Le Bois dans la Mode (Wood in Fashion)

This hand-colored pochoir illustration from a French fashion journal satirizes the 1920s vogue for wooden ornaments and sculptural accessories. Elegantly dressed figures sport exaggerated wooden elements—hats, pendants, and sculptural embellishments—rendered in sharp blacks and warm ochres. The accompanying text mocks how forest materials, stripped from American riverbeds, have infiltrated high couture, reducing living wood to fashionable novelty. The work exemplifies the pochoir technique favored by luxury periodicals, where stenciled color layers produced refined, limited editions for wealthy audiences. It belongs to a lineage of fashion satire extending from 18th-century caricature through early modernism, mocking society's appetite for novelty and conspicuous consumption. The piece captures Art Deco's geometric sensibility while gently ridiculing the arbitrariness of style itself.