Fashion Illustration - History

History

Fashion Illustration has been around for nearly 500 years. Ever since clothes have been in existence and there was a need to translate an idea or image into a garment there has been a need for fashion illustration. Not only do fashion illustrations show a representation or design of a garment but also served as a form of art. Fashion illustration shows the presence of hand and is said to be a visual luxury. (Drake, 9).

More recently, there has been a decline of fashion illustration in the late 1930s when Vogue began to replace its celebrated illustrated covers with photographic images. Laird Borrelli, author of Fashion Illustration Now states,

Fashion Illustration has gone from being one of the sole means of fashion communication to having a very minor role. The first photographic cover of Vogue was a watershed in the history of fashion illustration and a watershed mark of its decline. Photographs, no matter how altered or retouched, will always have some association with reality and by association truth. I like to think of them as prose poems and having more fictional narratives. They are more obviously filtered through an individual vision than photos. Illustration lives on, but in the position of a poor relative to the fashion.

Read more about this topic:  Fashion Illustration

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.
    Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)