About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Object Design Style Guide is a woman from the island of Ulijan off the coast of Croatia. The illustration is taken from a French book of dress customs, Encyclopedie des Voyages by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (1757–1810), published in 1796. Travel for pleasure was a relatively new phenomenon at the time, and illustrated guides such as this one were popular, introducing both the tourist and the armchair traveler to the inhabitants of other far-off regions of the world, as well as to the more familiar regional costumes of France and Europe.

The diversity of the drawings in the Encyclopedie des Voyages speaks vividly of the uniqueness and individuality of the world’s countries and peoples just 200 years ago. This was a time when the dress codes of two regions, sometimes separated by just a few dozen miles, identified people as belonging to one or the other, and when members of a social class or trade or tribe could be easily distinguished by what they were wearing.