Browse Items (71 total)

Riding DressFashion plates are important to historic fashion studies because they show the garment as it was meant to be worn. This fashion plate is from Lady’s Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, June 1817; the magazine ran from…

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…

Fashion plates are records of fashion from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth centuries. These printed and hand-colored images were produced to show what was fashionable at the time. As part of the earliest magazines, fashion…

Evening Dress.Fashion plates showed women and their dressmakers what fashionable society was wearing in London and Paris (National Portrait Gallery). In 1812, a neoclassical look with tubular silhouette, empire waist, and open neckline reigned for…

Morning Dress for September 1800This fashion plate illustrates morning dress for September 1800. Both figures wear white muslin gowns that are slightly longer in the back. White was a popular color in the early 1800s. The figure on the right wears an…

Morning Dress for October 1799Mary C. Whitlock, former department chair and founder of URI’s Historic Textile and Costume Collection, found many loose fashion plates in antique shops around Massachusetts and donated them to URI’s collection. These…

Evening Dress, Lady’s Magazine, November, 1814 Fashion plates were the portal to the fashion world for someone who wanted to know the latest styles in 1814. The young woman is seated on a chair with her feet on a footrest. She is bent over slightly,…

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…

London full DressThis fashion plate was printed for John Bell’s Le Belle Assemblée in November 1808. It depicts two women in evening dresses. The same print is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and it includes the…

The beginning of the nineteenth century featured a radical turn in fashion with the introduction of neoclassical styles. Simplified white chemises with empire waistlines dominated the streets of London, where this fashion plate was printed. Marie…