar America," Business History Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 80(3), pages 485-528, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:buhirw:v:80:y:2006:i:03:p:485-528_03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S000768050003587X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Amy Quark, 2015. "Agricultural commodity branding in the rise and decline of the US food regime: from product to place-based branding in the global cotton trade, 1955–2012," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 32(4), pages 777-793, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:buhirw:v:80:y:2006:i:03:p:485-528_03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/bhr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.