Ackermann’s Fashion Plates June 1812

 

Springtime brings thoughts of babies and motherhood, and thus we have yet another fashion plate featuring a young child. Unlike many earlier Ackermann fashion plates that include children, the toddler in this plate features so large as to almost obscure the details of the fashionable dress its mother is wearing. Strangely, mom is wearing gloves (of fashionable lemon) while interacting with her child! Baby has lost its little red shoe; can mother’s “small sprig of geranium placed in the hair on the left side” be far behind?

 

I got excited when I spied beautiful sample #4 in this month’s patterns of British Manufacture. To my disappointment when I read the accompanying description, it is not a fabric, but rather, a “specimen of the new embossed fancy paper, colored in oil, over a silver ground… recommended for the backs of books, for hand and pole screens, covering and lining boxes, card-racks, &c, &c.” Can I say I’d rather have a dress made with such a lovely pattern than a card-rack or a lined box? But I suppose fashionable Regency ladies would just have to settle for the fabric in sample #3, a “new lilac spotted sarsnet, for evening or full dress.”