Found Online: Art - Gôut - Beauté

Art - Gôut - Beauté (Art - Taste - Beauty) was the last and the longest running of the deluxe French fashion magazines illustrated with pochoir prints.  Pochoir is a technique of  hand-coloured stencilling. The resulting prints are brilliant, but are also (by necessity) very expensive and labour intensive to produce—in limited editions only.

As a consequence, copies of AGB became collectors items as soon as they were produced, and are extremely rare and sought-after now.  Luckily for us, the California State Library has a few copies and has scanned them and put them on the Internet Archive for us to enjoy.

Lovers of 1920s fashion and/or Art Deco prints should really enjoy this selection!  The nineteen issues held by the California State Library date from 1922 to 1931 (the magazine ran from 1920 to 1933) and each page has at least one colour illustration.  Dazzling and impossibly glamorous women roam these pages, doing the rounds of high society while dressed in the latest Jazz Age creations from the Paris couturiers.  

Art - Gôut - Beauté was established by the fabrics firm d'Albert, Godde, Bedin & Co. (AGB!) to promote the French fashion industry and associated luxury trades.  It was circulated in 35 countries.  These issues are in English and were originally distributed by the City of Paris department store in San Francisco.  The Depression finally killed AGB, making a magazine full of expensive hand-made plates unviable.