The 1910s and 1920s witnessed the advent of luxurious catalogs from the great French fashion houses that used the hand-colored stenciling technique known aspochoir. This highly refined, painterly technique, which consists of applying layers ofgouache paint or watercolor to achieve bold blocks of saturated color, produced worksof visual artistry previously unrivaled in the history of illustration.
Fashion and the Art of Pochoirpresents a carefully curated selection of 300 of the most exceptionalillustrations from albums produced by couturiers, as well as from high-endmagazines popular during the period. From Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape, and GeorgesBarbier to Umberto Brunelleschi, Eduardo Garcia Benito, and Leon Bakst, these artistsinaugurated the alliance between fashion and art, expertly conjuring theatmospheres evoked by the clothing from designers Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, and Madeleine Vionnet, among others.
Complete with biographical descriptions of the featured illustrators and fashiondesigners, Fashion and the Art of Pochoir reveals the rarely seen images that defined a short but magnificen tgolden age in fashion illustration.