Figure 30.—Plate showing fashionable dress at Weymouth. From The Lady’s Magazine, 1774. (Courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum, London.)
The 18th-century reading public became increasingly
fashion conscious, and there are several series of French colored prints, the finest of them by Moreau le Jeune from 1775 onward, which have high artistic merit and have been sought continuously by collectors. Their purpose, however, was explicitly “pour servir à l’histoire des Modes et du Costume des Français dans le XVIII siècle.” The prints are strongly romanticized and must be regarded as a record of something between historical and fancy dress. The accompanying text names but only briefly describes the dresses and then passes on to facetious moralizing.
In the same way in London in 1794, Nicolaus Heideloff, whose Gallery of Fashion was an imitation of one of the French series by Esnaut and Rapilly entitled La Gallerie des Modes, though claiming that the dresses he described were real ones, seems to have
had as an objective the formation of a sort of picture gallery of costume portraits of English ladies. Heideloff called it a Repository, which is what we would call an archive today, but the term came to be used by Rudolph Ackermann for his general magazine, The Repository of the Arts . . . , published between 1809 and 1828 (see p. 89). The ladies in Heideloff’s aquatints are all different in the sense that they are dressed differently and doing different things, but the variations are mostly fanciful (fig. 31). In fact, the Heideloff prints served to fill picture books or to be pinned up or framed on walls; they do not differ greatly in their approach from the series of the Bonnarts and their contemporaries during the reign of Louis XIV.
Figure 31.—Print of a lady in a court dress ballooned out by side hoops, by N. Heideloff. The print does not attribute this fashion to any specific year. From the Gallery of Fashion, 1798. (Courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum, London.)
It is not proposed to give an account here of the
various magazines in the different countries which contained illustrated articles on fashion from 1770 onward, since this would merely repeat material in Mr. Vyvyan Holland’s book. Mention should be made, however, of the movements for dress reform motivated either by economic considerations or national feeling. Pamphlets and articles on these subjects were usually without illustrations, except when concerned with the revival or creation of a national costume.[42] Sweden was the only country where, thanks to the enthusiasm of King Gustavus III, the wearing of national dress was more than an archaizing affectation. Dr. Eva Bergman[43] has described the origins of this Swedish national dress in a book that