Lautrec's fascination with performers extended to dancers, opera singers, and actresses. Lautrec's color lithograph of 1893, Miss Loïe Fuller, references the 1892 debut of the American dancer named Loïe Fuller at the Folies-Bergère. Each of the 60 impressions of this lithograph is inked in a unique combination of colors — green, yellow, orange, mauve, violet, blue, and rose — many of them dusted with metallic pigments to give luster. The performer with the greatest long-term presence in Lautrec's work was the dancer Jane Avril, whom he depicted many times between 1893 and 1899 in such works as Jane Avril, from the portfolio Le Café Concert (1893); in a rare color poster she commissioned for her stint at the Jardin de Paris (Jane Avril, 1893); and for a tour of London with La Troupe de Mademoiselle Eglantine (1896). She is one of the few performers that Lautrec also depicted in her offstage life; in an 1893 poster for Divan Japonais, a café-concert that had been recently refurbished with a Japanese-themed décor, Avril is shown off-duty at the bar, and on the cover for the portfolio L’Estampe Originale (1893), Avril is shown in the printshop, inspecting a freshly pulled lithograph.

Women are a singular focus of Elles (1896), a portfolio of 12 works that marks Lautrec's greatest achievement in lithography. The series of carefully observed brothel scenes runs counter to the expectation of the titillating and the tawdry, instead presenting brothel workers during quiet moments of mundane intimacy — having coffee in the boudoir, during the final moments before waking, amid rumpled sheets and unmade beds, with hair to be repinned and corsets to be replaced. In Femme qui se lave, la toilette (1896), a woman washes before a basin, her bare breasts reflected in the mirror, contrasted with the eroticized picture of seduction that hangs above. With Femme au tub (1896), there is nothing erotic in the scene, save the image of Leda and the Swan displayed on the wall, and no sense that the subject knows she is being watched.

Lautrec was also a part of a creative circle of authors, editors, and composers who commissioned him to publicize their work. He made posters to advertise reviews including La Revue blanche (1895) and L'Aube (1896), a short-lived publication remembered exclusively for Lautrec's lithograph. The monochrome image suggests the journal's title — the blue light of dawn. The booming café-concert scene demanded a constant supply of new musical material, and Lautrec made numerous cover illustrations for song sheets, including the cover of the song sheet for "Carnot malade!" (1893), composed by Eugène Lemercier and popularized at the Chat Noir. Lautrec was also a season ticket holder at the Théâtre Libre and created a program for Le Missionaire (1894), where he inverted the spectacle of the theater, depicting the audience instead of the performers, as if to indicate that they were as much a part of the action as what occurred onstage.

Paris was Lautrec's city, the site of his studio, his printers and publishers, his friends, his beloved nightlife, and his muses. He found inspiration in the city's urban character, and passed many hours sketching in the Bois de Boulogne, the city's great cultivated wilderness, where an ever-changing cross-section of society went to promenade, whether on foot or horseback, by bicycle, carriage, or motorcar. In Au Bois (1897), Lautrec features his cousin Aline de Rivières walking with her little dog, with a rider silhouetted in the background. In 1895, Lautrec prepared a large poster to be used as an advertisement for the literary review La Revue blanche that featured the aristocrat Misia Godebska ice skating. Against a nearly blank background, with only the barest sense of the ice rink, she is shown clad in a polka-dot dress, fur muff and capelet, and veiled hat with elaborate plumage. Confetti (1894) is one of the few posters Lautrec made to advertise a consumer product; Lautrec used his signature crachis technique to great effect, his colored splatter mimicking the round form of the product, which was already big business.