Fashion Plates: Illustrating History's Latest Styles, 1760s-1920s
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Location
Charleston Museum
360 Meeting Street Charleston, SC 29403
360 Meeting Street Charleston, SC 29403
843.722.2996
www.charlestonmuseum.orgEvent Category
Historical
Once the most important resource for current styles, fashion plates are now a valuable source for historic research. These plates appeared in many publications, such as Godey's Lady's Book, La Belle Assemblée, Les Modes Parisiennes and Ackermann's Repository of Arts among others. Essentially, fashion plates did not exist before the French Revolution began in 1789, though the Museum does have several rare hand-tinted fashion illustrations dating to the 1760s. It has been suggested that the sudden influx of French influence - as aristocrats rushed to escape the Revolution - catapulted the art of fashion designing and especially the production of fashion plates into a thriving business. For many years, these images would be the arbiters of elegance. Dress makers or even amateur home-sewers would use the illustration as their guide; dress patterns were not widely available until the latter half of the 19th century.
Fashion Plates will exhibit a range of examples held in the Museum Archives and pair select examples with fashion accessories from the textiles collection. One of the Museum's earliest plates (pictured above), the work of Nickolaus Heideloff, dates from 1794 and depicts a side view of a woman wearing an empire style dress with short train. Her hair is dressed with several, large plumes and she is holding a closed fan. Pictured left is a French fan that would have been the height of fashion in the 1790s. It is intricately engraved on silk with classical figures surrounded with sewn-on sequins or spangles. The ivory sticks and guards are inlaid with silver and gilt foil.
Another early illustration, possibly engraved by William Hopwood, circa 1835, shows two women dressed in green. While green was a very popular fashion color and is found all around us in nature, it was not easily achieved through natural dyes. For example, Scheeles green involved an arsenic sulfide process which was quite hazardous to the dyers and even to the wearers since the pigment could become airborne when damp. A safe, synthetic green dye was not available until the 1860s. The shoe pictured below is remarkably similar to the ones in the Hopwood plate and dates from the same time. The sharply squared toe of the shoe was a new style for 1835, and side lacing replaced front lacing around 1830. The shoe was called a gaiter boot when made of fabric and "foxed" with leather. Our example could have been worn by Harriet Porcher Gaillard Stoney (1798-1863) of Charleston.
Fashion Plates will exhibit a range of examples held in the Museum Archives and pair select examples with fashion accessories from the textiles collection. One of the Museum's earliest plates (pictured above), the work of Nickolaus Heideloff, dates from 1794 and depicts a side view of a woman wearing an empire style dress with short train. Her hair is dressed with several, large plumes and she is holding a closed fan. Pictured left is a French fan that would have been the height of fashion in the 1790s. It is intricately engraved on silk with classical figures surrounded with sewn-on sequins or spangles. The ivory sticks and guards are inlaid with silver and gilt foil.
Another early illustration, possibly engraved by William Hopwood, circa 1835, shows two women dressed in green. While green was a very popular fashion color and is found all around us in nature, it was not easily achieved through natural dyes. For example, Scheeles green involved an arsenic sulfide process which was quite hazardous to the dyers and even to the wearers since the pigment could become airborne when damp. A safe, synthetic green dye was not available until the 1860s. The shoe pictured below is remarkably similar to the ones in the Hopwood plate and dates from the same time. The sharply squared toe of the shoe was a new style for 1835, and side lacing replaced front lacing around 1830. The shoe was called a gaiter boot when made of fabric and "foxed" with leather. Our example could have been worn by Harriet Porcher Gaillard Stoney (1798-1863) of Charleston.
