A fashion plate is an illustration (a plate) demonstrating the highlights of fashionable styles of clothing. Fashion plates are not depictions of specific people, but are instead generalized portraits, meant only to dictate the style of clothes that a tailor, dressmaker, or store could make or sell, or to show how different materials could be made up into clothes.
Used figuratively, as is most often the case, the term is a reference to a person whose dress conforms to the latest fashions.
Read more about Fashion Plate: History of Fashion Plates, Costume Plate
Famous quotes containing the words fashion and/or plate:
“Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from what he is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Our press is certainly bankrupt in the “thrill of awe”Motherwise reverence: reverence for nickel plate and brummagem. Let us sincerely hope that this fact will remain a fact forever; for to my mind a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)