Nouveaux ajustements pour les sports d'hiver in La Gazette du bon ton

Original extract from La Gazette du bon ton, illustrated with thirteen colored drawings signed M.T.

Famous fashion magazine founded in 1912 by Lucien Vogel, La Gazette du bon ton was published until 1925 with an interruption during the War from 1915 to 1920, due to the mobilization of its editor-in-chief. It consists of 69 issues printed in only 2000 copies and is illustrated notably with 573 colored plates and 148 sketches representing models by great couturiers. From their publication, these luxurious publications "addressed bibliophiles and worldly aesthetes" (Françoise Tétart-Vittu "La Gazette du bon ton" in Dictionary of Fashion, 2016). Printed on fine laid paper, they use a typeface specially created for the magazine by Georges Peignot, the Cochin character, adopted in 1946 by Christian Dior. The prints are produced using the metal stencil technique, heightened in colors and some highlighted with gold or palladium.
The adventure began in 1912 when Lucien Vogel, man of the world and fashion - he had already participated in the magazine Femina - decided to found with his wife Cosette de Brunhoff (sister of Jean, Babar's father) La Gazette du bon ton whose subtitle was then "Art, fashion and frivolities." Georges Charensol reports the editor-in-chief's words: "En 1910, observe-t-il, il n'existait aucun journal de mode véritablement artistique et représentatif de l'esprit de son époque. Je songeais donc à faire un magazine de luxe avec des artistes véritablement modernes [...] J'étais certain du succès car pour la mode aucun pays ne peut rivaliser avec la France." ["In 1910, he observed, there was no truly artistic fashion magazine representative of the spirit of its time. I was therefore thinking of making a luxury magazine with truly modern artists [...] I was certain of success because for fashion no country can rival France."] ("A great art publisher. Lucien Vogel" in Les Nouvelles littéraires, n°133, May 1925). The magazine's success was immediate, not only in France, but also in the United States and South America.
Originally, Vogel therefore assembled a group of seven artists: André-Édouard Marty and Pierre Brissaud, followed by Georges Lepape and Dammicourt; and finally his friends from the École des beaux-arts who were George Barbier, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, or Charles Martin. Other talents quickly joined the team: Guy Arnoux, Léon Bakst, Benito, Boutet de Monvel, Umberto Brunelleschi, Chas Laborde, Jean-Gabriel Domergue, Raoul Dufy, Édouard Halouze, Alexandre Iacovleff, Jean Émile Laboureur, Charles Loupot, Charles Martin, Maggie Salcedo. These artists, mostly unknown when Lucien Vogel called upon them, would later become emblematic and sought-after artistic figures. These same illustrators created the drawings for the Gazette's advertisements.
The plates highlight and sublimate the dresses of seven creators of the era: Lanvin, Doeuillet, Paquin, Poiret, Worth, Vionnet and Doucet. The couturiers provided exclusive models for each issue. Nevertheless, some of the illustrations featured no real model, but only the illustrator's idea of contemporary fashion.
La Gazette du bon ton is a decisive step in fashion history. Combining aesthetic demand and plastic unity, it brought together for the first time the great talents of the worlds of arts, letters and fashion and imposed, through this alchemy, a completely new image of women, slender, independent and audacious, also carried by the new generation of couturiers Coco Chanel, Jean Patou, Marcel Rochas...
Acquired in 1920 by Condé Montrose Nast, La Gazette du bon ton would largely inspire the new composition and aesthetic choices of the "dying little magazine" that Nast had purchased a few years earlier: Vogue magazine.
Very fine copy.