Tea at Trianon: Hoop Skirts and Equality

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 15, 2017

Hoop Skirts and Equality

From Racked:

In 2015, as part of a broader effort to excise Confederate symbology, the University of Georgia banned hoop skirts at official Greek functions. Administrators and Greek leaders couched their decision in vague, almost bureaucratic language. “We will continue to review costuming and themes for future events to ensure their appropriateness for our organizations,” wrote Ashley Merkel, president of UGA’s Panhellenic Council. Vice president for student affairs Victor Wilson bolstered her statement: “The discussion was about more than dress,” he wrote, “but about how you present yourself, and dress was part of that.”

Other proponents took a more vehement tone. “Remove the Southern belle from her inglorious perch,” urged Elizabeth Boyd, a University of Maryland American Studies professor. She continued, ““The Southern belle performances routinely staged on campuses across the South constitute choreography of exclusion.” It’s true: The hoop skirt has aged poorly. Its connotations 150 years post-heyday are antiquated at best, antagonistic at worst. From an inside view, though, this “choreography of exclusion” was anything but. Just the opposite, in fact: Its rebellion was quiet, subdued, and feminine, but a rebellion nonetheless. The skirts have lived long enough to become a villain of our racial imagination. To the women who wore them, they were heroic.

The hoop skirt lived many lives before reaching the antebellum South, known as the farthingale (to the Elizabethans) and the pannier (to French nobility circa 1718). The latter reached objectively absurd proportions in the later 18th century. If any garment can be considered choreographed exclusion, it’s the pannier. Handmade from whalebone or basket-willow and jutting several feet to each side, panniers embodied the conspicuous consumption of Louis XVI and his court. (Read more.)