Her required wardrobe included twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts and organ-crushing whalebone corsets. When the fourteen-year-old Austrian arch-duchess first arrived at the Palace of Versailles to become dauphine, rigid tradition governed what she wore, when she wore it, even who put it on her person. Caroline Weber tells the story of Marie Antoinette's Revolution in Dress, which helped make, and unmake, her reputation, and examines her wardrobe's impact on French history. Marie Antoinette was a woman who used clothing to command attention. She lives with her husband in New York City. A specialist of eighteenth-century French literature, culture, and history, she has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. Caroline Weber is associate professor of French at Barnard College, Columbia University. With her riding gear, her white furs, her pouf hairstyles, and her intricate ballroom disguises, Marie Antoinette came to embody-gloriously and tragically-all the extravagance of the monarchy. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber tells of the radical restyling that transformed the young queen into an icon and shaped the future of the nation. For a short while, the young girl played the part.īut by the time she took the throne, everything had changed. When her carriage first crossed over from her native Austria into France, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was taken out, stripped naked before an entourage, and dressed in French attire to please the court of her new king. A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year
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