18th Century Commemorative Medal - Execution of Marie Antoinette, 1793

Accession Number: 1885N1536.12

‘… It was intended to exploit the popular feeling of revulsion in Britain caused by the French Revolution…’
© Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

(Source: bmagic.org.uk)

‘The Rocket Dress’

The 1938 version of ‘Marie Antoinette’ is the only version I will watch over and over again. 

Calling all followers, I have need of your assistance! I am working on my final project for Uni and I am looking for extant examples of back lacing 18th century bodices or any information on 18th century dance costumes.

There are officially a couple thousand of you so I am very hopeful that someone will have spotted something. Any help is appreciated, thanks so much loves!

Sorry, the first bodice is from FIDM, the second is from the Met, the third is the inside of  Sofia Magdalena’s wedding gown, and Marie Antoinette’s apple green bodice.

Life is uncertain.  Eat dessert first.  ~Ernestine Ulmer

Dolce and Gabbana fall 2012/2013 

Louboutin 2010

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).

Guess what I saw today? The V&A’s Hollywood Costume Exhibition! 

Red dress photo stolen from here.

All the other photos are courtesy of these folks here.

Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette (1938)