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There are as many ways of looking at Marie Antoinette as there are historians, but I think that Caroline Weber’s book Queen of Fashion, one of the most recent takes on the youthful monarch, addresses an interesting perspective. From the moment Marie Antoinette stepped onto French soil, she was defined by what she wore. Traditional Bourbon protocol required that she be stripped of all items, clothing and servants before the court, and re-dressed in entirely French clothing. This meant that she was naked in front of a large, if select, group of nobles and servants. While she was being clothed, female servants fought over the clothes she brought from Austria and divyed them amongst themselves. That scene was oddly echoed in later years, when the revolutionaries that de-cried her extravagance raided her closets of their sumptuous wares.
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There are as many ways of looking at Marie Antoinette as there are historians, but I think that Caroline Weber’s book Queen of Fashion, one of the most recent takes on the youthful monarch, addresses an interesting perspective. From the moment Marie Antoinette stepped onto French soil, she was defined by what she wore. Traditional Bourbon protocol required that she be stripped of all items, clothing and servants before the court, and re-dressed in entirely French clothing. This meant that she was naked in front of a large, if select, group of nobles and servants. While she was being clothed, female servants fought over the clothes she brought from Austria and divyed them amongst themselves. That scene was oddly echoed in later years, when the revolutionaries that de-cried her extravagance raided her closets of their sumptuous wares.
Not long into her reign, the young Queen began defining fashion rather than letting fashion define her. Weber gives the reader a progression of style and helps us understand how the naked Austrian girl, shivering in front of a roomful of people, became an early icon of celebrity fashion. The Queen’s devotion to setting fashion trends gave her power when she had none, but was eventually her undoing. Marie began to reshape her look when she refused to wear the extra-stiff corset she was required to wear as a wife to the Dauphine.
The machinations of court politics were not her forte and she soon began regularly riding horses instead of tending to courtly matters. She shocked the world and the court by donning men’s breeches when she rode. The portrait she had commissioned soon after she started riding regularly is reminiscent of a similar equestrian portrait of Louis XIV. In mimicking the iconic king, she was starting to define herself in terms beyond carrying a future king in her womb. But Marie Antoinette never stuck to one particular fashion. Like today’s Madonna, she constantly re-invented herself. By the coronation of her husband, she had already moved on to the towering pouf that became all the rage in Europe after she adopted it. As she Queen changed her fashion, so too did all of France. Her changes in style were frequent enough that the population had to scramble to keep up. The hunger for high fashion and constantly shifting dress trends that the Queen seemed to encourage was not without controversy. She was criticized for her extravagance and flouting of queenly convention even as all of France waited eagerly for the next fashion update. Without the Queen’s monetary support, celebrity designers like Rose Bertin never would have risen to the heights they did in pre-revolution France. I enjoyed the convoluted journey of Marie’s fashions, from the corsets of her early reign and her shepherdess look to the widow’s weeds she wore after her husband’s execution. This look into a world of fashion dolls, towering hair and expensive glamour changed my perspective on the power of fashion to exalt and condemn.
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