News & Announcements

A new exhibition in the third floor display cases outside Special Collections looks at changes in fashion illustration and printing technology. The Color of Fashion: Advances in Printing and Fashion Plates, 1770s-1930s will be on display throughout the fall semester.

An excerpt from the introduction to the exhibition:

For more than 200 years, fashion has been “plated” in books and magazines with illustrations that trace styles, trends, and fads in costume. Hence the “fashion plate” – a person who tries to measure up to the illustrations of the day.

Changes in fashion often reflect and react directly to changes occurring in society. The way they have been portrayed in print has also responded to changes in printing technology: fashion “plating” has always been on the leading edge of graphic design and press development and has helped drive innovation in color printing.

This post introduces a new feature here in Special Collections, a monthly look at an item in our collections. This month we feature a concept painting created in 1964 to visualize a scene from the film The Great Race. The movie, by the creator of the Pink Panther franchise, Blake Edwards, was released in 1965.

Item of the Month features will be posted here as a downloadable pdf file. Printed copies of the brochure are also available in Special Collections as well as the first floor of the Library.

Download Item of the Month, September 2007 - Concept Paintings from The Great Race