Costumes Parisiens 2026: George Barbier's Paris fashion plates of 1913, dressed for the way we live now.

In 1913 George Barbier drew the latest Paris fashion for the Journal des Dames et des Modes: flat stencil colour, one elegant figure per plate, and a caption announcing the look, like "Robe d'intérieur" or "Manteau de théâtre". I found his Costumes Parisiens plates at the Rijksmuseum, where they are in the public domain, cropped ten of them down to the bare stencil and built a Recraft V4 Style from them. Costumes Parisiens 2026 keeps his poses and his captions and dresses them for how we actually live now: a silk blouse over pyjama trousers for the video call, a red delivery backpack worn over a fur-trimmed coat, a theatre coat embroidered with 99 unread badges, a necklace of charging cables, earbuds worn as pearl drops, a ring light carried like a parasol. Same magazine, a hundred and thirteen years later; only the accessories have changed.

Old is gold! 🥇 Amazing such a beautiful work

What if the future had been imagined a century ago?

I’m exploring the fascinating intersection of vintage science-fiction art and futuristic technology for the Recraft × Contra Design Challenge.

Inspired by antique illustrations, forgotten inventions, and surreal planetary landscapes, I’m developing “THE UNDISCOVERED FUTURE” — a fictional archive where yesterday’s artistic imagination meets tomorrow’s possibilities.

The goal is to transform a historical visual language into something unexpected, cohesive, and entirely new.

Sometimes, the most interesting vision of the future comes from looking into the past.

#Contra #Recraft #DesignChallenge #VintageIllustration #AIArt

antique illustration plus planetary landscapes is a fun mix. id push the faded paper texture harder so it reads as an actual archive