Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV: Interpreting the Art of Elegance (original) (raw)

Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV. Interpreting the Art of Elegance is the record of a symposium held in 2005, sparked by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)’s acquisition of a bound album of 190 hand-colored French fashion plates published between approximately 1670 and 1695. Taken together, its 14 essays are the first sustained analysis of a print form produced by the thousands in France at the end of the 17th century, beginning allegedly with Jean Dieu de Saint-Jean around 1670 but quickly zealously followed by his competitors in Paris’s rue Saint-Jacques. To give but one example that helps us to imagine the tremendous impact of these representations at the turn of the 18th century, in 1693, Donneau de Visé, an interested chronicler of fashion and publisher of the Mercure galant, announced to his readers that the print dealer and publisher Nicolas Langlois had for sale some 900 fashion prints representing ‘clothing from the court and other parts of the world [...] d...