I saw these vintage 1940s fashion illustrations floating about on Pinterest and I thought they were just catalog scans at first glance, but after clicking to the original source of these vintage fashion illustrations, I found out their true nature... these are sample fabric swatches for Fashion Frocks, a dress manufacturing company that had their home base in Ohio. There's a little bit of info about the building they occupied in the 1930s on wikipedia.

Not only are these vintage fashion drawings absolutely lovely, but the fact that these are ACTUAL fabric samples just makes me heart quicken a whole lot. I MUST have these!! The company was around since the 1920s and stopped producing clothing in the 1970s. Seriously, I MUST have these. I'm not really one to collect anything, but these are just an amazing piece of vintage fashion history!

These Fashion Frocks/Hardford Frocks sample pages are from Miss Amy on flickr.



Fashion Frocks was a company from Cincinnati, OH that employed housewives as salespeople to sell clothing to friends and neighbors "door-to-door" ... they would be armed with these wonderful sample sales cards for women to order from. It was a way of bypassing the retailers and selling directly to consumers, at better value-pricing. One of the company taglines is "It's fashion-wise to be thrifty." - from FASHION FROCKS flickr set