Hungarian Scissors and French Taste: Nationalized Fashion Plates in the 1840s

In the illustrated press of the nineteenth century, texts and images circulated across geographical borders. The European and transatlantic imports of French fashion plates and their leading role in the fashion press of various countries have already been highlighted by several researchers. The fashion magazines of the 1840s played a decisive role in the literary, artistic, and national movements, as well as in the dissemination of illustrations in Hungary, which was then part of the Habsburg Empire. Among the supplements (portraits and cityscapes, for example), the hand-coloured fashion plate was a steady favourite for subscribers. The fashion engravings came from Paris and the Hungarian editors copied, transformed, and reused them. By changing the textual and visual elements, the fashion compositions of French origin were adapted to and embedded in the local culture, with their meaning or the messages they conveyed tothe readers changed and nationalized. In my case study, I will focus on the image circulation and modification of the fashion plates that were published in Hungarian-language fashion magazines in the first half of the nineteenth century. I argue that the adoption of fashion imagery can only be understood as a complex process that affected the composition and meaning of the fashion images. The French fashion plates spread Parisian fashion throughout Europe, but at the same time, they ‘mutated’ via compilations and modifications, thus creating new versions that became embedded in the local culture. Mapping the French sources of Hungarian fashion images helps to reveal the concealed links between the national and the international press market. Furthermore, it also sheds light on the various stages and processes of image circulation among Western and Central European fashion magazines, as well as the technical and intellectual background of this uniquekind of nationalization. The specific examples presented in my case study show that nationalization is a distinctive form of mediation in the transnational circulation of press illustrations.