Fashion Plates Design Set

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Women, 1790 – 1799, Plate 002.” Gift of Woodman Thompson. https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll12/id/3469

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Men's Wear 1790-1829, Plate 007.” Gift of Woodman Thompson. https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll12/id/2444 Calahan, April and, Karen Trivette Cannell, ed. Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Fashion plates are frequently used as primary source material for the study of historical fashions, although commentators warn that as they were high-end aspirational catalogues it should not be assumed that the majority of people dressed in the same way expressed by a plate. A more accurate way to use fashion plates for study is to treat them like a modern high-end fashion magazine or designer's shop window with only a few people wearing such luxury items. [2] History [ edit ]Publications took fashion plates a step further by utilizing a popular method called pochoir, a type of stenciling printing style that was “used to reproduce the work of renowned Art Deco illustrators, including George Barbier, Robert Bonfils, Paul Iribe, and Georges Lepape.” [1] A similar style of art can also be seen on the cover of twentieth century issues of the American magazine, Harper's Bazaar,usually with illustrations by the artist and designer, Erte (a personal favorite of mine). These illustrations step away from the traditional eighteenth century fashion plate by creating fantastical scenes in which to showcase the latest styles. The most prestigious early nineteenth-century British contribution to the art of the fashion plate was Heideloff's Gallery of Fashion, 30 aquatint plates, 1797-1801, published by subscription to an aristocratic clientele. Focused on fashions worn by anonymous noble ladies, it also included the creations of named dressmakers. With the aquatint plates of British popular venues crowded with fashionable men, women, and children, published by London tailor Benjamin Read between the 1820s and 1840s, the fashion plate was decisively democratized. Prints and full-scale patterns were sold through Read's establishments in London and New York, where American versions soon appeared. A spate of periodicals emerged in the 18th century, including a number aimed at women, and from 1759 the Lady's Magazine (1759-1763) became the first to record contemporary fashions with its ‘habits’ of the year. Another, longer-lived Lady's Magazine (1770-1832) followed with more frequent and regular plates from 1770 to show what society was wearing. Early plates were issued uncoloured, though may have been tinted by dressmakers to inspire their clients, but by 1790 those in the Lady’s Magazine were 'embellished’ with hand-colouring, and the practice of including regular coloured plates had begun. This collection is currently closed to researchers due to a major collections audit, in preparation for the Museum of London’s move to West Smithfield.

Costume is interesting because it is splendid, ridiculous, useful, pompous, dignified, sombre, gay, fantastic – because, in short, it is human. a b "Fashion Plates introduction - National Portrait Gallery". www.npg.org.uk . Retrieved 2021-03-18. Illustration of popular styles of clothing Fashion plate, 1860 V&A Museum no. E.267-1942 1942 fashion plate from Argentina.

Confronted by advances in printing and photographic technology and the easy availability of the conventional graphic image, in the early twentieth century the artistic avant-garde retreated to the craft technique of pochoir (stencil) printing and hand coloring, producing formal, modernist, faux naives fashion plates in exotic or romantic settings reminiscent of the early nineteenth century. The genre was pioneered by Paul Iribe for Poiret's 1909 collection in Les Robes de Paul Poiret, 1909, and by Georges LePape in Les Choses de Paul Poiret, 1911. Their work and others of the group, such as Charles Martin and George Barbier, was brought to a wider public by the publisher Lucien Vogel, who launched the elitist Gazette du Bon Ton in 1911, the precursor of several similar art and fashion magazines. The general public became aware of the style and technique through prestige advertising, such as Art Gout Beauté, 1920-1936, published by the textile firm Albert Godde Bedin. Payne, Blanche. "Some costumes of Yugoslavia". Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club, Vol. 41, 1957 a b Nevinson, John L. "Origin and Early History of the Fashion Plate" . Retrieved November 10, 2011. The dress and textile collection is complemented by related material in the social and working history, photograph and printed ephemera collections, and the museum library. These holdings include the Harry Matthews Collection of costume and fashion plates consisting of around 3,500 prints dating from the 16th century to 1829. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “1800-1866, Plate 079.”Gift of Leo Van Witsen. https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll12/id/11916

As April Calahan states in Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style,“the fashion plate was no longer about a line-for-line transcription of garments, as it had been for centuries, but about conveying a certain mood, spirit, or lifestyle.” Fashion plates no longer remained the only source of information on current fashion trends and so they became their own art form in addition to providing information on current trends. a b c d Laver, James (1986). Costume & Fashion. London, England: Thames and Hudson. p.288. ISBN 0-500-20190-0. One of her subsequent accomplishments, however, was the completion of a book entitled "History of Costume", a college textbook describing the evolution of fashion from 3000 B.C. to 1900. Published in 1965, it contains detailed descriptions of historical and cultural fashion along with renditions of small-scale garment patterns that she meticulously drafted from various museum collections. To research her book, she spent two years avidly collecting illustrations: photographs, postcards, art prints, and fashion plates. Her book is still considered today a foremost resource in the study of costume history. It reflects her teaching philosophy that the study of original artifacts is of essential importance in the understanding of good design. The publishing boom of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries stimulated the flow of fashion illustrations. Despite the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, French plates continued to dominate the market, though equally fine examples were produced in England and Germany. Le Brun Tossa in the Le Cabinet des Modes, 1785-1789, and La Mésangère in Le Journal des Dames et des Modes, 1797-1839, featured high-quality plates by excellent artists, as did John Bell in the English La Belle Assemblée 1806-1832, but Bell's illustrations were often pirated and adapted to local taste. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Women, 1790 – 1799, Plate 002.” Gift of Woodman Thompson. https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll12/id/3466In general the advertising agencies were very open to modern trends. Not without reference to the cinema, by the early 1930s they had revived the male fashion image illustrating active realistic men in glamorized everyday settings. Esquire adopted this style in 1933 and subsequent men's fashion advertisements and magazines would continue it well into the 1960s. British women looked to Paris for the lead in fashion, and from the late 18th century French plates were often copied for British magazines. But from the 1830s, French engravings were themselves sent over for inclusion in high-class English periodicals. It was common practice for less accomplished engravers to then copy them for cheaper magazines, so the same dress was often seen recurring in subsequent months as it worked its way down the social scale and further away from Paris. By the 1860s and 70s nearly every English magazine imported its plates from France, and the collection contains numerous French prints that were reissued in England. a b c Brekke-Aloise, Linzy (2014). "A Very Pretty Business: Fashion and Consumer Culture in Antebellum American Prints". Winterthur Portfolio. 48: 191–212. doi: 10.1086/677857. S2CID 147022141– via JSTOR.

Despite this brief resurgence in the popularity of fashion plates, by the mid 1920s, the popularity of photography would win out over the traditional fashion plate. Clothes began to be collected as soon as the idea of a museum for London became reality in 1911. Until around the 1960s mainly garments from earlier periods were added with the exception of the two World Wars when contemporary collecting took place. The early curators of the museum were aware of the importance of clothes to bring history to life and in 1933 the museum was the first in Britain to publish a catalogue of its costume collection. The aim of the dress and textile collection is to represent London’s role as a centre for the production, design and consumption of clothes. It contains over 23,000 objects from the Tudor period to the present day. The majority of dress and textiles from the 16th century to the 19th century consist of fashionable dress and accessories, while objects from the more recent period represent a broader spectrum of society. Fashion plates do not usually depict specific people. Instead they take the form of generalized portraits, which simply dictate the style of clothes that a tailor, dressmaker, or store could make or sell, or demonstrate how different materials could be made up into clothes. The majority can be found in ladies' fashion magazines which began to appear during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Used figuratively, as is often the case, the term refers to a person whose dress conforms to the latest fashions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Women 1840, Plate 100.” Gift of Woodman Thompson. https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll12/id/1220

Gazette du bon ton: arts, modes et frivolities,1912–15 and 1920–25, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Women are not the only people to depicted in fashion illustrations. Men's fashions have been portrayed since the creation of fashion plates, although less frequently than women's. Dyer, Serena (2022). Disseminating Dress: Britain's Fashion Networks, 1600-1960. Bloomsbury. pp.73–94. People attractively or unusually dressed have been popular graphic subjects at least since the sixteenth century, when the Costume Book or Trachtenbuch brought them into popular publishing. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the graphic artist Vaclav Hollar had given such illustrations new artistic status and Bosse, Callot, and de Hooghe began to group their fashionables in suitable settings. Related Articles In France, La Galerie des Modes was a pioneer in fashion plate publication. [8] Encompassing over 400 prints, this series was issued sporadically by the print merchants Jacques Esnauts (or Esnault) and Michel Rapilly between the years 1778 and 1787 and paved the way for the distribution of popular magazines such as the Magazin des Modes Nouvelles Françaises et Anglaises. [5]