fashion plate
1
6.1
- noun
- /ˈfæʃən pleɪt/
- Archaic
:
plano de moda
- Disdaining the epic narrative of Salon painting, he turned to caricatures and fashion plates for their potential to record contemporary history.
- Women in fashion plates
Examples
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He opened The Painter of Modern Life with the observation that fashion plates had a double kind of charm: artistic and historical.
Academic text (1997) -
But Labille-Guiard shares more than just the latest styles with these fashion plates; the arrangement of her body also echoes their modified contrapposto poses, which present several views of each figure to disclose as much information as possible about the depicted attire.
Academic text (2007) -
Both the client and the seamstress would have drawn inspiration from engraved fashion plates.
Academic text (2015) -
Each new issue of magazines like the English Woman's Domestic Magazine came with a gorgeously tempting new fashion plate every month.
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In fact, Labille-Guiard provides still more detail than the fashion plates by flipping the edge of her powder blue overskirt to showcase a white lining within.
Academic text (2007) -
In fact, her appearance aligns Labille-Guiard even more directly with another form of commercial imagery associated with women—the fashion plate.
Academic text (2007) -
The representation of women in motion is one of the most striking images in fashion plates of the 1790s and early 1800s, which commonly showed them walking on city streets and in parks, driving their own carriages, and riding horses.
Academic text (2015) -
Women in fashion plates engaged in accepted feminine behavior such as playing the piano or sewing, and they were confined to decorous activities such as sipping tea or strolling in picturesque settings with their well-dressed children.
Academic text (1997) -
The magazine featured a stunning fashion plate that showcased the latest trends for the upcoming season.
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She flipped through the pages, admiring each fashion plate that illustrated the most current styles in haute couture.
How Realistic
Surface Forms
Morphology
fashion + plate
Although 'fashion' is transparent, the head noun 'plate' has no compositional relation to a person's dress or appearance, so the meaning 'a very stylish person' cannot be derived from the literal parts. This is an idiomatic usage where 'plate' does not contribute its usual sense, so a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words would not reliably infer the intended meaning.
Etymology
Fashion plate originally referred to the printed pictures in old magazines that showed the newest clothes, and those pictures were made from a metal plate used for printing. So the name now means 'an illustration showing the latest styles'.