The 1910s and 1920s witnessed the advent of luxurious catalogs from the great French fashion houses that used the hand-colored stenciling technique known as pochoir. This highly refined, painterly technique, which consists of applying layers of gouache paint or watercolor to achieve bold blocks of saturated color, produced works of visual artistry previously unrivaled in the history of illustration. Pochoir presents a carefully curated selection of 300 of the most exceptional illustrations from albums produced by couturiers, as well as from high-end magazines popular during the period. From Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape, and Georges Barbier to Umberto Brunelleschi, Eduardo Garcia Benito, and Leon Bakst, these artists inaugurated the alliance between fashion and art, expertly conjuring the atmospheres evoked by the clothing from designers Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, and Madeleine Vionnet, among others. Complete with biographical descriptions of the featured illustrators and fashion designers, Pochoir reveals the rarely seen images that defined a short but magnificent golden age in fashion illustration.
