The American magazines bore such names as Godey’s Lady’s Book, Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions and Peterson’s Magazine. Within their covers, women of means could see some of the latest styles, many of them representative of French designs.
These were known as fashion-plate magazines with illustrations of clothing for middle-class women of the 19th century. They were the precursors to today’s fashion magazines.
At auction recently, several fashion plates from those periodicals along with full copies of Peterson’s were scattered among the tables. These hand-colored illustrations showed women wearing dresses with thin waistlines and full skirts. The plates – printed from engravings – had been pulled from magazines, and most were framed or matted for framing.
Also on the tables were La Mode Illustree and Les Modes Parisiennes, popular French magazines of the period. The illustrations in Les Modes Parisiennes were created by a watercolor painter and the subjects tended to be more realistic.
A couple of the fashion plates were from Godey’s, which was founded in Philadelphia in 1830. The periodical featured not only illustrations but articles on health, recipes, remedies, crafts and more, including pages of sheet music for the piano. Godey’s eventually became a literary magazine with works by such well-known authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The publication was the most popular during the early 19th century and was discontinued in 1878.
Peterson’s was created as a cheaper alternative to Godey’s. It began as the Ladies’ National Magazine in 1842 and became known as Peterson’s Magazine from 1855 to 1892. Like Godey’s, it also contained book reviews and articles.
Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions was founded in 1860 by a milliner named Ellen Louise Demorest, an abolitionist and women’s rights activist, and her publisher husband William Jennings Demorest. The publication – of which she was the editor – offered sewing patterns as well as fiction, poetry, short stories, songs, and advertising for clothing and household items. Stowe was also one the contributors.
Ellen Demorest is credited with mass-producing tissue-paper dressmaking patterns after seeing her African American maid cutting a dress pattern out of brown paper. She owned a fashion emporium in New York where she hired female workers, both black and white.
These fashion-plate illustrations come up at auction from time to time – especially the framed ones – but I usually ignore them. But this time I decided to take a closer look. Here’s I found:
