Produced by Louise Hope, Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [This e-text comes in three forms: Unicode (UTF-8), Latin-1 and ASCII. Use the one that works best on your text reader. --If “œ” displays as a single character, and apostrophes and quotation marks are “curly” or angled, you have the UTF-8 version (best). If any part of this paragraph displays as garbage, try changing your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding”. If that doesn’t work, proceed to: --In the Latin-1 version, “œ” is two letters, but French words like “étude” have accents and “æ” is a single letter. Apostrophes and quotation marks will be straight (“typewriter” form). Again, if you see any garbage in this paragraph and can’t get it to display properly, use: --The ASCII-7 or rock-bottom version. Quoted text in French or Italian will not have its original accents, but English text will be essentially unchanged. Footnotes that give translations of quoted material have been kept in their original location. Other footnotes are mainly bibliographic; these are grouped at the end of the text. Dates originally printed as “XVIII^{me} siècle” and similar, with superscript “me”, have been simplified to “XVIIIme”. Some illustrations have been shifted up or down to avoid interrupting paragraphs. Many illustrations contain original text, either within the picture itself or as a decorative caption below. Short captions are given in {braces} after the modern (1967) caption. Others are collected at the end of the e-text. Spelling and punctuation of this and other original material is unchanged.] United States National Museum Bulletin 250 Contributions from The Museum of History and Technology Paper 60, Pages 65-92 ORIGIN AND EARLY HISTORY OF THE FASHION PLATE _John L Nevinson_ Smithsonian Press Washington, D.C. 1967 [Illustration: Figure 1.--DRESS OF SIGMUND VON HERBERSTEIN for the Polish Embassy in 1517. Over his doublet and breeches he wears a brocade gown lined with silk. From _Gratae Posteritati_, 1560. (_Courtesy of British Museum, London._) {A MAXIMILIANO CAESARE AD SIGISMVNDVM POLONIAE REGEM ET BASILIVM MAGNUM MOSCOVIAE PRINCIPEM SIC VESTITVS DESTINATVS SVM.}] _John L. Nevinson_ _Origin and Early History Of the Fashion Plate_ _A fashion plate is a costume portrait indicating a suitable style of clothing that can be made or secured. Fashion illustration began in the late 15th and early 16th centuries with portrait pictures that made a person’s identity known not by his individual features but rather by his dress._