fashion plate

English

fashion plate with men's and women's styles (1845)

Alternative forms

• fashion-plate

Etymology

Initially produced as engravings.

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

Noun

fashion plate (plural fashion plates)

1. A picture, usually a full-page advertisement, showing the latest fashion in clothing.
   • 1917, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “Confessions of a Humorist”, in Waifs and Strays‎^[1]:

     By turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would hardly recognize it as vers de societe with neatly shod feet and a fashion-plate illustration.

   • 1920, Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:

     He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; […] he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

   • 1920, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, →OCLC:

     Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which looked as hard as steel plate.

   • 2015, April Calahan, Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 1:

     Today, in an age when the promotion of fashion is dominated by social media, video, and photography, fashion plates are nearly forgotten—relics of history consulted by few aside from professional costume designers and scholars of history.

2. (by extension) A person who dresses in especially stylish fashions.

   I'm no fashion plate, and don't dress to impress.

   • 1868, Louisa M[ay] Alcott, chapter 9, in Little Women: […], part first, Boston, Mass.: Roberts Brothers, published 1869, →OCLC:

     “I told you they dressed me up, but I didn’t tell you that they powdered and squeezed and frizzled, and made me look like a fashion-plate. […] ”

   • 1892, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “Breaking the ice”, in The Great Shadow and Beyond the City, Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, […]; London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., →OCLC:

     In their stiff, crackling dresses of black silk, with jet-bespangled jackets, and little rows of cylindrical grey curls drooping down on either side of their black bonnets, they looked like two old fashion plates which had wandered off into the wrong decade.