The Ornamented Being

Unfortunately the Musée Des Beaux-Arts De Lyon’s website is down but I can still share the inspiration for my new gown with you!

The original text reads: “C’est une robe-chemise blanche en mousseline de coton, à traîne, à manches courtes et au décolleté carré. Elle date de 1805 : On l’appelle demi-parure. C’est la tenue idéale que Juliette Récamier pouvait porter le soir pour briller en société ou aller au bal, mais ce n’est pas non plus une robe de Cour”.

Please forgive my terrible English translation (assisted by Google translate when I got stuck): ” A dress of white cotton muslin, train, short sleeves and square neckline. It dates from 1805 and is called a half-set. This is the perfect outfit that Juliette Recamier would wear in the evening (google translate says) to shine in society (?), or go to the ball, but this is not a Court gown. ” 

Please click here to read more about my Juliette Récamier gown.

(Source: mba-lyon.fr)

c.1760-70

The Met says: Women with coquettish airs were imposing in robes à la française and robes à l’anglaise throughout the period between 1720 and 1780. The robe à la française was derived from the loose negligee sacque dress of the earlier part of the century, which was pleated from the shoulders at the front at the back. The silhouette, composed of a funnel-shaped bust feeding into wide rectangular skirts, was inspired by Spanish designs of the previous century and allowed for expansive amounts of textiles with delicate Rococo curvilinear decoration. The wide skirts, which were often open at the front to expose a highly decorated underskirt, were supported by panniers created from padding and hoops of different materials such as cane, baleen or metal. The robes à la française are renowned for the beauty of their textiles, the cut of the back employing box pleats and skirt decorations, known as robings, which showed endless imagination and variety.

(Source: metmuseum.org)

Excerpt taken from Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber

“ Designed for his 2000 Christian Dior “Masquerade and Bondage” collection, John Galliano’s “Marie Antoinette” dress tells an unexpected story. True to the architecture of eighteenth-century court costume, the gown features tantalizing décolletage, a rigidly corseted waist, a ladder or échelle of flirty bows on the bodice, and a froth of flounced skirts inflated by petticoats and hoops. Its splendid excess evokes France’s most colorful queen … even before one notices the embroidered portraits of the lady herself that adorn each of its hoop-skirted hip panels. (Plate 1.)

But the two portraits deserve a closer look, for it is they that tell the story. On the gown’s left hip panel the designer has placed an image of Marie Antoinette in her notorious faux shepherdess’s garb—a frilly little apron tied over a pastel frock, a decorative staff wound with streaming pink ribbons, and a mile-high hairdo obviously ill suited to the tending of livestock. In keeping with the Queen’s frivolous reputation, the embroidered ensemble is more suggestive of Little Bo Peep than of lofty monarchical grandeur. On the right hip panel, Galliano offers a depiction of the same woman, also devoid of royal attributes, but this time in a mode more gruesome than whimsical. Here, she wears a markedly plain, utilitarian dress, with a simple white kerchief knotted around her throat and a drooping red “liberty bonnet”—the emblem of her revolutionary persecutors—clamped onto her brutally shorn head. This image portrays the consort trudging toward the guillotine, to lay her neck beneath its waiting blade.” 

(Does anyone know who the first picture belongs too? I pulled it off of Pinterest last week and the only link back was google images).

Detail, Maria Luisa of Parma Princess of Asturias, in the gardens of Aranjuez (ca. 1766), by Anton Raphael Mengs.

Detail of 12 year old Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria (Marie Antoinette).

Drawings and sketches of costumes for the opera in Paris and Versailles from 1739 to 1767 Louis-Rene Boquet (1717-1814), 1770.

Quadrille de Mlle De // Loraine 1775 : 1775 : [maquette de costume] / [Louis-René Boquet] - 1

French silk negligee

c.1880

Met

(Source: metmuseum.org)

Three-colour gold tiara with swags of leaves and flowers surmounted by a row of large flowers formed by clusters of turquoises surrounded by cannetille work with a small diamond in the centre. It has been converted from a frontlet ornament of c.1805 and a French import mark and French design registry mark are on the loop at each end.

British Museum

c. 1805

First French Empire