Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

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In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette's bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France In her final decade, Elizabeth II remained closer to home. US photographer Annie Leibovitz photographed the Queen on two occasions. The spectacular portraits of the first sitting presented a monarch of Hollywood dreams. The second, by contrast, revealed the Queen off-duty in her favourite tartan kilts and tailored tweeds, surrounded by family and dogs at Windsor Castle. It was a pertinent reminder that behind the carefully stage-managed façade was a woman, wife and mother most at home in the countryside. The gold dress she wore for the 2012 Diamond Jubilee palace pop concert was influenced by the golden figure on the Queen Victoria Memorial, around which the stage was constructed.

Later the things she was divested of were taken home as trophies by the ladies that attended her stripping and redressing as a Frenchwoman, and she would see them at court brazingly wearing those things they stripped her of. It is the beginning of seeing that a chest of magical never ending money can in fact be drained to its very dredges by a young dressmaker’s extraordinary inventiveness. Rose Bertin a milliner, makes her way to to the court of the new Dauphine. She is a pretty woman who knows how ‘ a well shaped ankle turned out nicely at the fireplace, where she sits will be to her advantage, but she is also a doughty heart who fights for the widows thrown into into the Bastille by pleading her case with the Dauphine. Rosey is in demand with the old boys too, who seek to abduct her away to to their little cottage, to have their way with her but she stands up to them defiantly and lets the whole world know, she is being put upon by this married old beard, who hisses’ little viper’ at her, attempts upon her to the world. The Dauphine's first act of defiance, a 15-year-old's strop, was her refusal to wear the grand corps, the rigid corset permitted only to the court elite. Her second was to learn to ride, and don not only male-style upper-body garments (nothing novel about that, female royals and courtiers had galloped about in similar equine fig since the 1660s), but to wear, and be painted in, breeches, while astride the saddle. Hunting Frenchwomen hid "culottes" under skirts; only the awesome Catherine the Great of Russia and comic actresses flaunted their lower limbs in breeches. Perhaps says the author of this book this was ‘ in retaliation for those scenes of appalling aristocratic coldheartedness that the insurgents vowed to make the white haired white skinned, well dressed princess suffer- Lamballe through her brutal death and ritual coiffing , and the Queen through a forced encounter with her friends savagely styled head..’There were masked balls, she donned a domino, into her company came notorious court seducers and in the company she kept in her small world was not of the court, spies were routed.

She takes her place in this wonderland of pouf creation and extravagance that will bring down the Austrian daughter of the Caesar's. This book should definitely be read after one reads Antonia Fraser's "Marie Antoniette: A Journey." This is not a definitive biography, nor does it claim to be. However, it looks at the ill-fated queen in a unique and textual way- through the clothing choices she made at every juncture in her tenure as Dauphine, and later Queen of France. This was an exceptional biography of Marie Antoinette with fashion as a decoding device akin to an anthropological device used in ethnography. More than any other treatment of Marie Antoinette this thoroughly researched work really set her in an historic cultural framework. Moreover, there was no glossing over the less attractive behaviors and attitudes of our heroine. Instead they are presented as all too human foibles exacerbated by the stultifying and constricted world of the French court amid socio-political crisis and change.

Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. I feel that a lot of the book was a stretch--the brand-new Dauphine notices a tapestry of Jason and Medea, calls it a "bad omen" for a wedding, and we assume that it plants in her mind the idea to manipulate fashion for power? Yeah, probably not.

It was said and likely true, of Marie Antoniette that she powered her wigs with flour when people had no bread. That this was a a spoiled and terrible court is obvious but she was a little Maid, representing Vienna, and the hope of a peaceful alliance between the two countries. This is the book that spurred me on to reading biographies again. The premise for this book is that Maria Antoinette did not have a lot of power--certainly not the kind-of power she might have expected to have given her mother. She was also limited in the ways she could express herself. So, Marie Antoinette turned to fashion as a way to express her views and to influence her husband.The monarch has see-through “Birdcage” brollies made by the Fulton group to match each outfit in case of wet weather, with the edging and handle corresponding to the exact shade she is wearing.

About her spending she could not be persuaded but her brother did successful harangue her husband a talk that was so scorching and so rough perhaps, that after his departure, the' laxical bridegroom made it atop his bride, and a year later she conceived a child'. Rose whose millinery bills will be eye watering figures and whose shop is patronised by all the frivolous women who want to look and dress like the Dauphine. Silly women make their way to her in droves but like to secure their goods with a proper semblance of humility from the little milliner, when she is sometimes impetuous and spirited, just because she is a drab with gifted fingers and an eye for elaborate frippery does not mean she should not know her place! It's very interesting. If you have any interest in Marie Antoinette or the time period, you should read this. Yes, there are some pictures in there, but they're there to aid you in a visual. I adore the pictures! I think she should have included more. Oh well. Of course they could have left her her little dog. Her attachments would be ruthlessly pruned and chosen right down to her little dog , the consolation of her journey from her family, forever as it happened.and yet while her reign lasted she had caused the greatest personages of France to bow to the frivolous yoke of fashion, a fashion of which she was the ingenious and lavish inspirer.' The start of her reign saw classic couture creations of silk and tulle evening gowns by Sir Norman Hartnell and cinch-waisted dresses by Sir Hardy Amies.