A young woman known as a Banner Girl, dressed in a costume covered edge to edge with dozens of small photographic portraits, is the subject of this trimmed cabinet card. No photographer's imprint is visible on the surviving mount. She stands holding a fringed banner in one hand, its lettering no longer legible, beside a painted studio backdrop and draped furniture.

Rows of cartes de visite and small cabinet card portraits are affixed across her bodice, cap, sleeves, and full skirt, arranged in overlapping triangular panels down the front of the dress. A tasseled cord and fringed drapery hang from a nearby chair, and an ornate painted column and floral urn form the backdrop behind her. She wears laced boots visible beneath the hem of the photograph covered skirt.

Banner Girls were women hired by businesses of many kinds to appear at fairs and carnivals in the late nineteenth century as walking advertisements, their costumes built from the products or imagery of the sponsoring trade. Here the costume is assembled entirely from photographic portraits, likely commissioned by a photography studio to advertise its own work. The cabinet card format, larger than the earlier carte de visite, made this style of display practical by the 1880s and 1890s, when such novelty portraits were most common.

The card has been trimmed from its original mount.