Fashion Designs from Gazette du Bon Ton

This hand-colored lithograph presents four elegant women's fashions from the prestigious French fashion journal Gazette du Bon Ton. The designs showcase the silhouettes and accessories of early 1920s haute couture: long skirts, structured coats, and elaborate hats typical of the period. Created by the journal's fashion illustrators, the figures display the elongated proportions and stylized features characteristic of fashion plates—descendants of 18th and 19th-century caricature traditions that exaggerated human forms for satiric or commercial effect. Unlike the political caricatures of Gillray or Daumier, these designs served commercial purposes, yet employed similar printmaking techniques and distorted proportions. Fashion illustration remained part of the broader visual culture that included comic and caricature art, sharing techniques of line, exaggeration, and social commentary through dress and deportment.