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The Red Carpet Highlights of... The 77th Annual Cannes Film Festival 2024!
Marie Antoinette
- Thread starter Mink
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Great idea for a thread 
I recently found this site: http://www.freewebs.com/dregae/index.htm about Marie-Antoinette's gowns both in portraits and various replications in films (like the 1938 film with Norma Shearer and Sophia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette, and even films where she appears as a secondary character like Affair of the Necklace with Joely Richardson as the Queen).
The creator also has an excellent archive of other 18th century costume film pics if any one is interested in fashion during that era
I recently found this site: http://www.freewebs.com/dregae/index.htm about Marie-Antoinette's gowns both in portraits and various replications in films (like the 1938 film with Norma Shearer and Sophia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette, and even films where she appears as a secondary character like Affair of the Necklace with Joely Richardson as the Queen). The creator also has an excellent archive of other 18th century costume film pics if any one is interested in fashion during that era
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Miss Dalloway
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Great thread i read that she was really extravagant and gathered ove 5000 gowns in her short life time!
Thanks for the pictures and link!
Thanks for the pictures and link!
Let Them Eat Lace: Marie Antoinette's Fierce and Fearless Fashion
READ MORE: 2006, New York Times
After several seasons of polished and demure looks, presumably aimed at bringing out their customers' inner Stepford Wife, fashion designers have launched a pair of altogether different trends. The first of these proposes that women abandon their pretty little dresses for an array of unreservedly hard-edged, mannish creations that, in the words of New York Times reporter Ginna Bellafante, leave "no room for ambiguity about [their wearers'] power and aggression." The second vogue, ushered in by the Cannes début of Sofia Coppola's flimsy but stylish biopic, Marie Antoinette, has been described as a "Marie Antoinette moment." This look features oversized, flamboyantly colored puff pieces (Yves Saint Laurent's hot pink "carnation cape," Lanvin's billowy, lollipop-red baby-doll dress) and accessories festooned with spangles, crystals, and ostrich feathers galore.
Faced with these two, seemingly irreconcilable aesthetics may well lead fashion followers to ask: What gives? Is it really possible to be a take-no-prisoners power dresser and a frilly fashion queen at the same time?
On a practical level, the answer may well be no. History, however, suggests a different response, at least if one takes a closer look at Marie Antoinette's own relationship to fashion. In my forthcoming book, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, I have tried to dispel the erroneous, shopworn idea -- upon which Coppola's film, for instance, relies -- that the French queen's extravagant clothing choices reflected her self-absorbed, "let them eat cake" frivolity. As is now well known, Marie Antoinette never uttered that notorious zinger, which had been attributed to various French sovereigns for more than a century before her arrival at Versailles in 1770. Much less well known is the fact that her signature costumes -- like the frothy, candy-colored frocks, towering, feather-sprigged hairdos, and sparkling gemstones reprised in 2006's fall collections -- represented daring bids for political power. In Queen of Fashion, I demonstrate how, defying the well-established conventions that governed queenly appearance, she used clothing to combat her enemies and cultivate an aura of unshakable strength.
When the Austrian-born Archduchess Marie Antoinette was married off at age fourteen to France's future king -- crowned Louis XVI in 1774 -- her overriding duty was to give the kingdom an heir. But for her first seven years at Versailles, her cripplingly shy (and, according to some, genitally malformed) husband refused to consummate their marriage. Because so many people at Versailles opposed the Franco-Austrian alliance that her marriage had been designed to solidify, Marie Antoinette's failure to get pregnant left her vulnerable to countless court intrigues. The most damaging of these sought to annul Louis XVI's marriage and send his "barren" wife back to Vienna in disgrace. Despite her young age, Marie Antoinette understood that this course would destroy Franco-Austrian relations, and thus that it behooved her to secure her position through other means. Taking a lesson from her husband's and her own great, seventeenth-century ancestor, Louis XIV, for whom magnificent costumes had proven a famously effective tool of absolutist domination, the young queen turned to fashion to bolster her prestige. Detracting her subjects' attention from her childless state, she reinvented herself -- as my friend and colleague Pierre Saint-Amand has written -- as the nation's first "supermodel, its ruling diva, the queen of glamour."
To that end, Marie Antoinette rebelled against the stodgy, outmoded costuming strictures of Versailles, which, by remaining virtually unchanged from generation to generation, were meant to signify the timeless transcendence of the Bourbon reign. Unlike previous queens of France, who had stayed hidden away at their husbands' court, Marie Antoinette scandalized her fellow courtiers by making weekly trips to Paris, which was eighteenth century Europe's undisputed capital of style. There, she met some of the city's most celebrated designers, whom she enlisted to outfit her in a variety of eye-catching, experimental ensembles. These ranged from startlingly androgynous, man-tailored jackets and breeches to mile-high pouf coiffures decorated with intricate landscapes and military battle-scenes, and from sweeping, jewel-encrusted gowns with which she upstaged her husband at public appearances to risqué peasant-girl shifts that she sported at her private country retreat. Whether dressed up or dressed down, Marie Antoinette conveyed an image of absolute autonomy and power -- of a woman who could do, wear, and spend just about anything she pleased.
As Marie Antoinette herself recorded, this astute piece of self-marketing went a long way toward convincing the French public that she actually had real influence in her husband's government -- for, like Louis XIV before her, her sartorial flights of fancy bespoke an unrestricted access to the royal coffers. Yet unlike Louis XIV, of whom, as a male ruler, such aggressive ostentation was expected, Marie Antoinette's bold posturing scandalized many of her subjects. France was, after all, a country where the royal consort had traditionally stood as little more than a docile, retiring companion (and breeder) of kings. Alarmed by her apparent rise to power, the queen's adversaries at court began spreading unflattering tales about her narcissism, her financial recklessness, her ruinous addiction to fashion.
These, of course, are precisely the stories that culminated in the myth of "let them eat cake," and that Coppola's Marie Antoinette -- whose opening scene shows a feather-headed Marie Antoinette saucily licking cake off her fingers -- so lamentably perpetuates. And gossip of this sort dealt the queen a devastating public-relations blow. When massive social unrest erupted in 1789, for instance, angry hordes descended on Versailles calling for Marie Antoinette's -- not her husband's -- head. The burgeoning revolutionary media then took up this call with a vengeance, describing her outfits as signs of her treacherously self-indulgent nature. By the time she was imprisoned in the Conciergerie in August 1793, her detractors seemed to take great pleasure in punishing her for her alleged crimes of fashion. Unlike other well-born inmates of the Conciergerie, who were allowed to retain sumptuous wardrobes, Marie Antoinette was forced to give up all clothes except for the tattered dress on her back. One cruel jailer even insisted that she unstitch by hand the royalist fleurs de lys embroidered on her chamber's wall-hangings.
As when she had occupied the throne, however, Marie Antoinette had no intention of letting her enemies beat her, and costume remained her preferred weapon of choice. Before she and Louis XVI were stripped of their powers in August 1792, she insisted on wearing her most aggressively spectacular diamonds to meetings with hostile revolutionary officials -- as if to remind this group of men, whom she dismissed as "a pack of madmen, idiots, and brutes," that there would always be an unbridgeable chasm between them and her royal self. To add insult to injury, she adamantly refused to wear the tricolor ribbons and cockades that revolutionary public adopted as privileged emblems of liberty, fraternity, and equality. In this embargo, she was virtually alone, as other, more politically opportunistic members of the court made the tricolor and similar revolutionary insignia (like jewelry set with the stones from the demolished Bastille prison) a regular part of their daily costume. Unlike the more craven members of the aristocracy, Marie Antoinette never dreamed of compromising with the forces that sought to lay her low.
Even when revolutionary leaders beheaded her husband in January 1793, she did not back down. Upon learning of his death, her very first act was to commission a full wardrobe of regal black mourning clothes for herself and her children -- notwithstanding the fact that wearing mourning for the newfound French republic had declared it illegal to wear mourning for the late king. Because of its monarchist overtones, in fact, Marie Antoinette was forbidden to wear this dress to the guillotine; apparently, republican chieftains feared that her widow's costume, which smacked of royalist martyrdom, would cause the public to sympathize with her and try to prevent her execution. Yet even when stripped of her widow's weeds, the fallen queen trounced her foes. According to her serving-girl in the Conciergerie, she had kept a pristine, lily-white slip dress -- the instantly recognizable color of the Bourbon fleur de lys -- hidden in her cell throughout her incarceration. It was in this politically charged outfit, which reduced the crowds around the scaffold to an awestruck silence, that she was guillotined in October 1793.
From the beginning to the end, then, Marie Antoinette's fashion statements were an intrepid and highly consequential form of power dressing. Like the dark, defiant get-ups that are coming into vogue this fall, they left "no room for ambiguity" about her defiance, her courage, and her utter unwillingness to accept defeat. Sadly, Sofia Coppola's film misses a huge opportunity by ignoring these qualities and offering yet another variation on the insipid, pastry-devouring party girl of legend. Still, the queen's fearless clothing choices merit consideration today, and not just among the devotees of high style. In an age when brave, independent thinking is in short supply both on and off the runway, a resurgent "Marie Antoinette moment" can only be a salutary trend -- whatever kind of dress that moment prescribes.
READ MORE: 2006, New York Times
After several seasons of polished and demure looks, presumably aimed at bringing out their customers' inner Stepford Wife, fashion designers have launched a pair of altogether different trends. The first of these proposes that women abandon their pretty little dresses for an array of unreservedly hard-edged, mannish creations that, in the words of New York Times reporter Ginna Bellafante, leave "no room for ambiguity about [their wearers'] power and aggression." The second vogue, ushered in by the Cannes début of Sofia Coppola's flimsy but stylish biopic, Marie Antoinette, has been described as a "Marie Antoinette moment." This look features oversized, flamboyantly colored puff pieces (Yves Saint Laurent's hot pink "carnation cape," Lanvin's billowy, lollipop-red baby-doll dress) and accessories festooned with spangles, crystals, and ostrich feathers galore.
Faced with these two, seemingly irreconcilable aesthetics may well lead fashion followers to ask: What gives? Is it really possible to be a take-no-prisoners power dresser and a frilly fashion queen at the same time?
On a practical level, the answer may well be no. History, however, suggests a different response, at least if one takes a closer look at Marie Antoinette's own relationship to fashion. In my forthcoming book, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, I have tried to dispel the erroneous, shopworn idea -- upon which Coppola's film, for instance, relies -- that the French queen's extravagant clothing choices reflected her self-absorbed, "let them eat cake" frivolity. As is now well known, Marie Antoinette never uttered that notorious zinger, which had been attributed to various French sovereigns for more than a century before her arrival at Versailles in 1770. Much less well known is the fact that her signature costumes -- like the frothy, candy-colored frocks, towering, feather-sprigged hairdos, and sparkling gemstones reprised in 2006's fall collections -- represented daring bids for political power. In Queen of Fashion, I demonstrate how, defying the well-established conventions that governed queenly appearance, she used clothing to combat her enemies and cultivate an aura of unshakable strength.
When the Austrian-born Archduchess Marie Antoinette was married off at age fourteen to France's future king -- crowned Louis XVI in 1774 -- her overriding duty was to give the kingdom an heir. But for her first seven years at Versailles, her cripplingly shy (and, according to some, genitally malformed) husband refused to consummate their marriage. Because so many people at Versailles opposed the Franco-Austrian alliance that her marriage had been designed to solidify, Marie Antoinette's failure to get pregnant left her vulnerable to countless court intrigues. The most damaging of these sought to annul Louis XVI's marriage and send his "barren" wife back to Vienna in disgrace. Despite her young age, Marie Antoinette understood that this course would destroy Franco-Austrian relations, and thus that it behooved her to secure her position through other means. Taking a lesson from her husband's and her own great, seventeenth-century ancestor, Louis XIV, for whom magnificent costumes had proven a famously effective tool of absolutist domination, the young queen turned to fashion to bolster her prestige. Detracting her subjects' attention from her childless state, she reinvented herself -- as my friend and colleague Pierre Saint-Amand has written -- as the nation's first "supermodel, its ruling diva, the queen of glamour."
To that end, Marie Antoinette rebelled against the stodgy, outmoded costuming strictures of Versailles, which, by remaining virtually unchanged from generation to generation, were meant to signify the timeless transcendence of the Bourbon reign. Unlike previous queens of France, who had stayed hidden away at their husbands' court, Marie Antoinette scandalized her fellow courtiers by making weekly trips to Paris, which was eighteenth century Europe's undisputed capital of style. There, she met some of the city's most celebrated designers, whom she enlisted to outfit her in a variety of eye-catching, experimental ensembles. These ranged from startlingly androgynous, man-tailored jackets and breeches to mile-high pouf coiffures decorated with intricate landscapes and military battle-scenes, and from sweeping, jewel-encrusted gowns with which she upstaged her husband at public appearances to risqué peasant-girl shifts that she sported at her private country retreat. Whether dressed up or dressed down, Marie Antoinette conveyed an image of absolute autonomy and power -- of a woman who could do, wear, and spend just about anything she pleased.
As Marie Antoinette herself recorded, this astute piece of self-marketing went a long way toward convincing the French public that she actually had real influence in her husband's government -- for, like Louis XIV before her, her sartorial flights of fancy bespoke an unrestricted access to the royal coffers. Yet unlike Louis XIV, of whom, as a male ruler, such aggressive ostentation was expected, Marie Antoinette's bold posturing scandalized many of her subjects. France was, after all, a country where the royal consort had traditionally stood as little more than a docile, retiring companion (and breeder) of kings. Alarmed by her apparent rise to power, the queen's adversaries at court began spreading unflattering tales about her narcissism, her financial recklessness, her ruinous addiction to fashion.
These, of course, are precisely the stories that culminated in the myth of "let them eat cake," and that Coppola's Marie Antoinette -- whose opening scene shows a feather-headed Marie Antoinette saucily licking cake off her fingers -- so lamentably perpetuates. And gossip of this sort dealt the queen a devastating public-relations blow. When massive social unrest erupted in 1789, for instance, angry hordes descended on Versailles calling for Marie Antoinette's -- not her husband's -- head. The burgeoning revolutionary media then took up this call with a vengeance, describing her outfits as signs of her treacherously self-indulgent nature. By the time she was imprisoned in the Conciergerie in August 1793, her detractors seemed to take great pleasure in punishing her for her alleged crimes of fashion. Unlike other well-born inmates of the Conciergerie, who were allowed to retain sumptuous wardrobes, Marie Antoinette was forced to give up all clothes except for the tattered dress on her back. One cruel jailer even insisted that she unstitch by hand the royalist fleurs de lys embroidered on her chamber's wall-hangings.
As when she had occupied the throne, however, Marie Antoinette had no intention of letting her enemies beat her, and costume remained her preferred weapon of choice. Before she and Louis XVI were stripped of their powers in August 1792, she insisted on wearing her most aggressively spectacular diamonds to meetings with hostile revolutionary officials -- as if to remind this group of men, whom she dismissed as "a pack of madmen, idiots, and brutes," that there would always be an unbridgeable chasm between them and her royal self. To add insult to injury, she adamantly refused to wear the tricolor ribbons and cockades that revolutionary public adopted as privileged emblems of liberty, fraternity, and equality. In this embargo, she was virtually alone, as other, more politically opportunistic members of the court made the tricolor and similar revolutionary insignia (like jewelry set with the stones from the demolished Bastille prison) a regular part of their daily costume. Unlike the more craven members of the aristocracy, Marie Antoinette never dreamed of compromising with the forces that sought to lay her low.
Even when revolutionary leaders beheaded her husband in January 1793, she did not back down. Upon learning of his death, her very first act was to commission a full wardrobe of regal black mourning clothes for herself and her children -- notwithstanding the fact that wearing mourning for the newfound French republic had declared it illegal to wear mourning for the late king. Because of its monarchist overtones, in fact, Marie Antoinette was forbidden to wear this dress to the guillotine; apparently, republican chieftains feared that her widow's costume, which smacked of royalist martyrdom, would cause the public to sympathize with her and try to prevent her execution. Yet even when stripped of her widow's weeds, the fallen queen trounced her foes. According to her serving-girl in the Conciergerie, she had kept a pristine, lily-white slip dress -- the instantly recognizable color of the Bourbon fleur de lys -- hidden in her cell throughout her incarceration. It was in this politically charged outfit, which reduced the crowds around the scaffold to an awestruck silence, that she was guillotined in October 1793.
From the beginning to the end, then, Marie Antoinette's fashion statements were an intrepid and highly consequential form of power dressing. Like the dark, defiant get-ups that are coming into vogue this fall, they left "no room for ambiguity" about her defiance, her courage, and her utter unwillingness to accept defeat. Sadly, Sofia Coppola's film misses a huge opportunity by ignoring these qualities and offering yet another variation on the insipid, pastry-devouring party girl of legend. Still, the queen's fearless clothing choices merit consideration today, and not just among the devotees of high style. In an age when brave, independent thinking is in short supply both on and off the runway, a resurgent "Marie Antoinette moment" can only be a salutary trend -- whatever kind of dress that moment prescribes.
northernsky
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model_mom said:
such an interesting read, thanks for posting.
Great thread !!! MA was really the style icon of that time especially in the court of Versailles.Every woman in the court wanted to dress up like her and she and her stylist (if i can say) Rose Bertin made some big some changes on the style of that time.Changes that were seen as scandalous then.
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DosViolines
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source: nytimes.com
October 15, 2006
The Queen’s Wardrobe
Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
It could be a tabloid cover story: A 14-year-old girl is wrenched from her mother’s home and transported across state lines, stripped bare and paraded before a crowd of jaded adults. The girl’s only comfort, a pug dog named Mops, is taken from her, and as strange eyes assess her nudity with frank stares, she breaks down in tears. It sounds like a situation that calls for an Amber Alert: what it actually is, though, is the factual record of what happened when Archduchess Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna of the Austrian Hapsburgs was handed over to the Bourbon court in 1770 to become the bride of the dauphin, Louis Auguste, the future King Louis XVI of France. Relinquishing her nationality with her clothes, she donned a “gleaming ceremonial gown made from cloth-of-gold” which transformed her into a human embodiment of the French monarchy. With that dress, she took on a new identity and a new name: Marie Antoinette, dauphine of France.
In “Queen of Fashion,” her suspenseful, remarkably well-documented and surprisingly humanizing account of the role style played in Marie Antoinette’s fate and legacy, Caroline Weber, who teaches at Barnard College and is an expert on the Terror, adds texture, shimmer and depth to an icon most of us thought we knew already. The traumatic wardrobe change was a diplomatic formality — a tradition known in royal circles as la remise — which the girl’s redoubtable mother, Maria Theresa (the Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and an ancien régime role model for 20th-century stage mothers), had not just sanctioned, but hailed. “You must absolutely lend yourself to what the court is accustomed to doing,” she wrote in a note to her daughter. “All eyes will be fixed on you.” This event augured what was to come at the French court at Versailles. For the rest of Marie Antoinette’s life, getting dressed would never be the private affair it had been before her extreme makeover — noblewomen would watch her put on her clothes in the morning and take them off at night, and squabble over the privilege of handing the queen her underthings. But in two decades, the ceremonial toilette would be remaindered, as the country stripped their adopted queen of her finery again, and led her to the guillotine in a white shift, to pay the ultimate price for her failure to correctly gauge What Not to Wear in revolutionary France.
Hundreds of books have been written about the doomed queen — from Stefan Zweig’s famous biography of the early 1930’s and Antonia Fraser’s superb recent “Marie Antoinette: The Journey” to the new novel “Abundance” by Sena Jeter Naslund (the author of “Ahab’s Wife”). In “Abundance,” the remise affords the occasion for the child bride to indulge in Barbara-Cartland-issue reveries about the “pleasant rosebuds” on her young chest, and about the masculine allure of her groom-to-be. “There must be other words than ‘tall’ and ‘strong’ to think of,” the heroine daydreams, recalling her mother’s birds-and-bees lecture on the “engulfing transports of wifely love,” at which she had “squirmed with delight.” But she can’t think of any. (As Weber shows, “nearsighted, maladroit and grossly overweight” would have been closer to the case — Louis XVI was an ineffectual 18th-century emo boy.) Fictionalizing a life that is already so surreal is usually a vain endeavor (Shakespeare is one of the few who regularly pulled it off); so it’s best in reading Naslund’s romance to think of it as a kind of “Forever Amber” punted across the channel from Restoration England to Versailles. But the tributes don’t stop with books; there have been plays, operas, films and couture gowns devoted to the conehead-pouf-coiffed sovereign — from a Rochas frock in a “Let Them Eat Cake!” themed window at Barneys last Christmas to John Galliano’s 2000 “Masquerade and Bondage” collection for Christian Dior, which included a hoop-skirted “Marie Antoinette” gown printed with an image of the queen frolicking in shepherdess garb. This month, 213 years after her execution, Marie Antoinette has been resurrected by Kirsten Dunst in a lavish Sofia Coppola movie that portrays the Austrian as a vapid valley girl with bonbons in her cheeks and nary a thought in her brain. Vogue put the star on its cover last month, with the headline: “Kirsten Dunst as the Teen Queen Who Rocked Versailles,” and the director told the magazine that she sees her subject mostly as a confused young woman trying to make her place in the world. “I feel that Marie Antoinette is a very creative person,” Coppola said. A dozen glossy pages were devoted to showcasing frothy 2006 couture confections that revived the “teen queen’s” glamour. It goes to show: if you take the long view, no press is bad press. But Weber reminds us that it doesn’t feel that way when it’s your neck on the slab.
When you think of Marie Antoinette, chances are you picture a simpering, rosy-lipped Lladro figurine of a woman, wearing one of the outfits she favored: an opulently panniered, plunge-necked, stiffly corseted satin gown; or a frilly Bo Peep shepherdess costume; or (in her pared-down Rousseauian mode) a simple white muslin gown, loosely belted at the waist — a trend French society condemned but soon copied. Her hair you undoubtedly imagine swept up in her signature headdress, the powdered pouf. But Weber shows that the child bride who arrived at Versailles (years before the craze for her poufs caught on) was no coquettish sophisticate. Friendless, conspired against and viewed with suspicion by the xenophobic, malicious French court (including her husband’s close relations), she had to think fast to secure her position as consort to the future king. The heir apparent, a shy, 15-year-old virgin, was unwilling to consummate the marriage (it took his wife seven years of pillow talk to win him over). Without an heir to shore up her claim to the throne, the dauphine had to invent a way to project power. She did it, the author suggests, by making herself a trompe l’oeil armature of fine clothes and accessories, as a posturing animal might do in the wild. “Through carefully selected, unconventional outfits and accessories, she cultivated what she later called an ‘appearance of [political] credit,’ ” Weber argues. As the queen later said, “I allow the public to believe that I have more credit [with the King] than I do in reality.” Lacking perspicacity, she failed to understand that, in France, kings’ wives were supposed to be as peahens to the gaudy peacock husband; elegant, but drab and unshowy. Fine feathers were reserved for kings’ mistresses — like Mme. Du Barry, and Mme. de Pompadour before her. But in her first months at Versailles, Marie Antoinette was protected by her youth, beauty and vivacity.
Championed by the debauched King Louis XV, she felt (wrongly) free to chase butterflies in the palace gardens with young ladies from her entourage; to mock the dour old crones in the court; to snub Louis XV’s scheming, well-connected ex-poule mistress, Du Barry; and to refuse to wear the torturously confining royal grand corps corset. She delighted Louis XV and thrilled the curious public by taking up riding, wearing men’s breeches and a riding coat, and having a portrait of herself painted astride a rearing stallion — like her hero Louis XIV, the Sun King. Her mother fired off a Cassandran warning from Vienna to respect court protocol: “If you do not heed my advice, you will regret it, but it will be too late.” By then, it already was. The baleful court watched over the dauphine like predacious spiders, awaiting the chance to lunge at a glittering bluebottle and sink in their fangs.
The men and women of Versailles pursued a relentless whisper campaign against the newcomer, and after the death of Louis XV in 1774 and the coronation of Louis XVI in 1775, as a mood of anti-Royalist rage spread across impoverished France, the queen’s reputation was dragged through the gutter by cartoonists who accused her of profligacy, frivolity, nymphomania, lesbianism and incest, among other vices. France’s financial woes were laid at her jeweled slippers, even though her extravagances were negligible compared with the huge deficits the country incurred during the American Revolution or what her brothers-in-law squandered on “gambling, courtesans and elegant clothing” in 1777. But according to Weber’s theory, the image of influence and splendor Marie Antoinette had carefully crafted for herself, using fashion as her buttress, was too powerful to blot from the public’s imagination. As her mother had forecast, she was “hurtling toward an abyss.” In 1787, she rationed her pin money, scrambling to restore her image, but by then, she was out of touch, and out of time.
On July 14, 1789, French citizens stormed the Bastille (Louis XVI, oblivious, spent the day hunting, and wrote in his journal, “Nothing”); three months later, an angry mob stampeded through Versailles and smashed the queen’s mirrors and slashed her bed to shreds, not realizing she’d fled her boudoir. The royal family then moved to the Tuileries, in Paris, and tried to lie low; Marie Antoinette even tried to pander to popular feeling by sporting patriotic tricolor garb. But like a modern-day celebrity forced by reversal of fortune to live among crowds that had once both worshiped and reviled her, she was bound to stand out. When she tried to leave the country in 1791 with her family, there were no private planes, no helicopters, just a coach. She didn’t stand a chance. Spotted in Varennes, captured, brought back to Paris and imprisoned, she continued to order subdued but still stylish outfits to wear in captivity. Even after her husband was executed, Marie Antoinette defied her captors by ordering mourning dress, seeking solace in the illusion that had set her on her unlucky course: the notion that by controlling her image, she could master her fate. Bound for the chopping block, deprived of her widow’s weeds, she still contrived to have a clean-lined martyr’s costume smuggled into her cell. She was the first woman of whom it truthfully could be said that she shopped until she dropped.
Liesl Schillinger, a New York-based arts writer, is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
SusanSuperstar
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She was so great! I read about that Parfume they created and it´s like a 10000 for a bottle!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
omgspicegirls
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She was so beautiful
Can't get enough of those dresses!
Can't get enough of those dresses!
