Why Marie Antoinette Still Reigns Over Fashion – TownandCountrymag.com

It’s not just “florals for spring.” There are some notions that fashion magazines can’t seem to shake—and of those, the reigning favorite is Her Royal Highness, Marie Antoinette.

It’s become almost a rite of passage to pose as the ill-fated Queen in a double-page spread. Most recently, Kylie Jenner had the pleasure in Harper’s Bazaar, but many—Rihanna, Ali Wong, Nicki Minaj, just to name a few—have come before her. The tack each photo story takes is different, and plays as much with the celebrity’s image as it does the Queen’s, but imagery of our girl Marie is always there.

It’s been well over 200 years since she met her fate at the guillotine, dressed in virginal white—flawless clothing she’d managed to acquire despite spending the previous nine months in a cell—determined to make a final, lasting sartorial impression. And it’s lasted. She’s an icon, in the truest sense: her image, like the Greek Orthodox panels of my youth, is ever-present. It’s instantly recognizable referent, ripe for visual iteration.

When Jeremy Scott needed a gimmick for Moschino’s fall 2020 show, Marie Antoinette was there at the ready. And when the Hadids walked out—clad in cut-off 18th century gowns, with punk-ed up poufs swirled atop their heads like icing—they were following in the footsteps of countless runway takes that had come before. Just last season, Thom Browne had twisted his arsenal of seersucker and tweed into the corsets and panniers of her era.

There’s definitely a timeliness of her (falsely attributed) words. As films like Parasite and Knives Out illustrate our current culture’s urge to eat the rich, those on top can’t understand why those at the bottom wouldn’t rather have cake. And our president far prefers to hold court at Versailles—er, Mar-a-Lago—than contend with his own capital.

But if Marie Antoinette still meant to us what she signified to the French people—Madame Déficit, a symbol of indulgence and frivolity in a time of scarcity—we’d hate her. And we don’t.

Or at least, I don’t. In part, it’s my instinct to get behind any and all of history’s maligned women. And there’s also the allure of the teenaged princess played by Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, stripped of her clothing and beloved dog (Mops!) as she’s passed off to France at the border. Lonely, beautiful, and seemingly ignorant of politics, it’s hard to blame Dunst’s Queen for taking pleasure where she found it. And all that her courtiers would have whispered about—undercover trips to Parisian balls, trysts with a foreigner—just look, to the modern eye, like a woman taking control of her predetermined life.

But even more than Coppola’s playful teen Queen, or a smoldering indignation against misogynists past, it has to be the Petit Hameau: Marie Antoinette’s purpose-built model village on the grounds of Versailles. There, she had a mill, a barn, a hen house, vegetable gardens, both a working dairy and a model dairy, and multiple spaces for entertaining. The image of a Queen meandering through an agricultural set piece, pretending to collect already-cleaned chicken eggs, is patently absurd (not to mention downright offensive to the actual peasants she ruled over) and also, somehow, charming.

There, Marie Antoinette created her own little world, a simulacrum of pastoral life without any of its unappealing realities—the spoiled princess version of the petting zoos and tourist-friendly farms of my own Midwestern youth. And to fully enter her fantasy, the Queen dressed the part, committing as wholly to white cotton dresses as she did to formal gowns back at the palace. It wasn’t long before this new chemise à la reine caught on outside her faux-humble abode—if Marie Antoinette wasn’t known for exercising her political power, she relished her influence over Europe’s fashions. And her sway proved far more enduring than the Ancien Régime.

It’s easiest to see her in excess, in piles of ribbons and silk and lace. When a designer identifies her as his inspiration, it nearly always results in wide-hipped, heavily layered gowns and frilly, Rococo pastels. But that’s only one half of Marie Antoinette’s stylistic legacy—and were it not for the other, she might not prove as indelible.

When the whole of New York decided to dress like milkmaids last summer, she was there, too. When we gush over Dôen and Sleeper’s Instagrams of women outdoors, frolicking in their flowing nightgowns, that’s Marie, baby. Her influence can be seen in the rustic patterns of Batsheva and Brock Collection, the romantic lace of Simone Rocha. Like their Queen, the twenty-somethings that lust after these brands aren’t going to work in the fields—they’re cultivating their own digital fantasy worlds, sharing dispatches from a trip upstate (or just near a houseplant).

Marie Antoinette stays with us because she embodies a dialectic: our love of consumerist self-indulgence, and our latent desire to give it all away. Not that many would-be homesteaders are really trying to rough it in the wilderness, nor was she—if the Petit Humeau foreshadowed anything, it was the rise of glamping.

I love the Humeau because I get it. I, too, daydream about spending my days cuddling with lambs in a billowing chemise—but then, I don’t have a palace to return to.