Très Parisien: style, printed by hand
The fashion plate as a way of looking: returning to a magazine whose colours were applied through stencils.
Très Parisien began publication in 1920. The Palais Galliera archive identifies Germaine Joumard as its director and one of its illustrators, signing as “Joujou”. Its fashion plates used pochoir: colour applied through stencils.
The page is part of the story
A fashion illustration does more than show a garment. The pose, the space around the figure and the relationship between areas of colour guide the eye. It is worth asking what the page makes easy to notice, and what it leaves out.
The museum’s collection description records both the magazine’s stencil illustrations and its later use of photographs. That change offers a useful way into the archive. Different image-making methods bring different possibilities; neither is simply a transparent window onto the clothes.
Back in context
On a screen, a fashion plate can become another saved image, separated from its issue and its caption. Returning to the publication restores some of that context. We can look at the picture and then at the page around it: how it sits next to words, how a sequence develops, how attention is directed.
The figure’s pose, the edges of a colour block and the details the illustrator chooses to leave out all affect how we see the clothes. These are useful things to look for when reading a fashion plate.
Sources & further reading
View the original publication ↗Keep reading
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