Fashion

Look At 1,000 Fashion Illustrations On NYPL's Site

by Stephanie Chon

I wonder if Professor Heng Xu's fashion trend-predicting website would've been able to come up these gorgeous fashion illustrations and sketches from the late 1950s. A little over 1,000 of the fashion illos and drawings are available on New York Public Library's website, where you can see the transformation of popular fashion styles amongst different demographics. As a gift, Walter Teitelbaum — one of the three founders of Creators Studio — gave the New York Public Library all of these fashion illustrations from 1957 to 1969.

Creators Studios has a signature style that is as timeless as the pieces they've drawn. The collection of drawings are divided into five categories: 1950s, 1960s, 1960s youth, 1950s evening wear and 1960s evening wear. All the outfits look extremely classy, filled with a mature color palette, and each illustration comes with a short description of the outfit. As expected, each sketch has beautiful artistic composition. All the sketches have a color theme that really enhances each outfits' pieces.

My favorite has got to be the "Sashed cocktail dress with novelty closings at shoulders" piece. In terms of fashion, I love how the sketch reveals two different ways to wear the dress. However, artistically, I enjoy how Creators Studios kept with the blue color palette from the main drawing versus the off-set alternative sketch.

Take a few minutes (or your lunch break) to enjoy the hundreds upon hundreds of fabulous sketches from the collection.

Check out the rest of the collection here.

Image: Courtesy of the New York Public Library