Oscar Wilde quipped, “Style is ephemeral. Artwork is everlasting. Certainly what’s a vogue actually? A vogue is merely a type of ugliness so completely insufferable that we’ve to change it each six months!” It’s true that fashions, developments, and even designers usually come and go. It’s uncommon for one thing or somebody to turn into a long-lasting icon. However some fashions, it appears, have endurance.
France, whereas universally well-known for its luxurious vogue trade, and Paris is its peak-of-chic capital, additionally boasts three girls from its historical past, Queen Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine, and Empress Eugénie, who proceed to encourage designers, books, films, tv, exhibitions, collectors, and lovers of historical past and elegance. These consorts set the developments of their instances and stay timeless French vogue plates. Surviving portraiture helps the trendy viewer perceive how every girl’s style transcended borders and eras.
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette was painted all through her lifetime, from her childhood within the Viennese palaces of her mom, the Holy Roman Empress, to her teenage years within the French courtroom as dauphine (spouse to the inheritor to the French throne), and later in maturity as Queen of France. The painter who captured her greatest was Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun.
Vigée Le Brun was probably the most proficient artists in 18th-century France and, certainly, is without doubt one of the most vital feminine artists in historical past. When Vigée Le Brun and Marie Antoinette first met they have been the identical age and shortly developed an in depth friendship. The queen helped the artist achieve admittance to the celebrated Royal Academy of Portray and Sculpture, and through the years Vigée Le Brun was known as upon to create 30 portraits of the queen.
One such instance, with lovely coloration and beautiful particulars, is “Marie Antoinette With a Rose.” This portray showcases the queen in a blue-gray silk “gown à la française” adorned with ribbons and lace. This costume was seemingly made by Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker who laid the foundations for high fashion. Within the image, the queen’s powdered hair pouf shows a gauzy striped turban trimmed with ostrich feathers. The rigorously crafted picture of your complete ensemble demonstrates Marie Antoinette’s regality and bought French-ness.
This portray additionally shows Marie Antoinette’s legendary love of jewels. Within the work, she wears a double strand pearl necklace and matching bracelets. Throughout this age, pearls have been extra priceless than diamonds. A big pearl pendant as soon as owned by Marie Antoinette, which had descended via her daughter’s household, bought at Sotheby’s in 2018 for a record-breaking $36 million. Jewellery historian Gislain Aucremanne describes, in a discuss Marie Antoinette on the jewellery college L’ÉCOLE, that the pearl’s value “revealed as soon as once more the curiosity and keenness that everybody, basic public and intense collectors, all the time had for Marie Antoinette.”
The Queen’s Chemise
The identical yr that Vigée Le Brun painted “Marie Antoinette With a Rose,” she had earlier created and placed on show the portray “Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Gown.” This portray scandalized the general public for it confirmed the queen sporting a gown en chemise, often known as chemise à la reine.
The queen, weary of sporting elaborate and heavy attire at courtroom, adored this new look of a loosely belted, largely unadorned muslin costume and it turned the model of selection amongst trendy girls in France and different international locations. As Aucremanne defined within the L’ÉCOLE discuss, in the course of the 18th century “everybody in Europe lived à la française.” Nevertheless, French critics took offense on the costume’ resemblance to the chemise undergarment of the interval.
“Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Gown” was faraway from view as a consequence of this outcry and “Marie Antoinette With a Rose” was rapidly produced to place as a replacement. Nevertheless, it was the “gown à la française” that turned outmoded with the French Revolution, whereas the recognition of Marie Antoinett’s chemise model of costume continued into the Napoleonic period.
Madame Bonaparte
The Martinique-born Empress Joséphine, supreme tastemaker in her husband’s empire and nice patroness of the humanities and botany, pushed sartorial boundaries. The Napoleonic courtroom drew symbolic inspiration from each early medieval French dynasties and the Roman Empire, purposefully bypassing the beforehand deposed French monarchy.
The chemise costume, just like a Roman tunic, was a prefect mode for furthering the propagandic picture of Napoleon as inheritor to the Roman emperors. Below Joséphine, the diaphanous chemise costume was not harking back to a fairy story shepherdess or milkmaid, because it had been when worn by Marie Antoinette, and as an alternative was made extra clear with a decrease neckline. This costume sort was mounted just below the bust and was often known as the Empire silhouette; it’s a silhouette nonetheless in vogue right this moment.
Joséphine will be seen sporting this model in her portrait on the Palace of Malmaison by François Gérard. The general public was captivated by what Joséphine would put on subsequent. Carol Woolton, an editor of British Vogue, says on an episode of the podcast “If Jewels Might Speak” that Joséphine remains to be an “final inspiration for what occurs in Paris.”
Emperess Bonaparte’s Tiara
Gérard’s portray depicts the empress sporting a tiara. Tiaras have been chosen as a method of decoration by Joséphine as a result of they harken again to historic Rome and former French queens had not worn them. Joséphine wore tiaras low on her brow, in a method often known as à la Joséphine. This model turned fashionable once more over 100 years later within the Roaring ’20s. Not like Marie Antoinette, Joséphine wore her hair unpowdered and in delicate curls.
In Josephine’s portrait at Malmaison, the empress is particularly sporting a tiara set with cameos. The craze in the course of the Napoleonic period for the traditional artwork of glyptics—cameos (engraved gems with a raised aid picture) and intaglios (gems the place a design has been minimize as a despair into the floor) was heightened by contemporaneous archeological discoveries. Two tiaras, reputed to be examples from Joséphine’s huge cameo and intaglio jewellery assortment, got here up on the market at Sotheby’s in 2021 and bought for a mixed $763,000.
Empress Eugénie
Empress Eugénie, born into Spanish the Aristocracy, was the spouse of Emperor Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon I and grandson of Joséphine. In distinction to Joséphine, Eugénie was fascinated by Marie Antoinette and embraced her model, adapting it to the mid-Nineteenth century. “The Empress Eugénie” portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, a outstanding painter of lush portraits of royalty, is harking back to Vigée Le Brun’s “Marie Antoinette with a Rose.” Eugénie is portrayed in an expensive and elaborate yellow silk costume with fringes, lace, ribbons, bows, and tassels, together with a powered coiffure and ropes of pearls.
Much like Marie Antoinette and Joséphine, Eugénie additionally popularized new types and types. Marion Fasel, founder and editorial director of The Adventurine, describes Eugénie because the “de-facto model icon of the period. She famously modified her garments and jewellery three or 4 instances a day and barely wore the identical outfit twice. Charles Frederick Price made her attire. Louis Vuitton crafted her trunks.”
Price, an Englishman, was a Paris-based designer thought-about to be the daddy of high fashion. Eugénie was a loyal patroness. Along with her assist, Price made trendy modifications to the de rigueur crinoline, a stiff petticoat worn beneath a full skirt, after which launched a radical new silhouette that turned all the craze: the bustle.
The Bow Brooch
After Napoleon III was deposed, the brand new French authorities (French Third Republic) bought a big cache of the French crown jewels at “the public sale of the century.” The official line was that these have been immoral luxurious gadgets whose proceeds can be put to raised use, however the actual purpose was that the federal government was involved that if varied claimants to the French throne have been in a position to put on these jewels ripe with cultural and political energy, they might be a risk to the steadiness of the brand new authorities.
On the public sale, an American jewellery model, Tiffany’s, purchased greater than two thirds of the tons. One of many highlights and, certainly, probably the most well-known jewels of the period, was a big bow brooch encrusted with diamonds that had been custom-made for Eugénie. The brooch was purchased on behalf of the Gilded Age American society queen Mrs. Astor.
In 2008, the jewel reappeared at public sale, this time at Christie’s. In recent times, France has been desirous to reclaim its cultural heritage. A non-public sale of this brooch was brokered with the Mates of the Louvre group and so they purchased it for $10.5 million. In the present day, it’s on show, together with different reclaimed jewels, on the Louvre, the place it’s admired by guests.
Whereas Queen Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine, and Empress Eugénie have their very own types and tales, additionally they have many commonalities. All have been married to monarchs who ended up being deposed. All have been born exterior France, and but are inextricable intrinsic elements of French historical past and tradition. Of their time, Paris was the last word middle of luxurious, because it nonetheless is, and so they have been its vogue leaders, nonetheless admired right this moment.
