Fashion in Print: Three Historic Plates from Library Collections

Fashion plates may appear to be charming illustrations, but they were once powerful tools of communication. Long before glossy magazines or social media, these prints carried the latest styles across cities and continents, shaping how dress, taste, and identity were understood. Libraries and museum collections have preserved many of these fragile works on paper, making them accessible for researchers, students, and the public.

The three examples featured here all come from France, a country that dominated fashion publishing and set trends across Europe and beyond. Drawn from the New York Public Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, these plates demonstrate how French styles were circulated through print and how fashion plates reveal both the artistry of printmaking and the history of fashion as a global language.

New York Public Library – “1875 [Women’s Fashion in Nineteenth-Century Paris]"

Women’s Fashion in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 1875

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at NYPL houses a remarkable set of 19th-century fashion plates, many now digitized. One striking example, “1875 [Women’s Fashion in Nineteenth-Century Paris],” depicts an elegantly dressed woman in full skirt and elaborate hat, capturing the ornate detail of Parisian style in the late 19th century. These plates were originally created as visual guides to current dress and were often hand-colored to highlight fabrics and trims. Today, they provide researchers not only with a record of shifting silhouettes but also with insight into how fashion circulated through print culture.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Library – “La belle et tendre Lyonnoise” (c. 1785)

Women’s Fashion in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 1875

Among the highlights of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s library holdings is a plate from the celebrated Galerie des Modes et Costumes Français (1778–1787), widely regarded as the first fashion periodical of its kind. This hand-colored etching, titled “La belle et tendre Lyonnoise” (“The Beautiful and Tender Woman from Lyons”), was created by Nicolas Dupin after a drawing by Louis-Joseph Watteau de Lille, the nephew of the famed painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. Published in Paris around 1785, the plate captures the elegance of regional French dress while also signaling the cosmopolitan reach of Parisian fashion. Its finely worked lines and delicate coloring exemplify how fashion plates functioned as both art objects and style guides, bridging the worlds of print culture and dress.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) – Dame en Robbe (1683)

Dame en Robbe, 1683

One of the earliest surviving fashion plates comes from the Recueil des modes de la cour de France, a Parisian series published in the late 17th century. This hand-colored engraving, Dame en Robbe (1683), by Henri and Jean Baptiste Bonnart, illustrates the grandeur of French court dress under Louis XIV. With its elongated silhouette and rich detailing, the plate served as both documentation of elite fashion and a promotional image of Paris as the arbiter of style. Today, it provides rare visual evidence of early modern dress at the French court, showing that fashion plates were already functioning as instruments of cultural authority well before the explosion of 19th-century periodicals.

From the ornate courtly elegance of the Bonnart brothers’ Dame en Robbe at LACMA, to the refined regional portrait of La belle et tendre Lyonnoise in Philadelphia, to the bustling Parisian street styles captured in the NYPL’s 19th-century plates, fashion illustration has long been a dialogue between art, commerce, and cultural identity.

Libraries and museums preserve these fragile works on paper not only as aesthetic objects, but also as evidence of how fashion circulated before the advent of photography or digital media. Each plate reminds us that style was communicated through print networks, bound in books and journals, and shared across borders, shaping ideas of beauty, status, and modernity.

By spotlighting these holdings, we see how libraries play a crucial role in sustaining fashion history. They keep alive the images that once defined taste, making them available today for researchers, students, and anyone curious about the ever-changing language of dress.

Image Credits

• New York Public Library: Women’s Fashion in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 1875. Hand-colored print. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection. Public Domain.

• Philadelphia Museum of Art: La belle et tendre Lyonnoise (The Beautiful and Tender Woman from Lyons), c. 1785. Hand-colored etching by Nicolas Dupin after Louis-Joseph Watteau de Lille. Rosenbach Foundation Gift, 1953. Accession no. 1953-70-532. Public Domain.

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Dame en Robbe, 1683. Hand-colored engraving by Henri and Jean Baptiste Bonnart, from Recueil des modes de la cour de France. Costume and Textiles Collection. Public Domain.

  
  

This article was originally published on the ARLIS/NA Fashion, Textiles, and Costume Special Interest Group blog.