Queen Of Fashion, by Caroline Weber

Voici une revue très bien faite de l'excellent ouvrage de Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.



In Paris last month, Karl Lagerfeld presented his latest Chanel ready-to-wear collection in a massive, specially constructed barn, complete with hay-strewn floors and wooden eaves wound with floral garlands. To some viewers, the haute hoedown may have registered as a celebration of natural materials like hemp, raffia, and linen, all lynchpins of the designer’s looks for Spring 2010. Others in the audience may have focused on the show’s revival of that classic French erotic arrangement, the ménage à trois, as models Lara Stone and Freja Beha Erichsen frolicked lustily in the hay with Lagerfeld’s male muse of the moment, Baptiste Giabiconi. Neither of these interpretations, though, rules out the most plausible theory of all: that the spectacle was really an early birthday party for Marie-Antoinette — the queen of rusticated, risqué fashions, born today in 1755.

An Austrian archduchess by birth and a French queen by marriage, Marie-Antoinette was an improbable pioneer of shabby chic. At Versailles — the court she moved to when she wed the future King Louis XVI at age 14 — etiquette demanded that its sovereigns’ very appearance evoke their transcendental power. To this end, the Bourbons dressed with such jaw-dropping elegance and ostentation that awestruck commoners could only conclude, to modify a phrase from today’s celebrity rags: “Royals — they’re not just like us!” Having grown up with no such strict codes governing her clothing choices, Marie-Antoinette was neither trained nor inclined to treat these choices as matters of state. Yet that’s exactly what her slightest fashion gaffes became. During her earliest days in France, for example, she refused to don the special, fainting-spell-inducing corset that only the highest-ranked princesses were entitled (read: required) to wear. Flying as it did in the face of Gallic tradition, this decision strained Franco-Austrian diplomatic relations almost to the breaking point. As the Viennese ambassador to Versailles reported in alarm: “Her Majesty’s refusal of the corset [has set] all of France complaining.”

Yet to Marie-Antoinette, homesick for the relative casualness and comfort of Austrian life, provoking her subjects’ ire was a small price to pay for sartorial freedom. This she achieved by establishing, at a neoclassical villa called the Petit Trianon, a private, faux-bucolic retreat where she and her visitors gamboled about in costumes that were, to contemporary eyes, almost shocking in their informality. Working with her favorite stylist, Rose Bertin, the queen devised a daily uniform that consisted, for women, of a plain, unstructured white muslin or linen chemise gown, accessorized with such homespun touches as a simple ribbon or a saucy little apron tied around the waist, and a silk posy or a straw hat perched jauntily on loose, unpowdered hair. Absent from this pretty, peasant-girl look was every component of traditional court apparel: vast hoopskirts, constrictive corset, and sweeping train; heavy, ornately embroidered silks, bejeweled and bespangled with an inch of their lives; masses of gems piled on to gild an already-twenty-four-karat fleur-de-lys. By jettisoning such cumbersome, tradition-bound garb in favor of a new style that emphasized cleanness of line, enhanced freedom of movement, and valued humble textiles and trimmings over rare, costly ones, the queen revolutionized 18th-century dress — and paved the way for the later innovations of such figures as, well, Coco Chanel.

But in a land where even a missing corset spelled scandal, Marie-Antoinette was woefully ahead of her time. In 1783, a portrait (above) showing her in her signature white gown and straw hat sparked a backlash that would only end on the guillotine ten years later. Critics raged against her for having posed “in the gown and apron of a country wench,” “[in] a chamber-maid’s dust-cloth,” and “in her underwear.” Inspired by the latter charge, underground pornographers began spinning yarns about the sordid antics the queen’s free-and-easy outfits enabled. So the chemise dress, which looks so modest by today’s standards, came to signify brazen promiscuity. It also came to mean anti-Frenchness, as other commentators, noting that muslin and linen were foreign imports, accused the queen of willfully destroying the nation’s silk industry. The down-home hat was also seen as a heinous affront to local custom: only a barbaric Austrian, it was said, would “cover herself with straw” when she could have — and should have — worn a crown.

So the reviled queen lost the battle, and eventually her head. But in the world of fashion, she most definitely won the war. Lagerfeld’s proto-Trianon collection — with its easy white dresses, filmy aprons, cloth flower accessories, and straw, straw everywhere — reminds us just how fresh and modern Marie-Antoinette’s “revolution in linen” (as one commentator dubbed it) was in its time, and how relevant it still is in ours. Had she somehow managed to defy revolutionary furor on the one hand and mortality on the other, the rebel queen would have turned 254 today. Her style legacy, though, remains forever young.
http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/queen-please-remembering-marie-antoinette/

Très complet en effet merci !
ça donne envie

Excellent ouvrage! Je le recommande chaleureusement !

Woops voilà une image d'une Madame du Barry qu'on ne reconnaît pas... Sauf si on ne se base que sur THE film:

"[Madame du Barry's] infantile lisp lent itself to parody and [her] crude way of speaking and eating betrayed her lowly origins."

Le reste du livre n'est pas mal mais sur quoi l'auteur peut-elle bien se baser pour écrire ça?

Coppola je dirais

L'ouvrage a, en effet, été publié...en 2006 !!!

Bien à vous.

Faudra vérifier les notes.   C'est à quelle page ?

L'auteur peut aussi avoir été influencée par l'ancêtre de la catastrophe juniocoppolienne, la catastrophe vandykienne.

Page 60
La note suivante (87) se rapporte à Zamor, citation d'Erickson (To the scaffold: The Life of Marie Antoinette). Sinon l'auteur semble s'être surtout basée sur Les Maîtresses de Louis XV des Goncourt, que je n'ai pas lu donc je ne sais ce qu'ils écrivent à propos de Mme du Barry.

Si d'aventure... a écrit:

Page 60
La note suivante (87) se rapporte à Zamor, citation d'Erickson (To the scaffold: The Life of Marie Antoinette). Sinon l'auteur semble s'être surtout basée sur Les Maîtresses de Louis XV des Goncourt, que je n'ai pas lu donc je ne sais ce qu'ils écrivent à propos de Mme du Barry.

Merci, Si d'aventure ! Je regarderai aussi.

Mais je crois qu'il faut tenir compte de l'importance du désastreux "Marie Antoinette" de Van Dyke sur les auteurs anglo-saxons. Ca peut inconsciemment biaiser leur vision, même celle d'une spécialiste aussi sérieuse que Caroline Weber.

C'est l'université du Michigan  

C'est en anglais

C'est très long  

Mais c'est l'auteur de ce livre qui parle et son livre est juste génial et il y a des images trop top  



petit conseil : à voir par parties, peut-être avec pause(s)-café(s) ?  

pimprenelle a écrit:

Voici une revue très bien faite de l'excellent ouvrage de Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.

The best book about Marie-Antoinette ever written:banane3: