Browse Items (71 total)

This fashion plate is dated July 1818 and depicts two women wearing fashionable garments of the time. The woman on the left, sitting down, is wearing an evening gown with elbow-length gloves and necklaces. Her hair is covered with a draped hat, with…

The fashion plate is inscribed Moden Z 1817, No. 39. The German word "Moden" means "fashion" in English. This particular plate showcases three women in empire-waist dresses with long sleeves and horizontal decoration at the bottom of each dress. Each…

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…

Beginning in France, the recurrent and increased modifications of fashion provoked the introduction of fashion plates. They were the only sources of information on the leading fashions of the period and were treated as instruction manuals for…

The process for producing a fashion plate began with an artist, who would create the design with pencil and watercolor, elaborating as many details as possible. The drawing was then given to the engraver to print, who used sharp tools to engrave…

Morning DressPublished for the proprietors, Novr. 1By the early nineteenth century, fashion plates were a popular medium to display the “artistic, historical, moral, and aesthetic feeling of their time” (Ginsberg 2005, p. 66). They also kept women up…

Modes Parisiennes 1846 The three men illustrate changes to the silhouette taking place in the 1840s. As women’s skirts became wider, men’s silhouettes followed. Trousers became fuller, shoulders sloped, and chests swelled out like a pigeon’s. To…

Modes de Paris April 30, 1842 These men are dressed appropriately for Longchamps, which was part of a park in the forested area of Bois de Boulogne in 1842. When Napoleon III became emperor of France, the Bois de Boulogne was reconfigured and opened…