Browse Items (71 total)

London Fashions for May, 1806 Full Dress, Walking Dresses, Morning DressLa Belle Assemblée, or Bells Court and Fashionable Magazine was published in London from 1806 to 1868 (Harper 2020). It was founded by John Bell, a magazine publisher and major…

Fashion plates are defined as “small, printed images, often hand-colored, of people wearing the latest fashions and depicted in conventional minimally narrative social contexts”, according to the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, Volume 2, by…

Full Dress for the Opera, Theatre &cThis fashion plate is captioned “Full Dress for the Opera, Theatre.” It was published in March 1815 in La Belle Assemblée, one of London’s most important women’s magazines of the early nineteenth century. The…

Paris Fashions for the Month of March 1806John Bell (1745-1831) began publishing La Belle Assemblée in London in 1806. The fashion images were engraved on copper plates and then printed on paper, which gave them the name “fashion plates”. Initially…

Fashion plates were popular from the late 18th century throughout the 19th and were used to indicate certain styles of clothing that dressmakers, tailors, or a store can make (Nevinson, 2021). These were highly useful during these centuries due to…

The fashion plate shown here appeared in The Lady’s Monthly Museum or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction. Published in London between 1798 and 1832, The Lady’s Monthly had a collection of subjects for women including poems, essays, and…

Fashion plates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries showed what dressmakers were making in London and Paris. Every few years a new waistline or sleeve appeared in Paris, and fashion plates made it easy to keep up with the latest…

This fashion plate is labeled “London Dresses for October. Published by Vernor Hood and Sharpe, Oct. 1, 1808.” During this period high-waisted Empire dresses were popular. The waistline ends just below the bust and the trim at the hem is becoming…

Fashion plates serve as windows into the past, offering detailed glimpses of the styles and trends of bygone eras. The June 1827 edition of The Lady's Monthly Museum not only adds to the fashion plates in the Historic Textile and Costume Collection,…

Throughout the history of human dress, there have been many different sources expressing the attire of the time, from art and sculpture to modern magazines. In the late eighteenth century we saw the emergence of a new source called fashions plates.…