Vintage Art Deco Poster by Vito Soriano

I visualized this romantic couple like a film producer would a period piece. The setting could really be anywhere so it's the title and the way the figures are dressed that actually gives it away.

This was inspired by vintage art deco, and I gave it a contemporary look, a period piece with a high brow feel. I used crisp and strong lines of art deco fashion to give it a modern flair.

This type of graphic work demands a minimalist approach for a streamlined look. It could actually take more work and effort to pull it off because simple compositions are more difficult to balance. Some artists are so fluid and organic, they find graphics extremely tedious or meticulous. I know a few of my artist friends who try to avoid them.

I see this piece as a cross between art deco graphics and impressionism. Many of the vintage travel posters (art deco era) from different parts of the world were influenced by impressionism. You can find contemporary poster art with the same decorative and stylized design today.

Fashion Illustrators

Between 1908 and 1912 Parisian couturier Paul Poiret commissioned his artists to illustrate his flamboyant designs using a new, elongated, and simplified style, which caught the eye of Vogue magazine, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar in America. This spawned a modern international style in fashion illustration that has become a tradition in itself. So much graphic art was created during the art deco period (20s-40s). Erte, George Planck, Lepape, Helen Dryden, Leyendecker, Tamara de Lempicka, Domergue and Georges Barbier were some of the leading illustrators of the day.

Their brilliant illustrations and posters have now become vintage as photography became the new mode in magazine publishing. What has not changed over the years? I have to say the elongated woman and tall skinny model are still the ideal even today. Blame it on Barbie.

Now digital technology is widely used to modify photographs of real models on the covers of Cosmopolitan, Vanity and other contemporary fashion magazines. In future articles, we'll drink coffee as we discuss the golden ratio of beauty in the human body. Oooh la la..