fashion plate

Definition

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

Etymology

Initially produced as engravings.

Example Sentences

• "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."
• "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."
• "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."