Journal des Dames – 5 Volumes with 178 Fashion Pochoirs

These five volumes with 178 remarkable pochoir fashion prints is Journal des Dames et des Modes, Costumes Parisiens. The work was published between 1912 and 1914 with only 1,279 copies printed in total.

The volumes are bound in beautiful 3/4 red Morocco. It is period binding with gold decoration to spine. It features the original parts bound in. It is missing the last two parts (numbered plates 1 to 176 available with two unnumbered plates). This is likely due to the war beginning and publication issues as a result of this.

Journal des Dames sought to be an expression of French elegance. It showed the fashion and also the culture of the early 20th century. Each illustration was printed on high quality paper using excellent pochoir coloring. Pochoir is created when single layers of color are added by hand to a lithograph using a stencil.

Christina Nuzzin noted Dames was “of the most refined Parisian elegance, and illustrated by the most gifted designers and illustrators of the time.” Leading artists of the time contributed to the Journal including Barbier, Brunelleschii, Bakst, J. van Brock, Wegener, Drian, and many others. George Barbier’s contributions to this work are particularly desirable. He contributed greatly to design in this era and also had work featured in Vogue.

“The Journal des Dames et des Modes lasted only two years (the first issue appeared on 1 June 1912, and the last on 1 August 1914). This stylish periodical was issued regularly three times a month, and ceased publication upon the outbreak of the First World War. With its expensive layout, its society columns, its poetic texts, its colourful annotations, and its fashion reports, it represented the last brilliant, refined, impartial, and aestheticizing impulse of a happy and optimistic society occupying the centre of the stage in the period that has aptly been called the ‘belle époque’… It was essentially the testimony, the history–illustrated, or rather ‘clothed’ and narrated–of the customs, ideas, and ideals of a society and a period.

“Every issue carefully reviewed all the current novelties of fashion, [and] every issue carried coloured stencil prints reproducing the latest conceptions of the fashion designers.” For the text, “the magazine could count on the collaboration of the best known writers and littérateurs of the time,” including Henri Duvernois, Marcel Boulenger, Paul Margueritte, Jean Cocteau, and many others. The artistic contributions “included the works of some outstanding artists and many promising young ones. Most frequent in his appearance, and outstanding for the quality of his illustrations, was Georges Barbier.” Other artists included Léon Bakst, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Umberto Brunelleschi, H. Robert Dammy, Paul Iribe, Charles Martin, and Fernand Simeon. (Christina Nuzzi, Parisian Fashion from the “Journal des Dames et des Modes”)