Lady Hardcover Journal – Vintage Fashion Illustration Notebook

In the decade before the Revolution, Parisian milliners were engaged in a quiet competition to see how far a hat could go. The answer, as any collector of the engraved fashion plates of the 1770s and 1780s will confirm, was considerably further than reason suggested. This journal carries one such hat on its cover: a wide-brimmed straw base, a spread fan of woven yellow straw, an enormous knot of crimson ribbon, and above it all a full eruption of red and black feathers reaching to the top of the picture plane. The woman beneath it meets your eye with perfect composure.

The image is a hand-colored engraving from the tradition of the French fashion plate, the genre that flourished in publications such as the Galerie des Modes et Costumes Français and the Cabinet des Modes in the years of Louis XVI, when Paris was the acknowledged center of European dress and the fashion plate was the mechanism by which that influence spread. These engravings were at once commercial documents and works of art, produced by skilled colorists working from printed outlines, each copy slightly different from the last. The one on this cover has all the warmth and slight irregularity of the originals.

The figure is shown from the waist up, her body turned slightly in three-quarter view while her face tilts toward the viewer. She wears a light blue fichu at the neck and the beginnings of a formal gown, though the hat is clearly the subject of the picture. The brim is wide and dark, the crown built up in stages: a base of yellow woven straw, fanned and spread like a theatrical prop; a massive crimson ribbon looped and gathered at the front; and above that, a burst of long feathers, deep red tipped with black, fanning upward in an arc that dominates the entire upper half of the image.

The background is the mottled cream and grey of aged paper, textured and slightly uneven, giving the image the quality of something recovered from a print portfolio rather than reproduced from a digital file. The colors are the warm, slightly oxidized tones of old hand-coloring: the yellow of the straw is the yellow of old gilt, and the red of the feathers carries a touch of rust. It is an image that rewards slow looking, which makes it an appropriate cover for a book intended for slow writing.