Jay T. Last Collection of Fashion Prints and Ephemera

The Jay T. Last collection of fashion prints and ephemera contains approximately 7,500 items dating from the 1570s to the early 1900s, with the bulk of the items spanning from 1825 to 1900. This collection consists of fashion plates, advertising prints, broadsides, and promotional ephemera produced for clothiers and tailors, dry goods suppliers, garment manufacturers, fashion publications, and textile companies affiliated with the design, production, and/or sale of clothing, accessories, and dry goods. While most of the materials are American, there are also notable quantities of foreign items in the collection, including French fashion plates, fez labels in several languages, and foreign textile labels. Labels affixed to textile samples of various sizes are also included.

Materials are broadly divided into two series: small-size items (11 x 14 inches or smaller) and large-size items (typically larger than 11 x 14 inches). Small-size items are described broadly at the series level; large-size items and select small-size items are fully inventoried with printers, artists, and publishers indexed by name. The collection includes 250 large-size items comprised mainly of lithographic advertising prints and fashion plates. Small-size items number approximately 7,250 and contain a variety of promotional materials including trade cards, calendars, booklets, product labels, fashion plates, periodicals, clippings, and printed billheads and letterheads with manuscript text. Each series is divided into subseries according to the kind of business, service, or trade sponsoring the advertisement. Types of businesses have been identified according to the principal type of product(s) manufactured or sold by the business. These subseries are arranged as follows: Accessories; Clothiers, Tailors, and Dry Goods; Fashion Plates And Periodicals; Footwear; Garments; Headwear; Sewing Supplies; and Textiles.

This collection contains many American and European printed illustrations, commonly known as "fashion plates," that typically depict men, women, or children modeling current clothing and dress styles. Small plates (usually 14 x 10 inches or less in this collection) illustrated the pages of magazines and bound volumes that were marketed specifically for women. Larger plates, primarily intended for display, advertised the products and services of fashion designers, tailors, and pattern makers.

The collection provides a resource for studying clothing and dress, sales and merchandise, textiles, and sewing, as well as changing fashion trends in the United States and Europe in the 19th century. The images are primarily promotional in nature and provide information about the history of the American fashion, clothing, dry-goods, and textile industries and the evolution of their advertising strategies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As graphic materials, the prints offer evidence of developing techniques and trends in printmaking, and of the artists, engravers, lithographers, printers, and publishers involved in the creative process.