The plates from that publication are of a very high quality, beautifully engraved and painted, and often incorporating bits of gold and silver paint. They are printed on heavy paper and are full quarto size, ie much larger than the prints seen in the Collections on this site. Such production qualities were expensive. It can be assumed, therefore, that La Miroir de la Mode was an upscale publication targeted to the upper class, which is in keeping with the little we know about Madame Lanchester. Its short life-span is likely because it was simply too expensive to produce.
When Ackermann's Repository of Arts began publication in 1809, Madame Lanchester appears to have briefly played the role of fashion editor. In the inaugural issue of that publication, the descriptions of the fashion plates are followed by this note: "It is almost unnecessary to add that the design and description of the ladies' fashions in this month are under the direction of Madame Lanchester, whose taste in the department of ladies' dress and female ornaments is so well known as to render any eulogium unnecessary." She must certainly have been an important figure in the world of fashion, a name familiar to the readers of the Repository. She continues to be mentioned in the next three issues as having furnished the designs for the plates "in her usual taste." By May of that year, however, her name disappears in the commentary, but a personage called Arbiter Elegantarium offers General Observations on fashion beginning that month and continuing for several years. Could this have been Madame Lanchester?
Despite the scarcity of information on Madame Lanchester, or perhaps because of it, I thought it would be fun to give her a role to play in Once a Gentleman. The fashion editor of the Ladies' Fashionable Cabinet, the ever-stylish Flora Gallagher, would certainly have patronized such a well-known and fashionable modiste. And who better to enlist in the transformation of Prudence from a Plain Jane into a striking beauty?
Besides the print shown above from her own publication, which is heavily embellished with silver metallic paint, you can see more of Madame Lanchester's designs in the Collections article on Walking Dresses 1806-1812. Figure 1 in that article shows two of her dresses in an early print from La Belle Assemblée.
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