sleepy

The Met's digital fashion plate collection – this is a super great resource, as their scanned images are in really high quality and they have a ton of them! the strength of this collection is definitely in the 19th century, but they do have some late 18th century things as well as some early 20th century stuff. they have things categorized by year and such, but I've found it's worth clicking through because not all the category names are accurate (there's one labeled "men's" that is definitely not what would have been considered menswear in that era). the dating is also pretty good for the most part, as many of the plates have dates on them, and most of the categorization is by date

Wikimedia Commons – as someone who works with historical images (both on this blog and for my PhD) I really love Wikimedia Commons! they have cool category features, one of which is "fashion plates by decade" and that's one that I use for the blog. the quality on these is a little more hit-or-miss, as they're uploaded by different people and organizations, and the dating can sometimes be hard to get super accurate if the plate itself doesn't have a date, but at least you'll usually know the decade

Catalogues and Wishbooks – this is a website that I'm so glad I found! (you may have seen images from it before either on the blog or elsewhere, as the images often include "Christmas musetechnical" above the image). I was really struggling to find 20th century stuff, but this website archives scans of a ton of 20th century (and into the 21st century) magazines, all organized by company and year. unfortunately, the scans aren't always the greatest quality, and it's difficult to zoom in without things getting a bit blurry, but the sheer amount of resources there is fantastic!

and I'll put a final note (although I won't officially number it) that I sometimes use Pinterest. I've always been cautious with Pinterest in the past, since both dating and quality are super iffy, but now I trust it even less since it has been infiltrated with AI slop (folks can read my anti-AI stance here if they're interested ☺️). even with my settings and filters set to no AI, if I want use what appears to be a historical image from Pinterest, I will often run a reverse image search to ensure it existed elsewhere on the internet before circa 2020 to ascertain that it is, in fact, a real image and not some AI-generated garbage (and yes, I have now seen a number of AI-generated fashion plates 😭). it turns out that many of the 20th century images on Pinterest are from the Catalogues and Wishbooks site anyway, but there are some things that I just have not been able to find elsewhere, such as a very large number of gorgeous late 19th La Mode Illustrée plates, so I will also venture into the wilds of Pinterest from time to time with great caution

I'll also say that if you have a local or favorite museum/collection, it might be worth just checking to see if they have any digitized collections with fashion plates! since fashion plates were pretty widespread and ubiquitous, many collections have them (even smaller ones), and you can even sometimes pick them up at antique stores (I have a couple myself!)