The Wall Street Journal-20080111-How Clothes Make the Car- Fashion Gives Autos Cues on Hues
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How Clothes Make the Car; Fashion Gives Autos Cues on Hues
When the models wearing Betsey Johnson's spring/summer 2008 collection sashayed down the runway at New York Fashion Week in September, their sky-blue tulle skirts and cotton-candy-pink prom dresses were noted by sundry fashion editors, retail buyers, celebrities and photographers. Also in the audience: Jon Hall, Ford Motor Co.'s chief paint designer.
Clothing designers are currently working on fall 2008's fashions, but design teams at auto makers like Ford, General Motors Corp. and Volkswagen AG's Audi are tweaking the paint choices consumers will be reviewing for cars in 2011 and beyond. Companies are paying more attention to color because consumers are, and having the right -- or wrong -- color in stock can affect the bottom line.
On average, a new paint color takes about five years to develop and test, so the "Red Candy" hue, a red base with red-tinted gloss coat, and "Amber Gold," a deep metallic yellow, that will adorn Ford's redesigned F-150 pickup at next week's Detroit auto show have been in the works for a while.
"Just because you're three years further out doesn't mean that a trend you saw in fashion can't be interpreted into automotive," said Karen Surcina, color manager at DuPont Co., a major auto-paint supplier.
Runway season is "the time when we're actually trying to confirm our own design forecasts," Mr. Hall said. "But we're also looking for big trends of what collectively the fashion designers are doing, whether that's transparent overlays or more pastel colors or darker colors or whatever it might be." Mr. Hall attended about 10 shows in September, including those by Carolina Herrera and Helmut Lang. While the auto maker has kept tabs on other fashion shows, September was Ford's first excursion to New York's Bryant Park tents.
Brown emerged as a luxe stand-in for black in the early 2000s, when Valentino, Donna Karan, and Yves Saint Laurent, among others, showcased suits, ball gowns and knits in saturated chocolate, toffee and caramel shades; the color recently filtered into automotive preferences. In 2007, 25% of Buick Enclaves sold were painted "Cocoa Metallic," and BMW AG's 2009 Mini Cooper Clubman will soon hit the streets in "Hot Chocolate," a warm brown.
Designers are also seeing shades of orange. Since 2000, tangerine and persimmon have cropped up on Dries Van Noten coats, Prada silk blouses, Marc Jacobs suits and Chloe handbags. One automotive iteration of the orange trend is Ford's "Blazing Copper," which was offered on the 2007 Edge and Escape models. The hue sold on nearly 10% of Edge models in 2007 -- the typical rate for such niche colors is 5%.
Brown and orange are among the "major colors that you're seeing in our industry. Those are all relevant and viewable in fashion," said Chris Webb, lead creative designer for trend and exterior color at GM. "You're certainly seeing that correlation across the industries."
While consumer interest in the so-called core colors (white, silver, black, gray, blue and red) still dominates the majority of global sales, automotive designers are also under pressure to predict trend colors. A 1997 DuPont report found that 39% of consumers said they were likely to switch brands if they couldn't find the right car color.
"Today's consumer is much more color-savvy than they have been in the past," said Jane Harrington, manager of color styling at PPG Industries Inc., an automotive paint manufacturer. She noted that large appliances, like washing machines, have recently been offered in bright reds and blues: "People are willing to make color purchases of products that were beige and brown in the past."
Auto makers and paint manufacturers conduct their own research and consult trend forecasting companies like Trend Union, Color Marketing Group and Worth Global Style Network, which release seasonal palettes identifying emerging trends in runway, interior design, product design and graphics.
Toyota Motor Corp.'s color manager, Christine Dickey, oversees paint development for the Scion brand. Ms. Dickey doesn't typically follow runway trends because she considers fashion "too transitory"; she prefers to consult furniture and high-end hospitality trade shows.
But in developing colors for Scion, which launched in 2003 and targeted an under-35-year-old male buyer, Ms. Dickey took a different tack.
Scion's core palette is intentionally dark, especially compared with other small-car youth brands. "It's a fallacy that young people like bright colors," Ms. Dickey said. Scion's marketing team looked to color trends in sports gear and surf- and snowboards. They also looked to their demographic's color preferences in clothing, she said.
Translating an aubergine silk dress into a vehicle paint isn't easy or cheap. GM tests and develops colors for five years before releasing them to consumers and the process, from concept through testing, is estimated to cost $250,000 per color. GM introduces 22 new colors each year.
But merely copying the same color seen on runways and tossing it onto a car will never work, Mr. Webb at GM said. "For example, purple has emerged in all areas of product design," he said. "But for us, instead of being chromatic like it's shown in fashion, we're doing very dark, very sinister versions for our performance vehicles. Or we're doing very silvery-light versions."
Despite the race to identify and cultivate niche colors, global color preferences stay within a narrow range of white, silver and black. More than half of the vehicles sold in North America in 2007 were in those colors, according to reports by DuPont and PPG.
White is a "palette cleanser" that often rises in popularity as trend colors shift. Moreover, white "tricoats" -- three different coats of paint -- represent luxury, Ms. Surcina said.
But just as blue's spectrum runs from cerulean to midnight, black and white shades can vary by translucency, contrast or sparkle. This year, up to 45% of Ford's color lineup will be new, including the first update of basic black and white in nearly 15 years. Named to connote both high-fashion and glamorous lifestyles, Ford's 2009 models will come in "Tuxedo Black," a deep black with glass prism flakes, and "White Suede," a soft eggshell.
