Series I. Fashion Prints and Ephemera (small size)

This series contains approximately 7,250 small-size printed items that pertain to fashion, clothing and dress, textiles, and sewing supplies from the late 16th century to the early 20th century, with the bulk of the items dating from 1825-1900. The material consists of trade cards, calendars, booklets, product labels, fashion plates, periodicals, clippings, and printed billheads and letterheads with manuscript text.

Items in this series are grouped broadly 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. Note that advertisements for a company may feature specific products that overlap with specialty shops and manufacturing companies in other subseries. Due to the fact that the collection covers a wide date span, categorization of items is complicated by the evolution of American commerce in the 19th and early 20th centuries, from specialized shops and tradesmen to dry goods and department stores selling an array of ready-made products. Also, advertising practices often encourage overlaps among subseries. A trade card, for example, might advertise raw materials, a finished product, a tradesman, manufacturing company, retail establishment, or some combination. In many cases, a manufacturing company created a stock trade card that dealers or agents personalized with their own textual advertisements.

The majority of items in this series promote clothiers, tailors, dry-goods establishments and specialty manufacturers, or showcase current fashions in the 19th century, with two notable exceptions: a group of hand-colored woodcuts from Hans Weigel's 1577 Trachtenbuch (Box 2, Folder 7), and a group of Esnauts et Rapilly prints illustrating French headwear and hairstyles circa 1777 (Box 2, Folder 4).