Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinettes "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queens tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailless rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Webers queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion -- the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs -- was also the means of her undoing. Webers book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of historys most controversial figures.

卡羅琳•韋伯，哥倫比亞大學巴納德學院法語與比較文學副教授。十八世紀法國文化專傢，曾任教於賓夕法尼亞大學、耶魯大學。已齣版有關於法國大革命的專著兩部，在《紐約時報》、《華盛頓郵報》、《圖書論壇》、《時尚》等報刊發錶論文多篇。