Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis Xvi and Marie-Antoinette by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell (review)

Marie Antoinette may be best known today for her ill-fated quip “Let them eat cake,” but in her own time, she reigned supreme as the fashion empress of her era with her lavish, trendsetting wardrobe and her endless supply of jewelry and accessories. As Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell makes clear in her readable and spectacularly illustrated book Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, in the Queen’s world, fashion was anything but frivolous. She argues throughout that fashion held an inextricable relationship to politics. According to Chrisman-Campbell, the story of French fashion in the late and early nineteenth centuries is also the story of the French Revolution. She explains, “Change is the essence of fashion, and of revolution. . . . the eighteenth century saw the birth of fashion as we know it today: that is, seasonal, international, corporate, media-driven, feminine in character, and constantly changing” (p. 14). Although fashion expressed the eccentric and expensive tastes of the court elite (Marie Antoinette apparently had undergarments made of Scottish linen with a different pattern for every day of the year), the emergence of fashion magazines, ladies almanacs, fashion dolls, and a burgeoning second-hand clothing trade served as vehicles for disseminating information about the latest styles to the general public on a large scale (p. 34). This trickle-down effect of style had significant political and social ramifications. Chrisman-Campbell writes, “While royal and aristocratic ladies had been the traditional arbiters of taste, fashion was increasingly driven by urban women lower down the social scale, from actresses and courtesans to the wives and daughters of bankers, soldiers, and statesmen” (p. 32).

Fashion Victims is divided into four sections, each with sub-chapters. Part one concerns the “Court and City” and the various roles for women in each. Part two, “New and Novel,” focuses on fashion for events and occasions: marriage, mourning, court dress, and the promenade/festival longchamps. Part three, “Fashion and Fantasy,” has an excellent section on fashion and the theater along with engaging explorations of “Anglomania” and “Orientalism.” Part four, “Revolution and Recovery,” describes the demise of the court and Marie Antoinette’s sartorial legacy. Chrisman-Campbell’s study focuses on “three female archetypes” who “provoked and personified” the changes in fashion that took place in late eighteenth-century France: “the queen, the petite-maîtresse, and the marchande de modes” (p. 19). The petite-maîtresse is perhaps the primary archetype as her title echoes the title of the book. Chrisman-Campbell explains, “Literally translated, the term means ‘little mistress’ but its modern equivalent is ‘fashion victim’—a woman (or a man, called a petit maître) whose primary occupation is keeping up with the latest fads, regardless of how frivolous, arbitrary, unflattering, or expensive” (pp. 34–35). The petite-maîtresse worked in tandem with the marchande de modes, the early modern equivalent of a contemporary celebrity stylist, to dictate the vibrant and fluctuating fashions.

Chrisman-Campbell’s focus on the marchandes de modes, particularly Rose Bertin, who served as Marie Antoinette’s particular fashion guru throughout her reign, is fascinating. According to Chrisman-Campbell,

Marchandes de modes played a crucial and sometimes controversial role in the eighteenth-century fashion industry. . . . neither artist nor merchant, the marchande de modes acted as a bridge—or a buffer—between the working classes and the aristocracy, enjoying intimate access to the bedchambers and bodies of her social superiors, male and female; alternatively, the classes might mingle in her own luxurious magasin.

(p. 53)

Madame Campan noted that Marie Antoinette’s close relationship with Bertin and her admission of Bertin into her household “had unfortunate consequences for Her Majesty” (quoted in Chrisman-Campbell, p. 27). The marchandes de modes’ association with sexuality, dubious morality, and visual display made them powerfully seductive and dangerous figures. Michel Garnier’s arresting portrait A Fashionably Dressed Young Woman in the Arcade...