The first Instagrammer lived in the 16th century and was called Matthäus Schwarz. This German financier made the act of dressing his life's passion and wanted to share it. He hired artists to draw and color his elaborate and very expensive outfits and, between 1520 and 1560, he collected 137 watercolors (today they would be selfies) in which he described his outfits and the circumstances in which he wore them. Schwarz's drawings are considered the first chronicle of fashion.
After this pioneer, illustration has been a creative tool to represent the clothing of the last five centuries. And also the changes in society and the arts. Like the moment when men got rid of sophistication, lace, color, floral prints and showy jewelry and began to consider them a feminine frivolity (spoiler, it was after the French Revolution).
The milestones and characters that have marked the history of fashion illustration splash with ink, watercolor, acrylic, collage or pixels on the pages of Sketching fashion. A practical history of fashion illustration (GG). Its authors, journalist Laia Beltran and illustrator Lucy Victoria Davis, trace a journey that begins in the Renaissance and reaches the 21st century, when photographic saturation and the brutal capacity for propagation provided by the digital age return an eclipsed discipline to the foreground. since the '90s as it fell out of favor with editors and brands for affordable, real-time runway photography.
Through the pages of the book parade authors who, over the course of the 20th century, elevated this discipline to the category of art, such as George Barbier, Georges Lepape, René Gruau, Kenneth Paul Block and the revolutionaries Antonio Lopez and Tony Viramontes.
This journey through the history of fashion illustration and the great authors of the 20th century is joined by 21 of the most powerful figures in the field of fashion illustration at the moment. They show their work and explain their creative process. They also reveal who their favorite colleagues are. And among the most revered names, David Dowton, witness to the golden age of haute couture and who since 2011 has been the first and only resident artist of the century-old Claridge's hotel in London, where he portrays live portraits of his illustrious guests, whether they are stars , aristocrats or models. Laia Beltrán describes him in a way that leaves no doubt about the role he occupies in this world that unites fashion and drawing: "Bowton is the Messi of illustration."
And if Bowton is one of the stars of fashion illustration, among the great ladies of ink we must count Gladys Perint Palmer (Hungary, 1947). Her energetic artwork brings fashion to life with spectacular, spontaneous visual effects, such as using an eyedropper to apply ink. She landed her first Vogue cover in the 1960s and her spontaneous work has illuminated advertising campaigns for Chanel, Dior, Estee Lauder, Geoffrey Beene, Lancome, Missoni, Neiman-Marcus, Oscar de la Renta, The Metropolitan Museum, Valentino and Vivienne Westwood. To celebrate the achievements of this acclaimed illustrator, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom declared May 24, 2006, Gladys Perint Palmer Day.
Chanel, Dior, Prada, Chloé and Givenchy regularly commission sketches of their creations. They know that, in a world where anyone feels like a photographer with a phone in their hand and there is a constant bombardment of over-edited images, an artist's unique work once again has a great impact. Because as the Valencian Vincent Mustache says: “A drawing explains the abstract better than photography. It makes you get closer, because it is not a reality, it is a fantasy.”
