Quotes from Caroline Weber

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.

François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), I

historians rarely emphasize the tremendous importance that [Marie Antoinette's] public attached to what she was wearing at each step along the way.

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.

Marie Antoinette's wardrobe was the stuff of dreams, and the space of nightmares.

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.

Generally, if Marie Antoinette had worn a gown once, she did not wear it again.

Marie Antoinette] went to great lengths to underscore the notion that the realm of Trianon was ruled by her and her alone.

Even when faced with unspeakable loss, Marie Antoinette tackled her difficulties as she always had - by choosing costumes that emphasized her resilience of spirit.

Even as she faced execution, Marie Antoinette's will to control her image, to manage it through her clothing, had not left her.

Selective memory is the handmaiden of fashion.

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.

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.