The Poster: A Visual History is based on the V&A collections and features many of the posters I acquired for the museum in my role as Prints Curator. In the final chapter Gill Saunders and I address how the poster has mutated and migrated in the 21st century spawning numerous digital descendants. 

"

From the towering coiffures of Georgian Britain to outsize Victorian crinolines, and diaphanous Regency gowns to the languid silhouette of the 1920s flapper, Style and Satire explores how European fashion and its most extreme trends were represented through elegant fashion plates and irreverent satirical prints. Presenting a joint history of the two genres for the first time, it examines the role the print market played in fostering a culture of fashion during the era of industrialisation. 

The idea for this book began in the V&A stores when I noticed that an outfit ridiculed in one of the museum’s satirical prints was copied  - fabric, feathers and all - from a fashion plate published a month earlier in the chic women’s magazine La Belle Assemblée. Further investigation revealed the close connections between these two forms of printed art that pictured everyday life. 

Images copyright V&A Publishing

"