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1917, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “Confessions of a Humorist”, in Waifs and Strays:
By turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would hardly recognize it as vers de societe with neatly shod feet and a fashion-plate illustration.
He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; […] he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which looked as hard as steel plate.
2015, April Calahan, Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 1:
Today, in an age when the promotion of fashion is dominated by social media, video, and photography, fashion plates are nearly forgotten—relics of history consulted by few aside from professional costume designers and scholars of history.
(by extension) A person who dresses in especially stylish fashions.
In their stiff, crackling dresses of black silk, with jet-bespangled jackets, and little rows of cylindrical grey curls drooping down on either side of their black bonnets, they looked like two old fashion plates which had wandered off into the wrong decade.
