cature fashion plates often titled "Merveilleuse" or 

 "Incroyable," which amused everyone in the early 

 years of the 19th century. 



After 1800 many types of magazines flourished, and 

 the increase in the number of lending and subscription 

 libraries and also of public libraries fostered a new 

 reading public. The magazines had illustrated fash- 

 ion articles. Often the engravings, and later the litho- 

 graphs, colored by hand, were their most attractive 

 feature. Not that any great originality was shown ; 

 the latest Paris fashions were often adapted, with or 

 without acknowledgment from French fashion plates 

 of the pre\'ious season. Men's and children's fashions 

 were not adapted on nearly the same scale. Possibly, 

 men's fashions were more static, or confined to details 

 such as variations in tying the cravat.^" 



Three magazines are worth special mention. La 

 Belle Assemblee, or Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine 

 "addressed particularly to the ladies" was published 

 in London from 1806 to 1868 (fig. 32). During the 

 1820s the plates were of less merit, but there was a 

 later improvement. In 1809, the London print firm 

 of Ackermann began to publish The Repository of 

 Arts, Letters, Commerce and Manufactures Fashion and 

 Politics. This magazine had a much wider scope, 

 and its illustrations are of good quality (fig. 33). A 

 special feature was the inclusion of small sample 

 squares of new materials pasted into the text which 

 named and described them. This feature usefully 

 supplements industrial records of the period, which are 

 hard to come by and difficult to handle in that those 

 preserved are usually bulky, not too well dated, and 

 show no distinction between fabrics made for export 

 and those for the home market. Thirdly, from 1830 

 to 1898, Godey's Lady's Book was published in Phila- 



delphia, under titles wiiich varied from time to time 

 (fig. 34). This magazine is much more famous for 

 its other contents than for its fashion articles; its 

 plates, often copied from French engravings, are of 

 low quality and rather crudely colored. 



The number, variation, and wide distribution of 

 19th-century fashion plates has proved something of a 

 handicap to the historian in search of reliable infor- 

 mation about dress. Mr. Holland has studied them 

 from the artistic angle, tracing many of the French 

 artists, who did not scorn fashion work. The relation 

 of fashion plates to Victorian dresses as worn has been 

 touched on by many costume WTiters,^" but the rela- 

 tion of the fashion plate to the fashion house has yet 

 to be studied; in particular, the large sheets put out by 

 wholesale drapers and textile manufacturers and the 

 advertisements of ready-made clothing that appear in 

 magazines all through the 19th century have not yet 

 been studied to full advantage. 



This account of the fashion plate is necessarily 

 incomplete, because its history and development has 

 not been continuous, and new links may yet be found. 

 The earlier period has been treated in greater detail 

 because it is generally less well-known, and the 

 boundaries between the fashion plate and the costume 

 picture are not all easy to define. The fashion plate 

 has died slowly, the victim of the photograph showing 

 the model wearing actual clothes and the sketch 

 giving the impression of a fashion artist at a dress 

 show. Through the centuries, the fashion plate has 

 provided the link between the wearer and the maker 

 of clothes. It has also attracted as collectors those 

 studying both the social background of a period and 

 the history of costume. 



« H. Le Blanc, The Ail of Tying the Craval, 3rd ed. (1828). 

 The zvhole Art of Dress, by a Cavalry officer (1830). Both of 

 these small books contain fashion plates. 



47 Vyvyan Holland, op. cit. (footnote 1), chap. 5 ff. C. 

 WiLLETT CuNNiNGTON, English IVomen's Clothing in the Mne- 

 teenth Century (1937). James Layer, Nineteenth Century Costume 

 (1947). C. H. Gibbs-Smith, The Fashionable Lady in the 19th 

 Century (1960). 



P.APER 60 : ORIGIN .\ND E.ARI.V HISTORY OI THE FASHION PLATE 



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