Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
by Caroline Weber
Genres: History, Fashion, Biography
Release Date: October 2, 2007
Pages: 703
Purchase from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Google Books
My Rating: ★★★★☆
☆☆☆☆☆ – Did not finish
★☆☆☆☆ – Hated it
★★☆☆☆ – Disliked it
★★★☆☆ – Okay
★★★★☆ – Liked it
★★★★★ – Loved it
Read the full explanation of my book rating system.
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.
Review
Queen of Fashion (QoF) is an enjoyable mix of “standard” history and fashion. Fashion alone can never tell the whole story, but it’s amazing how much an analysis of fashion and fashion decisions can add to the story of history.
Fashion plays such a large part in history, especially in the past when clothing and color carried so much meaning. Versailles was the pinnacle of this phenomenon, where appearance was everything, and Marie Antoinette’s appearance defined her in so many ways.
I want to get my only negative comment out of the way first. Ms. Weber leaned too heavily on why Marie Antoinette made her fashion choices when we don’t really know. At best, we can make educated guesses, sometimes with the help of letters or memoirs. But, we do not have insight into Marie Antoinette’s thoughts. So, regardless of how definitively Ms. Weber presents Marie Antoinette’s sartorial thought processes, they are no more than educated guesses and assumptions.
But, beyond that, I found QoF incredibly interesting. To tie everything together, Ms. Weber weaves major fashion choices and events into the “standard” history readers likely already know, giving us a timeline and orienting us in history. I find it impressive that she manages to do this without losing the sartorial focus of her book.
Perhaps the largest takeaway I have from QoF is a new understanding of what led to the easy vilification of Marie Antoinette around the start of the revolution. I’d never truly understood how the French people were so easily duped into believing the libelous pamphlets and cartoons that were circulated, especially the sexual ones. Removed from that era of history, they are obviously inflammatory and false.
Ms. Weber, though, connects the dots between Marie Antoinette’s position as the center of the Versailles fashion world, her fashion choices, and the spending that accompanied both and the traditional role of royal mistresses at the court of France. Inhabiting, as she did, a court without a mistress who could be hated instead of the king, Marie Antoinette unintentionally placed herself — through her fashion extravagance — into that role.
Once associated with the immoral — and disliked — role of mistress, it was a significantly smaller leap to associate her with other misdeeds, increasing in severity, until anything and everything was not just believable, but probable.
I absolutely recommend QoF not just to fashion enthusiasts, but history enthusiasts and knowledge seekers alike.
About the Author
I am a professor of French & Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University, where I specialize in 18th & 19th-century French literature, history, & culture. My newest book, PROUST’S DUCHESS (Knopf, 2018), explores the fizzy intersection of aristocracy, celebrity, & artistic genius in fin-de-siecle Paris. The book involved 7 years’ worth of detective work in the unpublished private papers of its three heroines, the real-life society doyennes upon whom Marcel Proust modeled his fictional Duchesse de Guermantes, the reigning goddess of the Parisian nobility in IN SEARCH OF LAST TIME. My previous books are QUEEN OF FASHION: WHAT MARIE ANTOINETTE WORE TO THE REVOLUTION (2006) & TERROR & ITS DISCONTENTS (2003). I have written extensively for the mainstream press & for fashion magazines as well as for scholarly publications; my aim in all my work is to make my material accessible & engaging to the reader. The image that appears above as my main author photo is actually a portrait of me painted by my amazingly talented friend Brad Livingstone Black.
Author links: Goodreads | Amazon Author Page
NOTE: This review is based on an eBook I purchased from Amazon on January 6, 2025.
