Marie Antoinette You Rock!
This fall Marie Antoinette reigns supreme.
“All eyes will be fixed on you!” Empress Maria Theresa of Austria said to her teen and youngest daughter offered in marriage to France in order to cement an alliance between the divided countries.
Two hundred years after her death the eyes are still fixed on Marie Antoinette. She’s feeling theatre houses across the world and this weekend in New York thanks to princess of a film making dynasty Sofia Coppola controversial Rock n’ Roll film version based on Antonia Fraser novel on the French queen life.
On magazine racks, she gazes in regal fashion, personified by actress Kirsten Dunst from the cover of Vogue to Quest International commissioned fragrance, “M.A. Sillage de la Reine,” inspired by scents the queen may have worn. Design houses like Lanvin unveiled collections featuring brocade, velvet and neck-high ruffles popularized during Marie’s time. Coppola’s good friend Marc Jacobs based his Louis Vuitton spring/summer 2007 collection on the movie, with frothy tulle, petticoats and pantaloons in pastel shades that match the marble on the Petit Trianon, the country house the queen used as a getaway.
To capitalize on the queen’s newfound popularity, Versailles officials recently labeled the area “Marie Antoinette’s Domain” and started charging a special admission to the enclave, which also includes a theater and the farm village about a 15-minute walk from the palace. Reproductions of her childhood dresses, costume jewelry and china covered with the interlocking “MA” monogram are on sale at the Louvre and other French museums. In the United States, mass-market retailers like Avenue and Ann Taylor Loft and Juicy Couture, have added a Marie Antoinette touch to their fall fashions, with velvet jackets, embroidered tops and cameo pendants and pastel color. In bookstores she’s all over the shelves a slew of fresh titles raging from biographies to books on fashion and her impact on International history, politics and culture.
As reporter Charity Vogel mentioned in an article on the Buffalo Gazette, last September “ This is the season of the “Marie Mania“.
Why is this current Marie Antoinette is making such an ultimate comeback? According to Charity Vogel in her article, the Art historian Larkin said she should be viewed “far more than a spoiled clotheshorse, she is a very important pivotal figure in feminist history , she epitomizes the issue of public women in position of power” and Camille Paglia in a recent essay “ The return of Marie Antoinette suggests that they are political forces at work in the world that Western humanism does not fully understand and it might not be able to control.” Charity continues elaborating on Barnard College associate professor and author of the new book, “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution”, “Part of the interest in Marie Antoinette also has to do with our continued fascination with all things royal “ another new movie, The Queen, focuses on how the British royal family reacted to the death of Princess Diana. The Dolce & Gabbana fall collection is a tribute to 19th-century French Emperor Napoleon and Empress Josephine, with military waistcoats and beaded gowns.
From the moment she arrived at Versailles, France, 14-year-old Marie Antoinette knew that what she wore was about more than just being fashionable. It was a tool for survival. “She very quickly intuited that clothing was a means of looking like she had more power than she did,” said Caroline Weber.
“France’s noble class was losing power, revolution was brewing, and people on all sides were looking for a scapegoat. With her lavish outfits and a level of ostentation to rival kings, Marie Antoinette became the perfect pawn “ continues Weber. As the French economy tanked, her spending became suspect. She was a slave to fashion, according to Weber, at times spending twice her yearly allowance on clothing. From her trademark “Pouf” hairstyle to the peasant-style chemise dress, French women readily adapted Marie Antoinette’s look. But the woman who inspired the world’s first fashion magazines soon found that her predilection for outrageous fashion would ultimately be used against her.
As described by David Edelstein in the New York Magazine Movie Review, Marie Antoinette is nothing more of a repetitious Sophia Coppola Alter Ego exploration of melancholy of ethereal beauties in dislocation, “tremulous spirit longing for release” trapped and isolated in the splendor of an overbearingly material world nothing less than the one of Versailles in the eighteenth century.
The movie, reporter Clifford Pugh from Houston Chronicle says, that the movie got mixed reviews when it premiered at Cannes this summer, for juxtaposes18th-century court life with 1980s punk and pop music to convey a youthful attitude of rebelliousness. It highlights the queen’s teenage exuberance but neglects to mark her evolution as wife, mother and public figure.
“She was a fashion icon, but she had important political reasons for that interest,” said Weber. “From her arrival in France until the day she died, her clothing was entirely bound up with her public image and her ability to exert control over her own destiny.”
Now, allow my personal thoughts among so much that has been said and will be for generations to come…
I have definitely identified myself more than once with that conscious adolescent pleasure of escapism from dislocation “This heaven gives me migraine “as said in the movie soundtrack lyrics” Natural ‘s Not in It “ by Leeds Post-Punk band Gang of Four, but constantly firm and certain of what I ‘ve always wished for… all along.
Nothing else for me is left to be said than those solemn words: Long lives the Queen.
Wode Paint Boudicca & Wode Scent Boudicca
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