Trois Chapeaux (Three Hats)

This fashion illustration by Camille Roger presents three elegantly dressed women modeling wide-brimmed hats adorned with straw, feathers, and fabric trim—the height of 1920s millinery. Rendered in pen and watercolor with bold black outlines, the figures display the period's characteristic elongated necks and simplified features.

Roger's work belongs to a long tradition of fashion satire descending from 18th-century caricaturists like Gillray and Rowlandson, who mocked the excesses of contemporary dress. By the early twentieth century, fashion illustration had become a dominant form of social commentary in periodicals and journals. These designs—exaggerated, stylized, sometimes grotesque in their proportions—functioned as both advertisement and gentle mockery of consumer culture, occupying the space where fine art caricature met commercial mass media, a predecessor to modern comic and graphic design.