A Sartorial Road Map to Rebellion

Who among us would want our life story told exclusively through our clothes? Could such an approach permit our biographer to descend from the sartorial surface to our subjective being? Could a biographer interpret our hairstyles and hemlines to make sense of the broad contour of our lives? In the case of Caroline Weber’s sartorial biography of Marie Antoinette, Queen of Fashion, the answer is a qualified “yes.” While Weber’s study of Marie Antoinette’s fashions in no way replaces more multifaceted biographies, such as Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey, or Evelyne Lever’s The Last Queen of France, by focusing on Marie Antoinette’s self-conscious use of clothing to craft her image, Weber evocatively highlights crucial aspects of Marie Antoinette’s struggle to gain power at court and earn the respect of the French people. Within a court culture riven by internal tensions and beset by external threats of fiscal crisis and rising cries for republican virtue, what the Queen wore mattered greatly to both Marie Antoinette and her contemporaries.

Weber’s fresh and sparkling narration of Marie Antoinette’s life is not confined solely to her clothing, fashions, and accessories. This is no dry compendium of old-school textile history. It reads more like a novel than a laundry list, and is enlivened by well-drawn portraits of key players at court and by a rich account of Marie Antoinette’s life that selectively focuses on particular styles of clothing as deliberate responses to the private and political problems she faced vis à vis her shy, bumbling husband, cutthroat courtiers, and an increasingly hostile French public.

Weber does not present the queen as a tragic figure—indeed, she presents Marie Antoinette as a modern woman trying to take charge of her life and assert her power through the limited materials at hand, in this case, clothing and fashions. Weber’s narrative is filled with paradox and irony: the same fashions that Marie Antoinette used to gain power were ultimately used against her; the styles she used to play act a simple virtuous private life were later adopted by Revolutionaries in their own sartorial code of republican resistance to monarchy. Queen of Fashion tells the story of a queen whose fashions in no small part “made” the Revolution; indeed, Weber claims that “in spite of herself, Marie Antoinette had, it seems, provided her foes with a sartorial road map to rebellion” (217).

Chapter 1, “Pandora’s Box,” begins on the auspicious day in April 1770 when the blonde, blue-eyed, and rosy-checked Marie Antoinette, attired in the grand habit de cour required by French etiquette, left all that was familiar to her in her beloved Vienna. On the surface the chapter focuses on the elaborate French-made trousseau that Marie Antoinette brought with her to France to celebrate her marriage to the fifteen-year-old French dauphin, Louis Auguste, and to cement an alliance between long-standing rivals, France and Austria. Her trousseau, carefully assembled by her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, cost over four hundred thousand livres, a whopping sum even by royal standards and an amount that exceeded all Maria Theresa’s expenditures on trousseaux for her other daughters combined. Weber offers a rich description of Marie Antoinette’s new coiffeur a la fançaise, hoopskirts, and the jewel-box coach lined with upholstery embroidered by the celebrated craftsman Trumeau, but also skillfully examines the tensions that vexed the young dauphine at the French court. The alliance with Austria provoked a vicious backlash within the French court, giving rise to an anti-Austrian faction determined to undermine the young bride. She also had to contend with the machinations of Louis XV’s sister and with the tremendous influence of the king’s new mistress, Madame du Barry. Beset by so many rivals, how could an Austrian princess convince the French that she was a loyal dauphine? Could she use clothing and fashion to assert her power without...