Three magazines are worth special mention. _La Belle Assemblée, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine_ “addressed particularly to the ladies” was published in London from 1806 to 1868 (fig. 32). During the 1820s the plates were of less merit, but there was a later improvement. In 1809, the London print firm of Ackermann began to publish _The Repository of Arts, Letters, Commerce_ and _Manufactures Fashion and Politics_. This magazine had a much wider scope, and its illustrations are of good quality (fig. 33). A special feature was the inclusion of small sample squares of new materials pasted into the text which named and described them. This feature usefully supplements industrial records of the period, which are hard to come by and difficult to handle in that those preserved are usually bulky, not too well dated, and show no distinction between fabrics made for export and those for the home market. Thirdly, from 1830 to 1898, _Godey’s Lady’s Book_ was published in Philadelphia, under titles which varied from time to time (fig. 34). This magazine is much more famous for its other contents than for its fashion articles; its plates, often copied from French engravings, are of low quality and rather crudely colored. The number, variation, and wide distribution of 19th-century fashion plates has proved something of a handicap to the historian in search of reliable information about dress. Mr. Holland has studied them from the artistic angle, tracing many of the French artists, who did not scorn fashion work. The relation of fashion plates to Victorian dresses as worn has been touched on by many costume writers,[47] but the relation of the fashion plate to the fashion house has yet to be studied; in particular, the large sheets put out by wholesale drapers and textile manufacturers and the advertisements of ready-made clothing that appear in magazines all through the 19th century have not yet been studied to full advantage. This account of the fashion plate is necessarily incomplete, because its history and development has not been continuous, and new links may yet be found. The earlier period has been treated in greater detail because it is generally less well-known, and the boundaries between the fashion plate and the costume picture are not all easy to define. The fashion plate has died slowly, the victim of the photograph showing the model wearing actual clothes and the sketch giving the impression of a fashion artist at a dress show. Through the centuries, the fashion plate has provided the link between the wearer and the maker of clothes. It has also attracted as collectors those studying both the social background of a period and the history of costume. U.S. Government Printing Office: 1967 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402 Price 35 cents _Footnotes_ Notes that were shown in their original location are repeated here for completeness.