Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. By Caroline Weber. London: Aurum Press, 2007; New York: Henry Holt, 2006

Marie Antoinette’s posthumous reputation is getting better and better these days; it was only a few years ago, says her biographer Antonia Fraser, that French schoolchildren were being taught to refer to her as the “wicked Queen” who brought about her family’s ruin through her rampant consumerism and elitist attitude. And now, two hundred and fourteen years after her death by guillotine, the erstwhile monarch’s image is being used to sell macaroons, watches, and super-trendy biopics, the fashion community can be reliably expected to refer to her at least once a season, and entire forests have been felled to provide paper for all the research that has been devoted to Marie Antoinette and her era.

Caroline Weber’s recent contribution, however, is well worth the paper it’s printed on. Weber, a professor of French at Barnard College, Columbia University, perspicaciously links Marie Antoinette’s fashionable image with her fortunes, examining the queen’s rise and fall through the folds of her opulent dresses. Rather than a frivolous monarch with a callous disregard for her people’s suffering,Weber paints a picture of a young woman fighting for autonomy at a largely unfriendly foreign court, who gets carried away with the unexpected power her fashion choices give her.

Although she never uttered the words most famously attributed to her (“Let them eat cake,” or “Qu’ils mangent du brioche”), Marie Antoinette did use her physicality to uphold a clear boundary between her Queenly self and her common subjects. This, however, was not entirely her idea, or her fault: “her body was not her own,” Weber informs us throughout the text. The Queen’s body was the site upon which the continued success of the monarchy depended, even from her early days as Dauphine, and was also, as Weber shows, a primary means of calling into question the Austrian-born Queen’s true allegiance to France. Her own security in France depended not only the consummation of her marriage and the production of heirs to the throne, but upon her conformation with the traditions of court dress, and her embodiment of the divine rights of the French monarchy.

Weber skillfully situates Marie Antoinette’s relationship to fashion within the traditional demands made on the Queen of France. She was expected to wear clothing so opulent and uncomfortable that other women at court only wore it on special occasions, such as the grands corps, a diamond-studded corset worn daily by the queen. Even her morning toilet was public and comprised of a series of rigidly hierarchised functions delegated according to rank amongst the noblewomen present. As Weber shows, these rituals were insisted upon by the court, but not for the same reasons, and certainly not with Marie Antoinette’s best interests at heart. For the Comtesse De Noailles, nicknamed Madame Etiquette, they represented an integral part of the successful functioning of the monarchy, For the queen’s sworn enemy, the Comtesse Du Barry, and though she suspected little, her husbands aunts, referred to as “Mesdames,” the breach of tradition was a way to undermine Marie Antoinette’s standing at court, causing lasting damage to her reputation, and entrenching the rumor in France and abroad that the Dauphine was physically malformed. That the Dauphine had so transgressed her grands corps, according to one contemporary source, had “all of France complaining.”

But rumors of physical deformity were the least of the rumors spread about Marie Anoinette, and Weber deals with them one by one, locating each of them within some aspect of the queen’s closet.

Soon after her arrival in France, the Dauphine took to riding horses, astride like a man and dressed in a man’s breeches, taking her illustrious ancestor, Lous XIV, as her model, going so far, Weber suggests, as to commission a portrait of herself upon a rearing horse which bore a strong resemblance to a similar portrait of the Sun King. Somehow, this horseback riding managed to win Marie Antoinette some approval at court, given that she was not a “real Dauphine,” nor a real woman, because the sexually disinterested Dauphin had yet to consummate their marriage. The result of her adoption of the hunt and her appealing to the image of Louis XIV, Weber illustrates, was that she gained an air of authority, particularly over her husband. This cross-dressing would later backfire, Weber writes, as it would invite accusations of “lesbianism, monstrousness, and a brazen thirst for power.”

Her moment truly came around the time of her coronation, in 1774, with the advent of the “pouf,” a hairstyle invented by a dressmaker named Rose Bertin, who would become Marie Antoinette’s chief stylist, and would be dubbed by her enemies as “the minister of fashion.” The headdress, “built on scaffolding from wire, cloth, gauze, horsehair, fake hair, and the wearer’s own tresses, teased high off the forehead” would often include a theme, commemorating an event near to the wearer’s heart, such as the birth of a child, or a favorite new opera playing in Paris, or dear to the country—when the French came to the aid of the American revolutionaries, Marie Antoinette wore a pouf containing the model of a frigate which won a battle against the English in 1778. Women began to copy Marie Antoinette all over France, furiously competing to keep up with the queen, often driving themselves into debt and squandering family fortunes. Marie Antoinette thus broke with the traditional behavior of French queens, who med largely quiet, retiring lives. Instead of letting her husband have all the limelight, Marie Antoinette secured it for herself.

Unfortunately for Marie Antoinette, she became the number one fashion icon in France at a moment when the country was deeply in debt, following the Seven Years’ War. In 1774-75 a harsh winter led to a depleted harvest, and the people revolted in what is known as the Flour Wars. Marie Antoinette herself frequently ran up debts, outspending her weekly allowance, and rubbing her excesses in the faces of her subjects with her liberal use of flour to powder her poufs. The Queen’s clothing, Weber points out, was becoming no longer a tangible sign of the glory and health of the monarchy, but of the extravagances of one woman. This is a key moment in Weber’s text and in the queen’s fate; Weber writes, “in her very quest to assert herself as a force to be reckoned with, the young queen failed either to consider or to grasp the scandal that her personal splendor represented to her people. By the end of 1776, one journalist wrote that “Her Majesty … is a danger to the morals of the people.”

The 1770s were thus a complicated period for the queen, one in which she drove her subjects to excess imitating her extravagant, implausible headdresses, and simultaneously cultured a simple, country life for herself and her circle of intimates in the Petit Trianon, a little palace on the grounds. This move managed somehow to secure her position at court, as it served to reinforce her autonomy, but at the same time, her expenditures mounted, and the adjustments she made to her wardrobe—eschewing the traditional robe-à-la-française for the informal lévite or chemise, a loose-fitting, lightweight dress made of muslin or cotton, worn over a simple cotton bodice rather than restrictive whalebone stays. This, among other Bertin-confected styles like the ankle-revealing polonaise, the mannish redigote, and the German military-inspired lévite à Prusienne, contributed to accusations of sexual indecency—the so-called “German vice” of lesbianism, which was not helped by her favoring close friends women like the Comtesse Jules de Polignac and the Princesse de Lamballe, and her championing of the transsexual Chevalier d’Eon.

Two further sartorial events served to destabilize the Queen’s reputation in France: a portrait of the Queen painted by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783, and the Diamond Necklace Affair of 1785-86. In the first case, the Queen was depicted in a less than Queenly manner; in the second, she was depicted, through the scandal, as a voracious woman who could be expected to flout her husband’s authority and the dignity of her position in the quest for a twenty-eight hundred carat diamond necklace known as the Slave’s Collar.

Her downfall is well known, and Weber is at pains to continue her thematic through the royal family’ attempted escape (in costume, with the Queen dressed as a servant), their capture, and imprisonment. Even in her final months, Weber contends, Marie Antoinette managed to make a fashion statement, in the black gown she dons as the Widow Capet, and the muslin chemise of purest white she reserves for the day of her beheading.

There is a clear tension in this text between Weber the trained academic’s desire to “read” the clothing as texts, and her (editor’s?) desire to write for a general public. Consequently, her vocabulary and means of building suspense tend towards sensationalism, while the various aspects of her argument are reiterated so frequently it’s as if she fears the reader will drop the thread (so to speak) of the argument and become utterly lost. But Weber’s clear prose and confident storytelling ought to have been enough for the reader to trust, without being constantly reminded of the general argument. This, however, is a minor flaw in an overwhelmingly excellent read.