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A selection of Victorian fashion plates from La Mode Illustrée


I have photographed* these plates from my personal collection of bound magazines, which includes years 1875, 1877, 1881, 1882, 1883 and 1884. My main interest resides in the years of the “Natural Form” period. This is a work in progress. New plates are added regularly.

When I decided to share these plates, and due to the limited amount of time I can dedicate to this project, I had to make a choice between taking pictures of all of the plates, which would advance very slowly, or make a selection of the more remarkable plates from different months and years. I chose the latter as I think it can give a better overview of the evolution of fashion during these years, and be of more interest.

I also own a quantity of patterns from these magazines, and copies of them with translations of the original instructions (which are in French, as the magazines) to English (and Catalan and Spanish on request), and a copy of the corresponding magazine, can be purchased from the Natural Form Patterns website. I sell those for little more than the cost of the copies and shipping. This doesn’t count preliminary copies (the patterns are very delicate and cannot be scanned in a big format printer, so they have to be copied in sections and then joined) or any of the time I put in it. Ideally this would, in the long term, cover some of the costs of collecting the magazines and patterns.

These magazines are more than 120 years old, and therefore exempt of copyright protection. They can be used for any purpose and distributed freely. Nonetheless, due to the time, effort and money it costs to host these images (apart from the high cost of the magazines themselves) credit and a link are very appreciated. If you found the images useful, interesting or inspirational, a donation of any amount is always appreciated, and will go to cover some of the hosting costs.

Please note that hotlinking these images in not allowed. I share the images freely, but not my bandwidth.

* I do not own a scanner, and the magazine’s format is very big, so an A3 scanner would be necessary.

 
2008 © Mercedes Almagro