Queen of Fashion Quotes

“. . . from her earliest days at Versailles, Marie Antoinette staged a revolt against entrenched court etiquette by turning her clothes and other accoutrements into defiant expressions of autonomy and prestige . . . it is my belief that she identified fashion as a key weapon in her struggle for personal prestige, authority, and sometimes mere survival.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Even when faced with unspeakable loss, Marie Antoinette tackled her difficulties as she always had - by choosing costumes that emphasized her resilience of spirit.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), I,”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Unlike a Eugenie or a Jackie, but quite like her ancestor the Sun King, Marie Antoinette helped invent fashion as a high-stakes political game - one that she played in dead earnest, and with deadly results. A winner-take-all affair, her program of singular sartorial defiance implicated not just her autonomy and her prestige, but her crown and, eventually, her life.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Selective memory is the handmaiden of fashion.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Even as she faced execution, Marie Antoinette's will to control her image, to manage it through her clothing, had not left her.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“In the name of equality, the Revolution's devotees had cast [Marie Antoinette] and her family out of their home and into prison; in the name of justice, they had mutilated her best friend and guillotined her husband. The conventionnels, in particular, had cloaked their actions in the language of moral rectitude - 'no man can reign innocently' - yet their own hands were drenched in blood.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“[Marie Antoinette] went to great lengths to underscore the notion that the realm of Trianon was ruled by her and her alone.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Generally, if Marie Antoinette had worn a gown once, she did not wear it again.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Indeed, for the denizens of Versailles, clothes and other seemingly superficial emblems remained concrete measures of their success . . . or failure. In this rarefied world, the surface was the substance. And the appearance of power, legible in everything from a slashed sleeve to a patent coat, was the real thing.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“. . . Marie Antoinette's wardrobe was the stuff of dreams, and the space of nightmares.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“. . . Marie Antoinette established herself as a force to be reckoned with - as a queen who commanded as much attention as the most dazzling king or mistress, and whose imposing stature had nothing to do with her maternal prospects.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“. . . historians rarely emphasize the tremendous importance that [Marie Antoinette's] public attached to what she was wearing at each step along the way.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“78. François Bluche, La Vie quotidienne au temps de Louis XVI (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 87. 79. Four indispensable studies on this subject are Jean Apostolidès, Le Roimachine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Norbert Elias, La Société de cour, trans. Pierre Kamnitzer and Jean Etoré (Paris: Flammarion, 1985); and Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). It is nonetheless important to note, as Elias does, that Louis XIV did not so much invent French court etiquette as consolidate and systematize it (76–77). A more colorful, less analytical account of etiquette under Louis XIV appears in W. H. Lewis, The Splendid Century (New York: Sloane, 1953), 54–66.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution