Hearts are ubiquitous on St Valentine's Day and if you had to look for heart-shaped accessories, heart prints and heart inspired garments in the history of fashion, you would easily end up spending months researching physical and digital archives.
Yves Saint Laurent, who (between 1970 and 2000) designed "Love" themed New Year's cards that featured bold colours and graphics, often employed hearts in his designs.
His A/W 1970 Haute Couture collection also included an iconic multicoloured silk velvet coat with appliquéd hearts and letters forming the words "Love me forever" on front and "Or never" on the back.
Hedi Slimane continued this passion for the heart motif during his tenure at the French maison: for Saint Laurent's A/W 2016 he designed indeed a heart-shaped vivid red fur jacket, displayed next to another love themed dress, Viktor & Rolf's white "I love you" gown (A/W 2005-06) during the 2019 "Camp" exhibition at The Met's Costume Institute.
But there are other ways to get inspired on St. Valentine's day: museums of all sorts (especially folk and postal museums) all over the world have in their archives cute Valentine cards.
Nowadays we are all focused on new media and expect to get a digital card or a message on social media from someone special, but these tokens of love that were extremely popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries are truly lovely.
There are some poetical Valentine cards for example designed by Walter Crane in 1876 featuring illustrations in colour with poems printed on the back.
Quite often his cards incorporate his beloved floral motifs that even take one of his trademark geometrical configurations in the attire of the personification of the Spring that in one card wears a green and white checked tunic with squares decorated with different types of flowers.
Valentine cards illustrated by Kate Greenaway look similar to Crane's, but there is an emphasis on fashion in them, with illustrations of couples in colourful Medieval attire or Empire line gowns, framed by openwork lace paper.
In later years other types of cards became popular, especially ones with embossed or lacework paper often incorporating swirls and floral motifs and at times decorated with die-cut scraps featuring bouquets of flowers or angels carrying a cornucopia of petals, elements that could be moved downward to reveal other images underneath.
So browse your favourite archive or museum (the cards in this post are taken from The Met Museum's archive by the way) and look for inspirations that may go beyond St Valentine's day and evoke the joy and optimism of Spring as well.
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