Today would have been Marie Antoinette's 254th birthday. Here is a interesting piece about her (and her fashion legacy) from the New York Time's wonderful blog, The Moment:
Women's Fashion
Queen, Please | Remembering Marie-Antoinette
By Caroline Weber
Marie-Antoinette, the pioneer of shabby chic, would be celebrating her 254th birthday today.
Caroline Weber is the author of “Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.”
In Paris last month, Karl Lagerfeld presented his latest Chanel
ready-to-wear collection in a massive, specially constructed barn,
complete with hay-strewn floors and wooden eaves wound with floral
garlands. To some viewers, the haute hoedown may have registered as a
celebration of natural materials like hemp, raffia, and linen, all
lynchpins of the designer’s looks for Spring 2010. Others in the
audience may have focused on the show’s revival of that classic French
erotic arrangement, the ménage à trois, as models Lara Stone and Freja
Beha Erichsen frolicked lustily in the hay with Lagerfeld’s male muse
of the moment, Baptiste Giabiconi. Neither of these interpretations,
though, rules out the most plausible theory of all: that the spectacle
was really an early birthday party for Marie-Antoinette — the queen of
rusticated, risqué fashions, born today in 1755.
An Austrian archduchess by birth and a French queen by marriage,
Marie-Antoinette was an improbable pioneer of shabby chic. At
Versailles — the court she moved to when she wed the future King Louis
XVI at age 14 — etiquette demanded that its sovereigns’ very appearance
evoke their transcendental power. To this end, the Bourbons dressed
with such jaw-dropping elegance and ostentation that awestruck
commoners could only conclude, to modify a phrase from today’s
celebrity rags: “Royals — they’re not just like us!” Having grown up
with no such strict codes governing her clothing choices,
Marie-Antoinette was neither trained nor inclined to treat these
choices as matters of state. Yet that’s exactly what her slightest
fashion gaffes became. During her earliest days in France, for example,
she refused to don the special, fainting-spell-inducing corset that
only the highest-ranked princesses were entitled (read: required) to
wear. Flying as it did in the face of Gallic tradition, this decision
strained Franco-Austrian diplomatic relations almost to the breaking
point. As the Viennese ambassador to Versailles reported in alarm: “Her
Majesty’s refusal of the corset [has set] all of France complaining.”
Yet to Marie-Antoinette, homesick for the relative casualness and comfort of Austrian life, provoking her subjects’ ire was a small price to pay for sartorial freedom. This she achieved by establishing, at a neoclassical villa called the Petit Trianon, a private, faux-bucolic retreat where she and her visitors gamboled about in costumes that were, to contemporary eyes, almost shocking in their informality. Working with her favorite stylist, Rose Bertin, the queen devised a daily uniform that consisted, for women, of a plain, unstructured white muslin or linen chemise gown, accessorized with such homespun touches as a simple ribbon or a saucy little apron tied around the waist, and a silk posy or a straw hat perched jauntily on loose, unpowdered hair. Absent from this pretty, peasant-girl look was every component of traditional court apparel: vast hoopskirts, constrictive corset, and sweeping train; heavy, ornately embroidered silks, bejeweled and bespangled with an inch of their lives; masses of gems piled on to gild an already-twenty-four-karat fleur-de-lys. By jettisoning such cumbersome, tradition-bound garb in favor of a new style that emphasized cleanness of line, enhanced freedom of movement, and valued humble textiles and trimmings over rare, costly ones, the queen revolutionized 18th-century dress — and paved the way for the later innovations of such figures as, well, Coco Chanel.
But in a land where even a missing corset spelled scandal, Marie-Antoinette was woefully ahead of her time. In 1783, a portrait (above) showing her in her signature white gown and straw hat sparked a backlash that would only end on the guillotine ten years later. Critics raged against her for having posed “in the gown and apron of a country wench,” “[in] a chamber-maid’s dust-cloth,” and “in her underwear.” Inspired by the latter charge, underground pornographers began spinning yarns about the sordid antics the queen’s free-and-easy outfits enabled. So the chemise dress, which looks so modest by today’s standards, came to signify brazen promiscuity. It also came to mean anti-Frenchness, as other commentators, noting that muslin and linen were foreign imports, accused the queen of willfully destroying the nation’s silk industry. The down-home hat was also seen as a heinous affront to local custom: only a barbaric Austrian, it was said, would “cover herself with straw” when she could have — and should have — worn a crown.
So the reviled queen lost the battle, and eventually her head. But in the world of fashion, she most definitely won the war. Lagerfeld’s proto-Trianon collection — with its easy white dresses, filmy aprons, cloth flower accessories, and straw, straw everywhere — reminds us just how fresh and modern Marie-Antoinette’s “revolution in linen” (as one commentator dubbed it) was in its time, and how relevant it still is in ours. Had she somehow managed to defy revolutionary furor on the one hand and mortality on the other, the rebel queen would have turned 254 today. Her style legacy, though, remains forever young.
