Fashion Plates Design Set

Product Information

Imagery found in newspapers, magazines, television, film and advertising is subjected to collage and painting techniques. 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.

Unfortunately we can no longer accommodate request from students to view the Janet Arnold garments as they are too fragile. In fact, Marie Antoinette's dressmaker, Rose Bertin, was known to tour the continent every year with berlines containing dolls outfitted with the latest fashionable styles.All these wider skirt silhouettes show decorative interest, an ornamentation in keeping with Gothic over embellishment. Suffrage and other banners represent London’s role as a centre for the fashion and clothing industry, from education through to design, production, promotion, retail and wear. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Tomy revived the concept as a toy marketed simply as Fashion Plates.

A project was undertaken by the Digital Initiatives Program to digitize and provide online access to selections from this collection. However, photography, which had begun earlier in the century, was developing into an even more popular medium and in the 1890s, fashion plates began to decline as photography grew. These include the Empire (1806-1813), Georgian (1806-1836), Regency (1811-1820), Romantic (1825-1850), Victorian (1837-1859), Late Victorian (1860-1900) and Edwardian (1901-1915). The first form of pelisse worn from 1800 to 1810 was an empire line coat-like garment to the hip or knee.

For example, Napoleon's expeditions to the East and items brought back by him and other soldiers created interest in Egyptian ornamentation. Swingeing London, for example, is the title of seven paintings and many more prints based on a 1967 press photograph of rock star Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser (Hamilton’s gallerist at the time) handcuffed together inside a police van. Few of the draughtsmen and engravers responsible are identified until the 1840s, when a new generation of French artists, introducing less stilted compositions with varied backgrounds and less stylised clothes, began to regularly sign their work.

In reality the outfits depicted in fashion plates were often adapted and toned down, just as designers’ creations are today, and British fashions often varied slightly from French ones as well as being some months behind.

The flowing medieval touches soon broadened to include Tudor and Elizabethan times with ruffed and Vandyke triangular pointed decoration and cross-over bodices. Leroy the French designer had to follow the whims of his clients and drop the dress waists and widen the skirts.