A fashion plate is a costume portrait indicating a suitable style of clothing that can be made or secured. Fashion illustration began in the late 15th and early 16th centuries with portrait pictures that made a person’s identity known not by his individual features but rather by his dress.
Fashion may be the general style or custom of clothing worn at any time. The term “fashion” originates from time when individuals described a lady who had been well outfitted like a “fashion plate”.
A fashion plate is an illustration (a plate) demonstrating the highlights of fashionable styles of clothing. Traditionally they are rendered through etching, line engraving, or lithograph and then colored by hand. To quote historian James Laver, the best of them tend to “reach a very high degree of aesthetic value.”
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Why fashion plate is a precursor to fashion photography ?
Really what fashion plates are is a precursor to fashion photography. Because, of course, fashion and the fashion system itself existed before the invention of photography during the middle of the 19th century. So fashion plates were really this way of communicating the most recent trends to audiences, whether they be audiences near or audiences far.
From the late 18th century and throughout the 19th, fashion plates showed ladies and their dressmakers what fashionable society was wearing in London and Paris. Styles had begun to change rapidly, and fashion plates were increasingly relied upon to suggest the latest and most appropriate outfits for different times of the day and for specific occasions.
Fashion plates do not usually depict specific people. Instead they take the form of generalized portraits, which simply dictate the style of clothes that a tailor, dressmaker, or store could make or sell, or demonstrate how different materials could be made up into clothes. The majority can be found in ladies’ fashion magazines which began to appear during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Used figuratively, as is often the case, the term refers to a person whose dress conforms to the latest fashions.
Fashion plates are frequently used as primary source material for the study of historical fashions, although commentators warn that as they were high-end aspirational catalogues it should not be assumed that the majority of people dressed in the same way expressed by a plate. A more accurate way to use fashion plates for study is to treat them like a modern high-end fashion magazine or designer’s shop window with only a few people wearing such luxury items.
Fashion plates are the first source many historical costumiers turn to for a new outfit. They are easily available online such as on Pinterest, are drawn to showcase clothing in as simple and accessible a way as possible and they very often feature a printed date. Even those that don’t offer a date show so many up to date fashion items that establishing when it was made is rarely difficult.
how should we use fashion plates when it comes to costume?
Limitations:
- Each plate is a snapshot representing the grandest style when in reality most people would add elements to an existing wardrobe. Even the middle classes wouldn’t have commissioned a full outfit every season.
- The plates very specifically represent the aspirational middle class.
Opportunities:
- Plates as a collection show the history of women’s clothing and the body as hems rise and fall, skirt styles expand and recede and elaborate undergarments style the idealised body.
- Plates were produced in massive volumes and so offer a fantastic record of designs that were available even if not worn by many people.
- As a collection they show the progression from made-to-order to more off-the-peg styles taking over.
Overall this means that recreating a specific fashion plate is problematic, although a very good and fulfilling exercise in researching a garment and making it from scratch. There is a whole array of considerations when attempting to make an outfit straight from a fashion plate – like the fact that these models are shaped like unrealistic fashion mannequins and even then we are not the same shape as our ancestors.
The real use of fashion plates is arguably to justify the existence of a specific garment at a specific time and in rare cases this can be used to date original items. Perhaps the more authentic project to undertake is to find a collection of prints and make an element of each to create an outfit representing several different years in one.
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