Autumn Fabrics

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The Autumn Fabrics and Original Vogue Designs issue was largely dedicated to “the warp and woof of the mode”—in this case, the textiles from which then-current styles like the bouffant silhouette were made. To illustrate the bounty and variety of materials available that fall, Helen Dryden evoked an earlier time, drawing two women walking in a park in sweeping skirts and jackets. Behind them, under brilliantly hued autumn branches, a parade of horse-drawn carriages driven by livered coachmen. This artwork is a wonderful example of Dryden’s “innovation for magazine covers,” which Helen Appleton Read, an art critic and Vogue contributor, described in a 1924 piece for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as being “a stylistic sophisticated combination painted in gay flat colors of French prints, the spirit of the rococo of 1830, of hoop skirts, and strapped slippers, pantalets, ringlets, patches and powder, parrots and French poodles, and a dash of the Picasso technique for modern piquancy.”