Paris is, in the eyes of many, the fashion and style capital of the world. And if you think French fashion was born with Coco Chanel (1883-1971) and her little black dress, you probably haven’t heard of the woman who turned her love of fashion into the politics of her day: Queen Marie Antoinette (1755-1793). The story of her arrival in Paris, the change of her name, and her political marriage that ended tragically under the guillotine reads just like a historical novel.
But if you think about it, this is also a coming-of-age story: a girl forced to leave home at age 15 for the “big city” (in this case, the 18th-century Palace of Versailles), and her rebellion against the establishment, which, like with every teenage girl, showed itself mostly through fashion and clothing details. But unlike other teenage girls around the world, the fashion statements of this French queen still stay with us today. So, we’ve gathered for you a few aspects of Marie Antoinette’s fashion life that show just how relevant she remains today, more than two hundred years after her death.
A Woman’s Best Friends
In one of the most memorable scenes in the movie “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) dances in a pink dress among men in tuxedos who shower her with diamonds, singing that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011) wrote a memoir devoted entirely to her love of jewelry, called “My Love Affair with Jewelry.” But before either of them, it was Marie Antoinette who nearly emptied the treasury of her husband, Louis XVI (r. 1774-1792), king of France, because of her love for anything that sparkled. And in her case, it damaged her reputation for generations to come.
To be fair, Marie Antoinette wasn’t really the hedonistic, greedy queen that the underground journalists and political opponents of her time made her out to be (as proof, she never actually said “if they have no bread, let them eat cake!”). The Austrian princess, Maria Josepha Antonia, was forced to leave her mother’s home, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (1717-1780), and her 14 (!!) older brothers and sisters, to cross the border into France alone (“alone,” relatively speaking, of course, if you don’t count the four carriages that followed her…) and try to fit into the materialistic, hedonistic, and cruel court of Versailles.
Even as a child, the princess suffered from the excessive demands of the Palace of Versailles regarding the future bride’s appearance. For example, when she was six years old, her mother called in a dentist to the palace, who broke the little girl’s teeth and moved them (without anesthesia, of course) until the French envoys confirmed that her teeth were straight enough for their taste. And if you think today’s Parisian fashion world is harsh on women’s and girls’ body shapes, what would you say about a princess who, on her wedding day, heard all the women of the court giggling behind her back because the bodice of her wedding dress wouldn’t close properly?
Under these circumstances, combined with the fact that everyone expected the princess to produce an heir with a husband who was unable to perform sexually for many years, you really can’t blame the young girl for deciding to compensate herself by buying all the silk, feathers, and diamonds the French treasury could afford her.
This string of indulgences continued until 1785, when two Parisian jewelers named Boehmer and Bassenge decided to exploit the queen’s reputation for extravagance to make money. Years earlier, Louis XV (r. 1715-1774), Louis XVI’s grandfather, had commissioned from them a magnificent necklace set with diamonds for his mistress, Madame du Barry (1743-1793). But the old king died before the work was finished, the mistress was banished from the palace, and the two jewelers were left stuck with a necklace worth 2 million livres, a sum that could have supported a middle-class French family for five years.
When they struggled to sell the piece, the two joined forces with a con artist named Jeanne de la Motte (1756-1791), who had managed to worm her way into France’s aristocratic circles by becoming the mistress of France’s ambassador to Austria, Cardinal de Rohan (1734-1803). De la Motte, who knew that her patron was a bit infatuated with the beautiful Marie Antoinette, began writing him forged letters in the queen’s name, making him believe the queen loved him back. She then even hired a prostitute who resembled Marie Antoinette somewhat, to meet secretly with de Rohan and ask him for the necklace as a gift.
The smitten de Rohan bought the necklace for a fortune, but when he tried to present it to the queen publicly, she was horrified and claimed she had never asked for such an expensive gift. By that time, France was already deep in debt from the war with the British over control of the colonies in North America, and hungry citizens were taking to the streets to protest. So the queen had already learned to rein in her extravagance, but it was too late: de Rohan was publicly humiliated, and Marie Antoinette’s reputation turned her into public enemy number one. The jewelers, meanwhile, never saw their money: the necklace was broken up and its diamonds were sold in London.
Self-Expression
One of the biggest fashion trends of 2015 was printing recognizable logos on clothes. The young, provocative designer Jeremy Scott (born 1975), who had joined the Italian brand Moschino the year before, even created an entire collection featuring clothes shaped like the McDonald’s logo, the Barbie character, and SpongeBob’s face. In fact, you could say that in an era when we’re busy expressing our feelings on social media day and night, expressing our thoughts through our clothes was a natural next step.
It’s hard for us to imagine times when the right to express personal opinions was reserved only for a select few: the nobility. And even among the nobility, women had to keep their mouths shut and express their true feelings only behind closed doors. But Queen Marie Antoinette had a desperate need for self-expression: during the first seven years of her marriage to Louis XVI, the couple failed to consummate their marriage and produce an heir. And since a queen’s standing in a foreign kingdom rose and fell with her heirs, Marie Antoinette’s position was especially precarious.
Not only that, but the political factions at court were divided between those who hated her for being Austrian and demanded an end to foreign influence at Versailles, and those who hated her because they supported her sworn enemy, Madame du Barry, the former mistress of the late king. Notice the common denominator? So the queen decided to take action and use her body and hair as a shield for her status at court.
Using materials like gauze, hairpieces, and even flour, she invented hairstyles so tall that she literally became “head and shoulders” above everyone else at court. Women from every corner of Europe rushed to adopt these giant hairstyles, which were also decorated with feathers, fruit, and fresh vegetables. In doing so, they were essentially saying: “We may be required to stay silent, but you can’t ignore our presence.”
Over time, the queen also began using her hairstyle as a way to express political positions. For example, in a year when the harvest was especially good, she showed off a tall hairstyle decorated with fresh stalks of wheat. And in 1778, following a victory of the French fleet over the English fleet, she expressed her support for the navy by decorating her hairstyle with an elaborate, fully equipped model of the French flagship!
Casual
Part of the charm of French women lies in their seemingly innate ability to wear everyday, simple clothes in the chicest way possible, as if the worn-in jeans and the buttoned-up men’s shirt on their delicate frames had been tailored especially for them in Givenchy‘s own studio. Indeed, France is the birthplace of “casual chic,” and this time the credit belongs entirely to the mother of modern fashion, Coco Chanel (1883-1971), who wore striped shirts and men’s cotton trousers, inspired by the fishermen of the French seaside town of Deauville, while other women were still buried deep in corsets and frills.
About 40 years later, the sex kitten of French cinema, Brigitte Bardot, was filmed in another French fishing town, Saint-Tropez, and she too paid tribute to the local fishermen’s clothing, though this time she added flat ballet shoes. That’s how the style of simplicity that French women excel at was born, and it continues to inspire Parisian fashionistas to this day.
About two hundred years before Chanel and Bardot, it was Marie Antoinette (1755-1793) who grew tired of suffocating corsets and overdone frills and decided that simplicity was simply the most beautiful thing. Except that unlike her fashionable successors, her battle was fought against French culture itself.
In the years following her coronation, Marie Antoinette, like the queens before her, was required to wear the “royal corset.” This was a particularly cruel torture device in the form of a corset laced down to a thickness of just four fingers, with no supporting straps or padding at all. French aristocrats believed that a carefully bound upper body symbolized the highest level of strength of character and self-control, which is why that corset, called the “Grand Corps,” or in a loose translation, “the supreme body,” was a garment reserved exclusively for the noblest women in France.
But for poor Marie Antoinette, it only took a few wearings to realize that she would rather be able to breathe or eat without difficulty. She refused to wear the royal corset, claiming she was thin enough to manage without it. This small rebellion was nothing less than a resounding slap in the face to the traditionalists of the Palace of Versailles, and they began whispering that Marie Antoinette’s refusal to wear the corset had to do with her inability to get pregnant.
French nobles even called out to her: “If you refuse to give us an heir, at least don’t insult us with the sight of your loose belly!” The matter even reached Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, who had to step in and convince her daughter to dress appropriately to avoid a diplomatic incident.
So the French queen bowed her head and submitted to tradition. But that didn’t last long, and in 1776 she decided she had done more than enough for French tradition, and launched a fashion rebellion so significant that it changed women’s fashion in Europe for almost a century. She abandoned the heavy palace gowns made of velvet and silk, and began wearing dresses with a loose, relaxed cut that not only required no corset but were made of a simple gauze fabric (the “chemise”) that was considered, in those days, underwear.
She replaced her dazzling jewelry with a thin silk ribbon tied around her neck. And as if that weren’t enough, whenever the queen went out riding, she paired this ensemble with a men’s riding jacket, tailored for her at full length, like a dress. In the 18th century, this look was probably the equivalent, in today’s terms, of a combination of lingerie and a men’s blazer.
Despite the initial shock at the palace and claims from the queen’s critics that she dressed like a prostitute, this style of dress became extremely popular among European women within just a few years, to the point that even her sworn enemy, Madame du Barry, began adopting the style.
About two years later, in 1778, the queen gave birth to her first daughter, Marie-Thérèse, and the French aristocracy relaxed and allowed the queen to keep her “little eccentricities.” That’s how the style of the simple, straight-cut white gauze dress survived for a long time. At the start of the 19th century, many years after Marie Antoinette’s tragic death under the blade of the guillotine, the dress became the height of fashion, so much so that even Joséphine de Beauharnais (1763-1814), the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, wore a similar dress in one of her first portraits.
Even the simple silk ribbon that Marie Antoinette wore around her neck became a cultural symbol. In the years after the queen’s death, women across Europe continued to mourn the death of that original diva by wearing a thin red ribbon around their necks, meant to resemble the cut of a blade. These collar-like ribbons have come and gone in women’s fashion over the years and the centuries, and what started as a playful trend of a young queen looking for a look that would shake up 18th-century French tradition made a comeback as a must-have item on the runways of the spring/summer 2015 season.
Indeed, you only had to glance at that season’s shows by Marc Jacobs and Vivienne Westwood to see that neck ribbons were the must-have item of summer 2015. And all that’s left for us to wonder is: would the fashion world as we know it today even exist without the undisputed queen of fashion, Marie Antoinette?
Ariella Goichman-Garber, from the fashion history blog Timeless Hemlines
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