Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

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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. 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. But she learns to ride a horse and is soon following the chase with her doting grandpapa, she’s a cutsie too, offering to embroider him a waistcoat, though it might take a couple of years. Du Barry the kings mistress, raised from prostitution to be the wearer of the most expensive cloth and jewels in an enemy of the archduchess riding out with her grandpapa, rejecting her corset! The Queen always had an innate understanding of how her wardrobe could add visual interest to her appearances. She knew this was helpful on the ground, in making herself a focal point by which onlookers straining to catch a glimpse could instantly make sense of a crowded scene. And she knew, also, that it helped make a great photograph. There is a lovely playfulness to this outfit, designed by Ian Thomas for a visit to Blois in France in 1992. The unstructured coat is unusually soft in silhouette, while the pink flowers glimpsed on the dress seem to wink to the flowers on the hat. 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.'

In any case, the dress of court she now refused to wear entirely striding through Versailles in her muslims or cross dressing in her riding pants causing scandal wherever she went. Soon though she is sparkling with the other young girls in court, nobody over thirty should be at court are among her brightest opinions. A well researched and genuinely gripping narrative account of the events surrounding the Monarchy, Fashion, and Marie Antoinette in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. Amidst all the books on Marie Antoinette that I've acquired over the years (for reasons which are both curious and somewhat unknown to me!), Caroline Weber's "Queen of Fashion" has figured high on my list.At nursing or residential homes, the Queen wears strong colours to help those who are visually impaired, and on walkabouts, the crown and brim of her hat will be taken into account. The story of Marie Antoinette is very well told, by Caroline Weber, it shows the child Marie Antoinette was ,and the game way she stepped up to this great alliance knowing all she represented. Her entrance in her silver gown into the palace of Versailles, a daughter of the Caesars, beneath the Apollo ceiling, and before the goatish king her new father in law, all that is beautifully told. As is the poor girls experience of of the court arriving in her bedchamber to observe herself and her buffoon bridegroom on the point of (hopefully) coitus. 'She blushed and hide herself under the gold embroidered bedspread. And there was no sex. We know this because her sheets were inspected next morning.' The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations this year will see her fashion choices take centre stage. The wretched state of the people while Louis danced, hunted, and copulated from his assembled deer girls and then an alliance with a not French bride for his son, was too much, for the people, her great show of wealth thought right for court audiences, were to the person with a starving child or no money for bread a terrible goad. 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.

Occasionally (more than occasionally perhaps) the effort to tie all of Marie Antoinette's behaviors and the reactive responses of her many enemies to fashion cultural codes was a bit strained. That is a minor quibble however. Her spending was enormous and nobody could dissuade her from it. The poufs were also home to little creatures, vermin took up nests in them, and there were special long combs for scratching your pouf if the vermin were too lively. 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 FranceShe was not to be subjected to any ugly people and so only beautiful faces were sent out to greet her. 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. But despite them all, she is launched a great soft big bird in paint and curls and refreshing too, after the the stiff ladies in the Dauphine boudoir. 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.

They granted the hooligans permission to make the tour of the prison with Madame De lamballes head on the condition they left the corpse at the door’ The thrifty Queen re-wears and adapts her clothes, with the average lifespan of an outfit running to 25 years. The national Platinum Jubilee celebrations set for June offer the perfect opportunity for the nation’s longest-reigning monarch to debut platinum-influenced pieces or jewellery, channelling the historic occasion through her fashion.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. How far the barb had entered peoples hearts showed in the ruthless dispatch of this effete class , it became know as the Terror, days of terrible bloodshed.

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! 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. Tiny weights are also put into daywear hemlines in case of windy weather, and fabrics that crumple or could potentially develop messy loose strands are avoided.

All I ever knew of Marie. Antoinette before I read this book was that she had been spoiled and that the French courts insane spending while people starved brought the monarchy down, before this book I never thought of her as a human being but her story is moving. 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. When Her Majesty visits a school or a children’s centre, she is always dressed in a bright, jolly colour, and her hat has the kind of details that will appeal to youngsters – feathers, twirls, twists, flowers and ribbons,” Ms Kelly revealed in her book about her working relationship with the Queen – The Other Side Of The Coin. There was a change for Rousseau like simplicity in fashion, and the Sillies all became rustics. Shepherdesses with jaunty hats and simple muslins, not a stay or deeply torturing corset upon any of them. 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.