FASHION & THE ART OF POCHOIR

A celebration of the painstaking hand-stenciling technique known as pochoir, as it was used in luxury fashion publications of the early twentieth century

The 1910s and 1920s witnessed an outpouring of luxury fashion publications that used a hand-stenciling technique known as pochoir (French for stencil). This highly refined, painterly technique, which consists of applying layers of gouache paint or watercolor to achieve bold blocks of saturated color, produced works of visual artistry previously unrivaled in the history of fashion illustration.

Fashion and the Art of Pochoir presents a carefully curated selection of 300 of the most exceptional illustrations from albums produced by the leading French couturiers, as well as from high-end fashion magazines. Artists from Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape, and George Barbier to Umberto Brunelleschi, Eduardo Garcia Benito, and André E. Marty, these artists inaugurated the alliance between fashion and art with highly stylized depictions of the work of cutting edge designers such as Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, and Madeleine Vionnet, among others.

Complete with biographical descriptions of the featured illustrators and fashion designers, Fashion and the Art of Pochoir celebrates the rare―and rarely seen―images that defined a short but magnificent golden age of fashion illustration.

300 color illustrations

April Calahan is a New York-based fashion historian and writer. She is Special Collections Associate at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Cassidy Zachary is a fashion historian and collections manager based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.