Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinettes 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 Antoinettes "Revolution in Dress " covering each phase of the queens tumultuous life beginning with the young girl struggling to survive Versailless 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. Webers 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. Webers book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship but also a moving revelatory reinterpretation of one of historys most controversial figures.