Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art Book

The title of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution is somewhat misleading, because this book isn't about fashion in the narrow sense of clothing. There are descriptions of Marie Antoinette's luxurious outfits and of the styles she promoted (like the Rousseauesque country muslin dress, the gaulle). But the author discusses a whole range of courtly styles and habits and shows how Marie Antoinette attempted to assert her individuality in this constrained sphere that was allowed her.

Marie Antoinette arrived as a teenager at a Versailles molded by Louis XIV's intention to keep his nobility at court, under his watchful eye. He and his successor, Louis XV, distracted the nobles from politics with convoluted and recondite ceremonies that left them competing for favors like being allowed to hand the queen her chemise. In this atmosphere, the color of a ribbon or who was invited to go hunting on a particular day took on fatal importance. It was within this ritualized and confining world that Marie Antoinette attempted to achieve some measure of personality, privacy, and happiness by taking up riding astride rather than side-saddle and wearing the outlandish pouf hairstyle, to name a few of her small rebellions.

But this strategy of self-expression backfired when "Madame Deficit" became famous for her extravagant expenditures, for powdering her hair with flour during a famine, and for clothing herself in the colors of her family of origin, the German Habsburgs. She had mastered the style and etiquette of Versailles but never learned to manage her public persona in the face of Revolution and imperiled her family through her missteps.

The book is a sympathetic biography of Marie Antoinette, approaching her as a victim of dynastic politics who achieves a certain maturity only to get lost in a situation that is unfathomable to her. The author, a professor at Barnard, writes in a lively style for what is essentially an academic book and doesn't get bogged down in microdefining the parameters of her subject. More than fashion, the ultimate subjects of the book are image and public personae; the history of a bizarre kind of court etiquette; and the horrifying disorientation of the Revolution as experienced by "la ci-devant reine."