ILLUSTRATION



Fashion illustration is not necessarily an art form, but it can be. Like anything else the beauty is partly in the eye of the beholder and partly in the hand of the artist.
Fashion illustration tries to create an image and a feeling. It is a world above fashion flats (i.e. technical drawings devoid of any artistic expression) It tries to capture movement, fantasy, and essence…the movement of the cloth around the human body, the fantasy of the image a person wants to be,, and the essence of the feeling the designer wanted to express. It gives us a portrayal of the person wearing the fashion. It doesn’t have to be detailed or accurate. In this way it differs from fashion photography which can be more or less realistic. I don’t really want to contrast the 2 forms but it becomes inevitable. There was a time when fashion illustration was very popular. But in time people wanted to see more accurately what they were buying. Photography gave them what they wanted. Illustration, sadly, fell out of fashion.
But why is fashion illustration important? In the same way that any art is important. It encapsulates human aspirations and human longings. It captures the zeitgeist of its time in a unique way. It records what humans in a certain era idealized. We may walk away from those ideas and fantasies at a point later in time. That doesn’t matter. It stands as a record of who we were, or at least, who we aspired to be. (understanding here that some will reject the norm, some will embrace it!)







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