British artist Arthur Buxton boiled down the most prominent colors on the covers of Vogue magazine in the past 130 years from United States, United Kingdom, France, and Italy.
The pretty colors actually tell us something about the fashion magazine industry:
Using open-source sampling tools, Buxton located the five most prominent colors in each issue’s cover, then stacked them on top of each other to create a color sandwich. The sandwiches were then arranged into columns, with each vertical column representing a year of magazine covers, and each horizontal column representing a month. [...]
What do the charts tell us? Mostly, they just affirm some long-held stereotypes about fashion in different parts of the world. Note how the palettes of Italy and France are overall much darker than those of the United States and the UK, lending credence to the notion that “wearing color” in Paris and Milan means dressing in head-to-toe black. There is also a startling amount of white in U.S. Vogue, and not just before Labor Day.
Suzanne Labarre of Fast Company has the post: Link