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Fashion Plate

1840s-1850s (published)
Artist/Maker
Place of origin

One of 88 fashion plates, many severely cut down to fit in a red-cloth and leather scrapbook


Object details

Categories
Object type
Materials and techniques
printing ink and hand-colouring, cut down and pasted into a volume bound in red cloth and leather
Brief description
One of 88 fashion plates dated mainly from 1844 to 1855, showing mostly menswear and clothes for young boys, but including several women's fashions and designs for fancy dress costumes; collected and pasted into a scrapbook.
Physical description
One of 88 fashion plates, many severely cut down to fit in a red-cloth and leather scrapbook
Dimensions
  • Volume height: 39cm
  • Volume width: 26cm
Credit line
Given by the House of Worth
Object history
This volume was probably kept intact to reflect how the Paquin design house maintained their research collection of fashion plates. Many of the plates from the Paquin archive from the first half of the 19th century are in a very poor condition, with signs of having been pasted down, drastically cut down, and generally in a grubby, much fingered state. This volume presents fashion plates from 1844 to 1855 cut down and pasted onto its pages, and is lettered on the cover: "PAQUIN: GRAVURES DIVERSES. Such volumes would have been used as reference for the designers, with little regard for the integrity of the original plates (which would have been seen as virtually disposable and of little worth). In some cases, figures have been cut in half, or have been cut out cleanly from the plate and overlapped onto other plates. One fine panoramic plate, no. 64 in this set, has been folded into the volume and can be unfolded, in order to examine it in its entirety. Other plates have been wrapped around the edge of the page, so that one figure is pasted on a page and the rest of the plate is on the other side of the page, as with nos. 57 and 61, which are actually the same plate.

Daniel Milford-Cottam, 18/08/2015
Bibliographic reference
Victoria and Albert Museum Department of Prints and Drawings and Department of Paintings Accessions 1957-1958 London: HMSO, 1964
Collection
Accession number
E.22395:87-1957

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Record createdJune 30, 2009
Record URL
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