The Ornamented Being
Ornamented: -verb: Adorn; beautify. Be·ing: -noun: Fulfillment of possibilities; essential completeness.
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John Galliano for Dior Haute Couture: Marie Antoinette inspired collection S/S 2006
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Photo reblogged from Society Hill
This is a cropped version of my illustration that is dedicated to John Galliano. Please bring him back, he makes the fashion world much much more exciting.
Please, please bring him back!
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Long Live Galliano.
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.”
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To kick off tomorrow post we’ll start with something a little earlier than what I had planned.
If you went to LACMA’s Fashion Fashion exhibition (which if that is the case don’t tell me because I will cry) or you have
the bibleLACMA’s Fashioning Fashion sitting in front of you (which I do) turn to page 154 (that is not a request!) and devour the text.If you don’t have the book no worries because I’m going to share what is on that page with you anyway!
The Revolutionary Vest dates from 1789-94 but the experts think it might be a tad older because under the current top layer (which is needlepoint stitch on canvas) is “luxurious striped green silk”. But it’s the symbolism of the vest that makes this such an important item.
I’m not going to type everything the book says because that would take forever but I am going to put up pieces from John Galliano’s preface where he spoke about this waistcoat: I was particularly taken with a gentleman’s vest; it is simply charmant (charming), to quote the coquettish collar… It gives many clues about the turbulent time, weaving style with politics, rebellion, and the tricolore. Here fashion speaks its owner’s mind through intricate needlework and beauty rather than through the violence of the day. As well as the collar, other clues can be found on the pockets.
One is the phrase. “L’HABIT NE FAIT PAS LE MOINE” (“The habit does not make the monk”), a caution to never judge a book by its cover or, indeed, take things, such as fashion, and its wearer, on face value alone.
The other pocket reads, ‘HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE,” a motto I recognized from the English Order of the Garter, which originally comes from the Old French saying, “Shame upon him who thinks evil of it.” Powerful messages to carry on your person! It is genius. I love the hidden messages and use of heroic symbolism and dandy analogy to, quite literally, wear your loyalties on your chest…
So, why don’t you look even closer at the vest? There are still many clues to unravel. Through its design and embroidery it tells how the wealthy once dressed like caterpillars by day, ostentatious butterflies by night, but then had to remember their loyalty to the state, to the blue, white, and red. This wearer is, as the collar hints, a bit of a charmer and seems to play it safe and profess both loyalties.
Take the tiny lapels: they are embroidered, one with a shorn caterpillar, the other with a butterfly with its wings cut. Does this mean the wearer’s wings have been cut? Ort is he glad that the rich, with their decadent ways, have been stopped? Well, this he can debate whichever way the company prefers…
… The vest is both a political and a fashion statement that captures the mood at the beginning of a new era. It also shows how style reacted, like a fickle mirror, and instantly rejected the gaudy finery so beloved before…
Sit back, relax and prepare yourself for the Regency.
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Beautiful Maria-Luisa Black Silk Taffeta Gown by John Galliano for Dior (1998)
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I get shivers whenever I see this dress. For me the embroidered bloody guillotine and the red x on her neck sum up the entire French Revolution.
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Another excerpt from the book Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber.
This was taken from page 8 and is my favorite line in the entire novel.
” Indeed according to the biographer Carolly Erickson, shortly after the guillotine sliced it’s own bloody version of a necklace into the Queen’s throat, well-born women in Paris began tying “thin red ribbon around their necks as reminders of what they might soon suffer.”
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One of the major reasons I love Galliano is because of how heavily influenced he is by fashion history especially the 18th century.
Riding Habit via V&A c. 1770-75
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Self portrait with two pupils, 1785. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
Christian Dior 2007
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Perhaps a quick peek on tomorrow’s line up?
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Tomorrow’s theme is 1789, a bit of Marie Antoinette, Rococo and a whole lot of John Galliano.
What I wrote back in June here still stands for today.
En garde!
