Yvette Guilbert at the Ambassadeurs - poster
The pattern
This still is filed under Iconic figure claim.
Define
A single figure, drawn, silhouetted, or posed, is the whole claim. You can read it across a street.
Mechanism
Compression into a body. The figure is not decoration. It is the sentence. Distance-legibility is the test.
Verdict
Poster scale, outdoor, packaging at a glance
Why it works
The poster spends its entire surface on one recognisable silhouette and gives the product name no adjective, no date and no venue in large type, which only works when the name itself is the demand. The extreme vertical format is a media decision, not a style one: a narrow column survives being pasted in a strip beside other bills and reads as one tall figure from across a boulevard. The inset of the audience and the conductor supplies the promise of the occasion without a second illustration, and placing it behind and to the side keeps the eye on the performer while telling you where she will be.
Steal this when
Copy this when the name on the piece is already the reason people would come, and any explanation would dilute it. The figure-plus-small-inset device is also the right structure whenever you need to show both a person and the setting they appear in without splitting the composition in two.