particular time. She argues that fashion plates are neither costume prints nor caricatures, but rather one of the earliest ways of communicating information about fashion trends: “The fashion plate has no other raison d’être than to impart information about the current or the coming mode.”281 Fashion magazines, just as fashion plates, communicate trend information and are therefore a source of documentation of trends. While the fashion plates can be argued to be the first instance of relatively large-scale popular communication of trend information, there are earlier examples. Moore lists the following: “Verbal description, display of merchandise for sale, the sight of novelties worn at church or wherever clothes worthy of imitation were paraded, the recommendations of tailors and dressmakers to their clients, the suggestion of adventurous clients to tailors and dressmakers, the reports of agents commissioned to buy materials or merely to collect intelligence, and the circulation of dolls clad in miniature replicas of full-scale garments.”282 While the Pandora dolls were impractical, costly, and as it turned out a threat to national security as described in Chapter 2, some of the other methods of diffusing trend information are still efficient for instance ‘parading clothes worthy of imitation.’ However, gathering fashion trend information in a publication and illustrating this information has proven to be a viable concept for consumers and fashion system alike. Providing news about fashion trends through fashion papers began in France in 1763 with Le Mercure Galant. In the United States, the first periodical for women, Lady’s Magazine, dates back to 1792, but it was Godey’s Lady’s Book, published between 1830 and 1898, that is considered to have laid the editorial groundwork for fashion journalism as a genre.283 As some of these early examples show, the publications mixed trend information with information on hairdressing, interior decoration and even transportation as well as society news. Magazines in addition to comprising a series of voices or points of view on fashion trends, were also complex 281
Fashion Through Fashion Plates 1771-1970, 10. Fashion Through Fashion Plates 1771-1970, 10-11. 283 In Vogue, 4. 282
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