Fashion Plates

Fashion Plates were released by Tomy in the early 1970s. Choosing from a large variety of indented plates that contained drawings of various fashion items – dresses, tops, pants – you would choose the combination that suited your tastes and assemble them into a base. By placing a piece of paper over the base, you could then glide a black crayon over it, which would create an image of your fashion statement. Then, by turning the paper over and selecting from a number of textures, you could take the set of colored pencils out and begin adding a splash of color to the designs. The process itself wasn’t all that time consuming – but it was somewhat addictive, given the seemingly endless number of choices you had at your disposal.