Fashion & Style

A Vogue cover took a week to draw, and René Gruau could sell a perfume with three brushstrokes. Posters and prints made when fashion was illustrated rather than photographed. The illustrated fashion poster ran from the 1900s through the 1960s, the period before high-end photography took over the brief.

The collection spans the great schools and the great houses. The Art Deco fashion illustration of the 1920s, when Erté and George Barbier set the language for evening wear and evening writing. Paul Iribe and Georges Lepape for Paul Poiret. The thin-lined drawings of René Gruau, who defined Dior's visual identity through the 1950s. Bernard Villemot for Bally. Antonio Lopez through the 1970s. Vogue and Harper's Bazaar cover illustration before the camera replaced the brush. American department-store advertising from the mid-century. Perfume, hat, and shoe campaigns from Paris and Milan.

These were commissioned art. Editors paid illustrators to invent how a season felt, because no other medium could. The originals were thrown out at the deadline. The ones that survived are the design record of how style was sold before the photograph took over.

Available in seven sizes, A4 through A0.

- Try it on your wall before you buy. Every poster supports our See It On Your Wall preview tool.
- Printed locally for the UK, US, and Canada.
- 200gsm archival paper, pigment-based inks.