fashion plate

plural fashion plates · alternative fashion-plate

1. A picture, usually a full-page advertisement, showing the latest fashion in clothing.

   By turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would hardly recognize it as vers de societe with neatly shod feet and a fashion-plate illustration.

   1917, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “Confessions of a Humorist”, in Waifs and Strays

   3 more examples

   He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; […] he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

   1920, Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

   Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which looked as hard as steel plate.

   1920, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, →OCLC

   Today, in an age when the promotion of fashion is dominated by social media, video, and photography, fashion plates are nearly forgotten—relics of history consulted by few aside from professional costume designers and scholars of history.

   2015, April Calahan, Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 1

2. broadlyA person who dresses in especially stylish fashions.

   I'm no fashion plate, and don't dress to impress.

   2 more examples

   “I told you they dressed me up, but I didn’t tell you that they powdered and squeezed and frizzled, and made me look like a fashion-plate. […]”

   1868, Louisa M[ay] Alcott, chapter 9, in Little Women: […], 1st part, Boston, Mass.: Roberts Brothers, published 1869, →OCLC

   In their stiff, crackling dresses of black silk, with jet-bespangled jackets, and little rows of cylindrical grey curls drooping down on either side of their black bonnets, they looked like two old fashion plates which had wandered off into the wrong decade.

   1892, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “Breaking the ice”, in The Great Shadow and Beyond the City, Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, […]; London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., →OCLC