Gallery of Fashion

• Hand-coloured frontispiece print
• Gallery of Fashion 1798 VOL.V
• Published as the Acts direct April 1,1798, by N. Heideloff
• at the Gallery of Fashion Office, No. 90 Wardour Street
• 241 x 292mm (9½ x 11½in)
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Gallery of Fashion, founded in London in 1794, is the earliest and most beautiful of the early émigré fashion journals.

In the preface, Niklaus von Heideloff, a miniaturist who fled Paris during the Revolution, promised his subscribers that the dresses featured were accurate copies of those worn by ladies of rank and fashion, and that his journal was a collection of the most fashionable and elegant Dresses in Vogue . . . the first and only one published in this country; it surpasses anything of the kind formerly published at Paris.

Fashion plate artists that fled from Paris, and the political upheavals that began with the Revolution and continued during the Napoleonic Wars, made London the centre of fashion plate production until the 1830s.

• Source: Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department
• À la Mode, 1795 to 1920 Fashion Plates
• www.bpl.org/research/rb/fashion/case1.htm