Caroline Weber > Quotes

“. . . from her earliest days at Versailles, Marie Antoinette staged a revolt against entrenched court etiquette by turning her clothes and other accoutrements into defiant expressions of autonomy and prestige . . . it is my belief that she identified fashion as a key weapon in her struggle for personal prestige, authority, and sometimes mere survival.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Even when faced with unspeakable loss, Marie Antoinette tackled her difficulties as she always had - by choosing costumes that emphasized her resilience of spirit.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), I,”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Unlike a Eugenie or a Jackie, but quite like her ancestor the Sun King, Marie Antoinette helped invent fashion as a high-stakes political game - one that she played in dead earnest, and with deadly results. A winner-take-all affair, her program of singular sartorial defiance implicated not just her autonomy and her prestige, but her crown and, eventually, her life.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“78. François Bluche, La Vie quotidienne au temps de Louis XVI (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 87. 79. Four indispensable studies on this subject are Jean Apostolidès, Le Roimachine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981); Norbert Elias, La Société de cour, trans. Pierre Kamnitzer and Jean Etoré (Paris: Flammarion, 1985); and Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). It is nonetheless important to note, as Elias does, that Louis XIV did not so much invent French court etiquette as consolidate and systematize it (76–77). A more colorful, less analytical account of etiquette under Louis XIV appears in W. H. Lewis, The Splendid Century (New York: Sloane, 1953), 54–66.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“. . . Marie Antoinette established herself as a force to be reckoned with - as a queen who commanded as much attention as the most dazzling king or mistress, and whose imposing stature had nothing to do with her maternal prospects.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“. . . historians rarely emphasize the tremendous importance that [Marie Antoinette's] public attached to what she was wearing at each step along the way.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Selective memory is the handmaiden of fashion.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“[Marie Antoinette] went to great lengths to underscore the notion that the realm of Trianon was ruled by her and her alone.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“In the name of equality, the Revolution's devotees had cast [Marie Antoinette] and her family out of their home and into prison; in the name of justice, they had mutilated her best friend and guillotined her husband. The conventionnels, in particular, had cloaked their actions in the language of moral rectitude - 'no man can reign innocently' - yet their own hands were drenched in blood.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“. . . Marie Antoinette's wardrobe was the stuff of dreams, and the space of nightmares.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Even as she faced execution, Marie Antoinette's will to control her image, to manage it through her clothing, had not left her.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Indeed, for the denizens of Versailles, clothes and other seemingly superficial emblems remained concrete measures of their success . . . or failure. In this rarefied world, the surface was the substance. And the appearance of power, legible in everything from a slashed sleeve to a patent coat, was the real thing.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

“Surrounded outdoors by the untamed, natural beauty of the jardin anglais, and indoors by the charming floral woodwork that adorned the villa’s walls, the Trianon ladies’ “professed ambition was to resemble wildflowers.”
― Caroline Weber

“Generally, if Marie Antoinette had worn a gown once, she did not wear it again.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution