When did you start to have the French Eighteenth century passion?

My interest in eighteenth-century France was first piqued in graduate school at Yale, where I began studying the writings of the philosophes. These authors remain some of my favorite writers, and I teach them frequently in my courses. I also have a personal interest in eighteenth-century France, as my mother's family is French and left France during the Revolution. Someday I'd like to do a book on that side of my family - the de Courcelles - to learn more about both what they did while in France, and how they made their way to America.


When did you decide to write a book about "Marie Antoinette's style"?

I first became interested in Marie Antoinette's fashions while I was researching my book on political speeches during the Reign of Terror. It surprised me to notice how frequently orators, journalists, and political pamphleteers made reference to the Queen's fashions - to her clothing and hairstyles - and I started to wonder what political significance her style might have.


By readind your book it seems that fashion had much more political meaning
during Marie-Antoinette's time than it does today in our society, where
everything can be extravagant and misunderstood. What do you think about it? Are
you agree with this assertion?

I do agree that fashion was much more politicized during Marie Antoinette's time than during our own. Journalists today ask me frequently who "the twenty-first century Marie Antoinette" might be, but my answer is always that there is no twenty-first century Marie Antoinette, and that this is precisely because of the fact that clothes have lost the intensely codified and politically loaded meanings they bore during the ancien regime and the Revolution. As I point out in my book's conclusion, the late eighteenth-century was a time when - in the words of Horace de Viel-Castel - one could be executed for "crimes of lese-costume." This is obviously not the case today, and for that reason, the enormously controversial and politically charged nature of Marie Antoinette's fashion statements could not be duplicated now.


Do you think Marie Antoinette was aware of her fashion influence or do you
think she was unable to comprehend the public perception of her eccentricity?

I don't think these two questions are mutually exclusive, as Marie Antoinette was clearly aware of her fashion influence - I mention in the book how she actively encouraged her "ministers of fashion" to cultivate a broader audience for the styles she herself made desirable - but at the same time she did not seem to understand how her status as a fashion icon wound up undermining her credibility as a royal wife. The problem, of course, was that before Marie Antoinette, it was the king's mistress, and not his wife, who was traditionally known - and reviled - for her excesses of fashion. Marie Antoinette got herself into trouble with her public by combining the two roles, and she never appears to have grasped that the people would not accept her as both a queen and a fashion-plate at the same time.


Marie Antoinette's life seems to be full of colors and lights, but during the
most important events she wore simple white dresses: white was the criticized
muslin gaulle that she wore in her Trianon and white was the dress she chose to
go with to the guillotine. From your point of view did she make such choises
intentionally?

Yes, I feel that she made these choices intentionally. As I mention in my book, white was a particularly important color for her to wear to her execution because, by the fall of 1793, it was very much a forbidden color in revolutionary Paris. Contemporary reports confirm that people who dared to wear white, which evoked the Bourbon fleur-de-lys and thus royalist fervor, were publicly attacked in the streets and sometimes even executed for their visible disloyalty to the revolutionary cause. In choosing a white dress to wear to her own execution, Marie Antoinette reminded the public that she had not abandoned her own belief in the monarchy - even at the moment of her death.


Among several pictures on your book, there is a sketch kept in the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France that represents a shoe worn by Marie Antoinette
in 1792: the queen's clothes disappeared right after the Revolution, so did you
find any difficult to base your own research on engravings, prints, portraits
and drawings from that period of time?

The absence of material objects - Marie Antoinette's actual dresses and bonnets, all of which were destroyed - certainly posed a challenge to me as I researched and wrote this book. The good news, however, is that her clothing choices were monitored and chronicled with obsessive scrutiny by many, many people; the visual and textual records of her (ostensible) fashion statements thus constituted an extremely rich trove from which to draw the materials I needed to tell this story in a convincing and historically accurate way.