(G)Old Standards

Butterick, Vogue Patterns, non-editorial magazine illustrations: those are the fashion illustration standards I grew up with in Manila. The lower-end fashion styles were seen as desirable, especially since they illustrated for a customer the actual dresses and clothing before they bought into it. Not the most advanced stylistically, but easy to comprehend, and they were my understanding of what was supposed to be good. What did I know, right? To this day, I still strive for that, despite knowing better. This was a quick sketch, not fully finished by any means, with that end in mind (hence the really prosaic clothing). I recalled a woman named Trining, who was the best illustrator that my mother ever hired, and who stayed with us at our shop the New Yorker the longest (well, at least in my nascent memory). She became synonymous with the Gold Standard of what all illustrations were supposed to look like. I wonder where she is now? She was at least a decade older than me, maybe more.