Costume Plates and Fashion Plates

Differences Between Costume Plates and Fashion Plates

Many people do not realise that there is a difference between a costume plate and a fashion plate. Fashion plates promote and publicize possible future fashions. Fashion plates are always intended as an idea of a how a new possible fashion might be worn. Some of the suggested fashions may never in reality ever be worn. They are a drawing of a designer's idea and often deliberately provocative. So fashion plates can and do often show an air of fantasy. You can read more about fashion plate history in my special new section soon where you will see images and read about names of typical fashion periodicals that carried fashion plates.

Costume plates are different in that they technically show costume as it was worn in the past especially everyday past fashions as an historical costume record. Such records of costume almost always include national or theatrical dress. Costume plates are about the fashions of the past and fashion plates are about fashion ideas in the here and now or the future.

If you want to collect fashion or costume plates some knowledge of the names of the original sources is useful and you will soon be able to read more about the first costume plates.

Fashion and Costume Print Prices

The late James Laver, fashion historian also noted that fashion plates were already becoming scarcer by the 1940s. Once moving film and movies arrived Hollywood and other film company costume departments began to snap up fashion and costume plates to enable them to reproduce costumes more accurately.

Today, it is still possible to find good fashion plates in antique shops, but more and more of us are buying our plates from internet shops such as those found at eBay which is an incredible resource for this format. It still amazes me how many have survived and the internet has opened up this easy to collect treasure for enthusiasts. In the main I feel sales of fashion plates are one of the things eBay does well with treasures to be found worldwide. It should be noted that fashion plates are different from trade plates, which were just advertisements which gave ideas on how to make up the fabric products sold by a manufacturer.

Hand Coloured Engraving from 1831 La Belle Assemblée

Prices vary and are dependant on the quality and rare value of the print. Here above and below I show two examples of fashion plate engravings bought from eBay in March 2005, through a respected UK seller known as Cabrio4. They cost me £15 for the two. Of course if many others had been bidding that day, my purchase may have cost me much much more or I may have abandoned buying the prints altogether. However these were both a very fine purchase and are in a timeframe worth collecting. The detail is exquisite. On other occasions I've paid much less or much more for a print.

One word of warning with bidding for these at eBay - don't get too carried away until you know what you are bidding on. Fashion plates can be like buses. You don't see many for a week or two and then just like buses dozens appear. My advice is that to begin collecting you just watch eBay sales of these for a few weeks if you are interested in starting a collection. Then use your knowledge to gauge the going rate noting the differences between types of plate and the variety available.

This pursuit can be an interesting and related alternative to collecting vintage clothing. It may be used as well, to enhance a clothing collection by helping you become more knowledgeable about style differences in fashionable dress.

I will be adding some more of Cabrio4's plates to the site in due course. If you want to learn more about fashion and costume plates please visit my new section on this topic in due course where more historical periodical naming information can be dealt with more fully.

Post Title → Costume Plates and Fashion Plates

Never Too Old to Act Young

A JUGGLER on a unicycle wobbles past a cluster of clubgoers, deftly avoiding a collision that might spill their candy-color cocktails down the front of premium-label jeans. A clown on stilts hobbles past a table full of neatly coiffed men with untucked dress shirts who don’t even look up from their drinks. It’s hard enough to project an air of unwavering cool at New York nightclubs. It’s even harder to do so in the presence of a clown.

But Carnival at Bowlmor Lanes, which opened last month on University Place, is not just any club; it owes more to the memory of P. T. Barnum than Steve Rubell. With 16,000 square feet of wire walkers, sword swallowers and Coney Island-style games like ring toss and goldfish pong, it’s a working carnival within the confines of a nightclub.

At this carnival, however, you wash down corn dogs with $14 blue-cotton-candy martinis, and the carnies barking out “Step right up, folks” look more like recent N.Y.U. sociology graduates than ex-cons.

“It’s like a cross between Circus Circus and the Boardwalk at the Jersey Shore,” said Rudy Temiz, 31, an electronics retailer who had just won two goldfish and three plush toys, and was enjoying a drink with a friend.

At first glance, such a splashy approach to after-hours fun seems at odds with the recessionary era in night life, where conventional wisdom has it that low-key is the new black. But with its emphasis on participatory fun, Carnival at Bowlmor Lanes is keeping with the move toward interactive night life.

Nightcrawlers who are weary of Club Row haunts offering little more than $400 bottle service and tedious electronica beats often drop the attitude — well, some of it — and settle in for a night of table tennis among the celebrities at SPiN New York (co-owned by Susan Sarandon) in the Flatiron district, martini-fueled gutterballs at Lucky Strike Lanes & Lounge on West 42nd or miniature golf in a foursome of plaid-shirt types at Bushwick Country Club in Brooklyn. (Carnival’s proprietor, Tom Shannon, was an early adopter. His Bowlmor Lanes bowling alley one floor below has been a magnet for trendy young clubbers for years.)

Particularly in lean times, the thinking goes, people have little patience with velvet ropes and bottles of Grey Goose. What they want is escapism.

“It’s the perfect club for this economy,” said Candice Spano, 23, a hairdresser from Staten Island. “The standard club is everyone sitting around talking and you can’t even hear each other,” she said. “Here, you don’t have to entertain each other. Here, you get entertained.”

Jack Anteby, 28, a wholesale jeweler from Brooklyn, certainly seemed to be. Surrounded by friends, he fired a fastball into a target a dozen feet away in the “Get Tanked” booth. Steee-rike! A lever swung, a trap door opened and a female employee in shorts and a T-shirt plunged into a tank of water. Mr. Anteby raised a fist in triumph. “I’m the only one who’s hit it, with at least 60 balls thrown!” he crowed.

His wife, Doris Anteby, said that her husband’s favorite place was the Seaside Heights Boardwalk in New Jersey, and he had been pestering her to come to the club since it opened. “He’s almost 30, but he acts 10,” she said.

Post Title → Never Too Old to Act Young