Book: Queen Of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To The Revolution by Caroline Weber

Published by Henry Holt And Co.

Purchased for my Nook (432 pages)

Genre: Non-fiction: History/Fashion

Find out more: Goodreads~Barnes And Noble~Amazon~Caroline Weber

Goodreads Summary: In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette’s bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France

Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette’s “Revolution in Dress,” covering each phase of the queen’s tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles’s rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt “unqueenly” outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her.

Weber’s queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion–the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs–was also the means of her undoing. Weber’s book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history’s most controversial figures.

Queen Of Fashion was a really interesting read.  I don’t remember much about Marie Antoinette, other than a few details from a podcast the History Chicks did on her.  And her dying, of course.  There aren’t a lot of details about her childhood, and the book mainly focuses on her life in France.

I loved the focus on clothes and how her style really changed things.  One thing that stood out was the corset reserved for princesses and other high-ranking royalty.  Marie had to wear it on a regular basis, while the everyone else only wore it on certain occassions.  It was definitely more restrictive than the standard corset, and it was much more restrictive than the corsets Marie used to wear in Austria.  Even pregnancy didn’t exempt you from wearing it, and they felt the effects of it more than anyone else.  Fainting, heart palpitations and asthma were among the symptoms.

Appearnce and clothes were really important over in France, and it really signified a lot.  Etiquette and ritual was also important, but clothes really signified the structure of society in France.  Certain people wore certain things, and if you deviated from that…it was not good.

I was surprised to learn that there were people who didn’t like Marie from the very beginning.  I knew that people really didn’t like her towards the end, but when she first arrived- that was definitely surprising.

I did like the descriptions of the clothes she wore, although it did become tiresome by the end of the book.  People definitely copied her fashions for a while, but what once earned her respect would soon work against her.  It seemed like she didn’t get what her clothing represented to her subjects.

It was interesting to see Marie through the clothes she wore, especially since I never associated her with clothes for some reason.

One thing I thought was a little odd was how Weber referenced Antonia Fraser’s work several times.  I did enjoy the one book I read by Fraser, and it’s clear that Fraser’s work was very important to Weber’s book.  But in comparison to other authors mentioned, it was almost as if Weber didn’t use any other sources.

I will say that it is pretty well-paced, and it has a lot of details without getting bogged down with them.  It’s also pretty straight-foward and fairly easy to read.

Queen Of Fashion gets a 4 out of 5.