Exceptional complete first edition of the 70 issues published in 69 issues of this legendary magazine. This complete copy, contains six additional prints not listed in Colas, making a total of 727 full-page plates. For the first issues, 3/4 red half-shagreen bindings, some rubbing to spines, framed with gilt fillets on the boards, corners bent, gilt top edges ; the following issues are presented in loose leaves as issued from number 7 of the year 1914, housed in burgundy cardboard slipcases.
Exceptional complete collection of this “very rare collection, the most important and most interesting for contemporary fashion” (Carteret). Launched in November 1912 under the direction of Lucien Vogel, the Gazette du Bon Ton was published until December 1925, with a hiatus from 1915 to 1920 due to the war. It remains the main witness to French way of life and taste during the Roaring Twenties. Our set is complete with the 721 plates described in Colas, plus 6 unpublished and unnumbered plates, i.e. 544 single plates, 148 sketches, 17 double plates, one triple plate, 17 unnumbered plates (Colas mentions only 11) and numerous colored woodcuts in the text. The most famous illustrators contributed to the magazine: George Barbier, Raoul Dufy, Pierre Brissaud, André Édouard Marty, Umberto Brunelleschi, Jean-Émile Laboureur, etc.
Carteret IV, 180. –– Colas, n° 1202.
Collation :
-70 leaflets in 69 deliveries, in 12 volumes, over 7 years.
- 3 bound books (volume 1 of year 1 / volume 2 of year 1 / volume 1 of year 2).
- Total of 727 full-page plates (721 listed in Colas), including 148 fashion sketches, 17 double page plates, 1 plate on three pages, 17 unnumbered plates.
- First year (Nov. 1912 - Oct. 1913): 2 volumes in 12 leaflets, 120 full-page plates.
- Second year (Jan. 1914 - summer 1915): 2 volumes in 9 leaflets, 79 full-page plates.
- Third year (Jan. 1920 - Dec. 1920): 2 volumes in 10 leaflets, 132 full-page plates.
- Fourth year (Jan. 1921 - Dec. 1921): 2 volumes in 10 leaflets, 100 full-page plates.
- Fifth year (Feb. 1922 - Dec. 1922): 2 volumes in 10 leaflets, 157 full-page plates.
- Sixth year (June 1923 - June 1924): 1 volume in 10 leaflets, 59 full-page plates.
- Seventh year (July 1924 - Dec. 1925): 1 volume in 9 leaflets, 80 full-page plates.
Right from the start, this sumptuous publication “was aimed at bibliophiles and fashionable society,” (Françoise Tétart-Vittu, “La Gazette du Bon ton”, in Dictionnaire de la mode, 2016) and was printed on fine vergé paper using a type cut specially for the magazine by Georges Peignot, known as Cochin, later used (in 1946) by Christian Dior. The prints were made using stencils, heightened in colors, some highlightened in gold or palladium.
The story began in 1912, when Lucien Vogel, a man of the world involved in fashion (he had already been part of the fashion magazine Femina) decided, with his wife Cosette de Brunhoff – the sister of Jean, creator of Babar – to set up the Gazette du Bon ton, subtitled at the time: “Art, fashion, frivolities.” Georges Charensol noted the reasoning of the editor-in-chief: “‘In 1910,' he observed, ‘there was no really artistic fashion magazine, nothing representative of the spirit of the time. My dream was therefore to make a luxury magazine with truly modern artists…I was assured of success, because when it comes to fashion, no country on earth can compete with France.” (“Un grand éditeur d'art. Lucien Vogel” in Les Nouvelles littéraires, n° 133, May 1925). The magazine was immediately successful, not only in France but also in the United States and Latin America.
At first, Vogel put together a team of seven artists: André-Édouard Marty and Pierre Brissaud, followed by Georges Lepape and Dammicourt, as well as eventually his friends from school and the School of Fine Arts, like George Barbier, Bernard Boutet de Monvel and Charles Martin. Other talented people soon came flocking to join 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 artist, mostly unknown when Lucien Vogel sought them out, later became emblematic and sought-after artistic figures. It was also they who worked on the advertising drawings for the Gazette.
The plates put the spotlight on, and celebrate, dresses by seven designers of the age: Lanvin, Doeuillet, Paquin, Poiret, Worth, Vionnet and Doucet. The designers provided exclusive models for each issue. Nonetheless, some of the illustrations are not based on real models, but simply on the illustrator's conception of the fashion of the day.
The Gazette du Bon ton was an important step in the history of fashion. Combining aesthetic demands with the physical whole, it brought together – for the first time – the great talents of the artistic, literary, and fashion worlds; and imposed, through this alchemy, a completely new image of women: slender, independent and daring, which was shared by the new generation of designers, including Coco Chanel, Jean Patou, Marcel Rochas, and so on…
Taken over in 1920 by Condé Montrose Nast, the Gazette du Bon ton was an important influence on the new layout and aesthetics of that “little dying paper” that Nast had bought a few years earlier: Vogue.
