Fashion Plate, December 1828
Evening & Walking Dresses for Dec.r 1828

Fashion plates are crucial to understanding and visualizing the dress and appearance from historical time periods. Fashion plates are small, hand-colored prints illustrating different people wearing the latest styles. They usually did not include a lot of narrative other than date and publication, due to the images being the focal point of the piece. They allowed women and men to see what fashions were in style and appropriate for evening and daywear. While styles were changing at a rapid pace in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, fashion plates suggested and depicted what fashionable society was wearing in London and Paris (National Portrait Gallery 2023). Without the creation of fashion plates, changes in fashionable men’s and women’s dress would have taken longer to spread throughout society.

In order to understand the impact of fashion plates, it is important to learn their origin. While fashionable people have been depicted in multiple forms of illustrations, fashion plates didn’t become popular until the last quarter of the seventeenth century when they were published by Paris print sellers. Oftentimes they were used as advertisements and fashion guides for the public (Ginsberg 2010). Gaining even more popularity in the nineteenth century due to the publishing boom in the late eighteenth century, fashion plates increased in England and Germany.

One example of a fashion plate is published by James Robins & Co. titled, “Walking and Evening Dresses for December 1828”. James Robins & Co. were print publishers both in London and Dublin in 1828 (The British Museum 2023). The fashion plate from The Lady's Monthly Museum, illustrates two women wearing walking and evening dresses in late 1828. During the 1820s, romanticism was on the rise in arts and fashion. Romanticism was an art movement and style that evoked emotions with a heavy emphasis on freedom of expression. Charles Baudelaire wrote that "romanticism, lies neither in the subjects that an artist chooses nor in his exact copying of truth, but in the way he feels” (Miller 2021). In this fashion plate from 1828, the garments definitely reflect the romantic style.

During the 1820s, the waistline of women's dresses dropped from just below the bust, the Empire style, to the natural waist. The bodice of each dress in this plate is decorated with a “V” shape accented by a belt at the waist. Dresses from this decade were highly ornamented with ruffles, embroidery, puffs, and cut-work which became a signature mark of 1820s styles. Both of these dresses have ruffles at the neckline, specifically a ruff with a wice collar on the right dress. While these dresses are similar in detail and decoration, they differ in type of dress. The white dress on the left is an evening gown, while the teal dress on the right is a daytime dress. This is determined by the exposure of the woman’s arm and neck in the white dress, which was not common in women’s daytime dress (Welters, 2023). The sleeve lengths of these dresses also vary, but they both remain puffed.

Accompanying the dresses in this fashion plate are various accessories. The main accessory is the bonnet or headdress worn by the women. The headress on the left is made with flowers and a wide ribbon to decorate the curled hairstyle characteristic of evening wear. The bonnet on the right is suitable for wearing when away from home, with a wide brim and high crown. There seems to be a yellow and red ribbon tied in bows and long strands flowing from the back. The two women also have their hair curled, a favored hairstyle of this time period (Welters 2023). These hairstyles demonstrate the emphasis on the top of the head in womenswear from the late 1820s through the 1830s. Each woman wears jewelry; each has a pair of drop earrings, a pair of bracelets, and a pin at the neck. The low neckline of the evening dress accommodates a necklace as well. Their shoes are both shown as slippers tied with ribbons that cross over the foot, in white or black to match each outfit. Another accessory shown is a colored scarf wrapped around the woman on the left’s shoulders which is assumed to be used for warmth in the evening. These accessories exemplify the decorative details women included in their attire in the 1820s.

References

Ginsberg, Madeleine., "Fashion Plates." In The Berg Companion to Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele . Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Accessed November 14, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474264716.0006591.

Miller, Sanda. "Capturing modernity in nineteenth-century France and England." In Images on the Page: A Fashion Iconography, 155–183. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. Accessed November 14, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350122628.0010.

National Portrait Gallery, “Fashion Plates Introduction.” London. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/research/new-research-on-the-collection/fashionplates/fashion-plates-introduction

The British Museum. (2023). James Robins. The British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection

The Lady's Monthly Musem. Accessed December 13, 2023. HathiTrust. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hn1prw&seq=396

Welters, Linda. “Women’s Fashion (1820-1840).” TMD441: The History of Western Dress. Class lecture at University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, November 6, 2023.