Fashion Plates Design Set

Product Information

As technology improved, speed of communication and transportation increased, thus allowing consumers access to foreign fashions, accessories and hairstyles.

It reflects her teaching philosophy that the study of original artifacts is of essential importance in the understanding of good design. Newer sections such as hats, hair, cloaks and capes, ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman fashion history continue to explore and make this a great web fashion history and costume history resource. The flowing medieval touches soon broadened to include Tudor and Elizabethan times with ruffed and Vandyke triangular pointed decoration and cross-over bodices. The collection ranges from garments made at home to those produced in the studios of London couturiers, from gowns worn at grand occasions to clothes worn every day. The narrower buckle belted day waist or sash-wrapped evening waist was balanced by widening skirts which were often horsehair padded and frilled to make them stand away from the legs.

Early plates were issued uncoloured, though may have been tinted by dressmakers to inspire their clients, but by 1790 those in the Lady’s Magazine were 'embellished’ with hand-colouring, and the practice of including regular coloured plates had begun. The early curators of the museum were aware of the importance of clothes to bring history to life and in 1933 the museum was the first in Britain to publish a catalogue of its costume collection. White gowns generally were kept for the evening and in the day pastel or colored robes were thought more suitable.

Hamilton’s practice draws on and comments upon a wide range of popular culture media and current events. By the mid-nineteenth century, with the expansion of popular and pictorial publishing as well as the clothing trade, the fashion plate proliferated. Not without reference to the cinema, by the early 1930s they had revived the male fashion image illustrating active realistic men in glamorized everyday settings. The headdress and scarf on the left are lavishly described as: a Vienna toque, consisting of separate stiffened puffs of pink satin.Quality fashion plates remained available through large-scale French publishers and agents for publications abroad, such as Goubaud and Mariton. By the 1860s and 70s nearly every English magazine imported its plates from France, and the collection contains numerous French prints that were reissued in England.

Fashion plates were first circulated at the end of the 18th century in England, rather than in France, as would be expected. Because of some overlap due to the acknowledged prominence of the Prince in court consider the Regency era to begin in 1807. Fashion plates are small printed images, often hand-colored, of people wearing the latest fashions and depicted in conventional minimally narrative social contexts. The general public became aware of the style and technique through prestige advertising, such as Art Gout Beauté, 1920-1936, published by the textile firm Albert Godde Bedin. As part of her studies of non-Western folk dress and embroidery technique, she traveled extensively in Europe, collecting original ethnic costumes, textile and embroidery examples.After 1810 it was worn full length and was a warmer longer-sleeved coat than the Spencer, but often made of the same materials.