When I was in university my tutor gave me some photocopies of 19th century fashion plates as she knows I like them. They've just been sitting in a folder for a year but I recently got them out and decided to start colouring them in so that I could frame them. Here is the first one I've done which is a French fashion plate from 1888:
And here is my coloured in version:
For each of the gowns I looked up images to use as a reference for
the colour schemes. So working from left to right, images used as a reference for the white and burgundy dress:
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| Evening dress by Mme Dellac, c.1878, Met Museum |
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(fig 1) Gown, 1885, Museu del Disseny de Barcelona,
Item MTIB 146255-0 |
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| La Revue de la Mode, dated August 30, 1885 |
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La Revue de la Mode, dated May 17, 1885
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Not all of these are the right date area but the overall effect of the white offset with deep burgundy/maroon is lovely so that was the colour combo I chose for that dress. And onto the yellow gown.
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| fashion plate c.1880s |
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| Fashion Plate 1876, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine |
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| (fig 2) Fashion Plate, 1885 |
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| (fig 3)Fashion Plate 1888 |
Note the 3D adornment in fig 2 which matches my fashion plate. Initially I thought the spots were just printed spots but the shading on them is off set so I think they're meant to be interpreted as a 3D embellishment similar to this much clearer fashion plate. I made a much stronger contrast for my image, which was just personal preference. As it was one of the last dresses I coloured in I didn't want too many very pale dresses and so leave the purple gown looking out of place for being so dark. Now the blue dress:
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| Fashion Plate, c.1880s |
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| Fashion Plate , 1886 |
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(fig 4) Dress c.1870–1880, Collections of the de Young and
Legion of Honor museums of San Francisco, CA.
Accession Number: 52.12.1a-b |
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| Afternoon Dress, 1875, House of Worth, Met Museum |
I don't have many direct references for the colour palate for this gown, however looking at other blue dresses gave me some ideas of what direction I wanted to go. Purple gown:
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| House of Worth Gown, 1880 |
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| No information |
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| 1884 Gown (fig 5) |
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| Gown, c 1885, Museum of Arts and Crafts Zagreb |
There were a lot of interesting shades of purple in this time period, and I decided to contrast it with a pale grey for the trimmings. And now the final cream dress:
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| Gown, 1882, Sigal Museum |
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| Fashion Plate, c.1870s |
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| (fig 6) Fashion Plate 015, 1885, Met Museum |
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(fig 7) American Dress 1880s, Met Museum
Accession Number C.I.38.58.2a, b |
This cream dress was the one I struggled with working out the trim colouring for. I just kept changing my mind as I saw how something looked and couldn't make my mind up. Eventually I settled on pale blue and pink trim with pink flowers but it was the most frustrating gown to colour.
Overall, this gave a useful starting point into understanding later Victorian fashions as it's not a period I've ever studied in great detail. Creating colour palates for an outfit is something I'm not very good at and so I always try to pay attention to how colours are put together in any time period. Through the 1880s you have an interesting mix of analogous colour palates (so colours next to each other in the colour wheel eg red, orange, and yellow)
or a very highly contrasting colour palate. Which is interesting to see in the same time period as it's a very different approach to colour in clothing. This is possibly influenced by the continued development of synthetic dyes in this time period which began a few decades earlier, so a much wider variety of colours are available to create interesting colour palates with.
I learnt a lot from looking at these fashion plates and original gowns and while the result is a nice pretty picture I can frame for my work area, the main reason for doing it was to learn more about the 1880s which I definitely have!
Fig 2+3:
Post on history of dyeing:
