Figure 33.—Walking dress of gray merino. Plate 38, Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts, 1819. (Courtesy of The Cooper Union Museum.)
The number, variation, and wide distribution of 19th-century fashion plates has proved something of a handicap to the historian in search of reliable information 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 writers,[47] but the relation 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.
[Figure 34.]—Philadelphia fashions. At this date caps or hats were worn indoors with full evening dress. The details of this print were probably copied from a French or English fashion magazine. From Godey’s Lady’s Book, October 1833. (Courtesy of The Cooper Union Museum.)
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.
U.S. Government Printing Office: 1967