Tea at Trianon: Modern Fashion and Versailles

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

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Modern Fashion and Versailles

From Living It:

“We always have this image of Versailles as a place of frivolity but nothing has been more documented than fashion at Versailles. It has been the topic of speeches, studies, documents and dress codes,” explains Laurence Benaïm. “From the day the Duke of Orleans, Louis XIV’s brother, went to the Innocents’ Market, where the slaughterhouses were, and returned with soiled and blood-stained feet, the red heel became fashionable. A detail that we find again in the famous portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud.”

Next to the pictures, texts recall how a micro-event could launch a trend or news became the name of a particular colour. The terms used to describe the different objects of fashion were sometimes very poetic but mostly full of eccentricity. Among our favourites is the “doe’s belly” yellow, a sombre shade called “London soot” and the nuance “opera brûlé” after the fatal conflagration that destroyed the Paris Opera House in 1781. (Read more.)