Fashion Plate à la Française

Madame Bonaparte wearing an empire silhouetted, diaphanous dress, still in vogue today. Detail from Jospehine's 1801 portrait François Gérard. Oil on canvas. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Public Domain

Irish poet and writer Oscar Wilde quipped: “Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!” It’s true that models, trends, and even designers often come and go. It is rare for something or someone to become a lasting icon. But some fashions, it seems, have staying power.

France, while universally famous for its luxurious fashion industry (and Paris as its peak-of-chic capital) boasts three ladies from its history—Queen Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine, and Empress Eugénie—who continue to inspire designers, books, movies, television, exhibitions, collectors, and lovers of history and style. These consorts set the trends of their times and remain timeless French fashion plates. Surviving portraiture helps the modern viewer understand how each woman’s taste transcended borders and eras.

Marie Antoinette

“Marie Antoinette With a Rose,” 1783, by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun. Oil on canvas. Palace of Versailles, France. Public Domain

Marie Antoinette was painted throughout her lifetime, from her childhood in the Viennese palaces of her mother, the Holy Roman Empress, to her teenage years in the French court as dauphine (wife of the heir to the French throne), and later in adulthood as the queen of France. The painter who captured her best was Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun.

Vigée Le Brun was one of the most talented artists in 18th-century France and, indeed, is one of the most important female artists in history. When Vigée Le Brun and Marie Antoinette first met, they were the same age and soon developed a close friendship. The queen helped the artist gain admittance to the prestigious Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and over the years, Vigée Le Brun was called upon to create 30 portraits of the queen.

One such example, with beautiful coloration and exquisite details, is “Marie Antoinette With a Rose.” This painting showcases the queen in a blue-gray silk “robe à la française” adorned with ribbons and lace. This dress was likely made by Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker who laid the foundations for haute couture. In the picture, the queen’s powdered hair pouf displays a gauzy striped turban trimmed with ostrich feathers. The carefully crafted image of the entire ensemble demonstrates Marie Antoinette’s regality and acquired French-ness.

Jewelry worn by Marie Antoinette on display at Sotheby's auction house. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

This painting also displays Marie Antoinette’s legendary love of jewels. In the work, she wears a double-strand pearl necklace and matching bracelets. During this age, pearls were more valuable than diamonds. A large pearl pendant once owned by Marie Antoinette, which had descended through her daughter’s family, sold at Sotheby’s in 2018 for a record-breaking $36 million. Jewelry historian Gislain Aucremanne, in a talk about Marie Antoinette at the jewelry school L’ÉCOLE, said that the pearl’s price “revealed once again the interest and passion that everyone, general public and intense collectors, always had for Marie Antoinette.”

The Queen’s Chemise

“Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress,” after 1783, by anonymous painter after Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun. Oil on canvas. Timken Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Public Domain

The same year that Vigée Le Brun painted “Marie Antoinette With a Rose,” she had earlier created and put on display the painting “Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress.” This painting scandalized the public for it showed the queen wearing a robe en chemise, also known as chemise à la reine (chemise of the queen). 

The queen, weary of wearing elaborate and heavy dresses at court, adored this new look of a loosely belted, largely unadorned muslin dress, and it became the style of choice among fashionable ladies in France and other countries. As Aucremanne explained in the L’ÉCOLE talk, during the 18th century “everyone in Europe lived à la française.” However, French critics took offense at the dress’s resemblance to the chemise undergarment of the period.

“Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress” was removed from view due to this outcry, and “Marie Antoinette With a Rose” was quickly produced to put in its place. However, it was the “robe à la française” that became outmoded with the French Revolution, while the popularity of Marie Antoinette’s chemise style of dress continued into the Napoleonic era.

Madame Bonaparte

Portrait of Joséphine, the wife of Napoleon, 1801, by François Gérard. Oil on canvas. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Public Domain

The Martinique-born Empress Joséphine, supreme tastemaker in her husband’s empire and great patroness of the arts and botany, pushed sartorial boundaries. The Napoleonic court drew symbolic inspiration from both early medieval French dynasties and the Roman Empire, purposefully bypassing the previously deposed French monarchy.

The chemise dress, similar to a Roman tunic, was a perfect mode for furthering the image of Napoleon as heir to the Roman emperors. Under Joséphine, the diaphanous chemise dress was no longer reminiscent of a fairy tale shepherdess or milkmaid, as it had been when worn by Marie Antoinette; instead, it was made more transparent with a lower neckline. This dress type was fastened just under the bust and was known as the Empire silhouette; it is a silhouette still in vogue today.

Joséphine can be seen wearing this style in her portrait at the Palace of Malmaison by François Gérard. The public was captivated by what Joséphine would wear next. Carol Woolton, an editor of British Vogue, says on an episode of the podcast “If Jewels Could Talk” that Joséphine is still an “ultimate inspiration for what happens in Paris.”

Empress Bonaparte’s Tiara

A gold cameo and enamel diadem by Jacques-Amboise Oliveras, circa 1808, believed to have belonged to Empress Joséphine Bonaparte. DANIEL LEAL/Getty Images

Gérard’s painting depicts the empress wearing a tiara. Joséphine chose tiaras as a means of adornment because they harken back to ancient Rome and previous French queens had not worn them. She wore tiaras low on her forehead, in a style known as à la Joséphine. This style became popular again over a hundred years later in the Roaring ‘20s. Unlike Marie Antoinette, Joséphine wore her hair unpowdered and in soft curls.

In Josephine’s portrait at Malmaison, the empress is specifically wearing a tiara set with cameos. The craze during the Napoleonic era for the ancient art of glyptics—cameos (engraved gems with a raised relief image) and intaglios (gems with a design cut as a depression into the surface)—was heightened by contemporaneous archeological discoveries. Two tiaras, reputed to be examples from Joséphine’s vast cameo and intaglio jewelry collection, came up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2021 and sold for a combined $763,000.

Empress Eugénie

“The Empress Eugénie,” 1854, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain

Empress Eugénie, born into Spanish nobility, was the wife of Emperor Napoleon III, who was the nephew of Napoleon I and grandson of Joséphine. In contrast to Joséphine, Eugénie was fascinated by Marie Antoinette and embraced her style, adapting it to the mid-19th century. The portrait titled “The Empress Eugénie” by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, who was a prominent painter of lush portraits of royalty, is reminiscent of Vigée Le Brun’s “Marie Antoinette With a Rose.” Eugénie is portrayed in a luxurious and elaborate yellow silk dress with fringe, lace, ribbons, bows, and tassels, along with a powered hairstyle and ropes of pearls.

Similar to Marie Antoinette and Joséphine, Eugénie also popularized new styles and brands. Art historian Emily Selter in The Adventurine describes Eugénie as the “de-facto style icon of the era. She famously changed her clothes and jewelry three or four times a day and rarely wore the same outfit twice. Charles Frederick Worth made her dresses. Louis Vuitton crafted her trunks.”

Worth, an Englishman, was a Paris-based designer considered to be the father of haute couture. Eugénie was a devoted patroness. With her support, Worth made fashionable changes to the de rigueur crinoline, a stiff petticoat worn under a full skirt, and then introduced a radical new silhouette that became all the rage: the bustle.

The Bow Brooch

After Napoleon III was deposed, the new French government (French Third Republic) sold a large cache of the French crown jewels at “the auction of the century.” The official line was that these were immoral luxury items whose proceeds would be put to better use, but the real reason was that the government was concerned that if various claimants to the French throne were able to wear these jewels ripe with cultural and political power, they would be a threat to the stability of the new government.

At the auction, an American jewelry brand, Tiffany’s, bought more than two thirds of the lots. One of the highlights and, indeed, one of the most famous jewels of the era was a large bow brooch encrusted with diamonds that had been custom-made for Eugénie. The brooch was bought on behalf of the Gilded Age American society queen Mrs. Astor.

In 2008, the jewel reappeared at auction, this time at Christie’s. In recent years, France has been eager to reclaim its cultural heritage. A private sale of this brooch was brokered with the Friends of the Louvre organization, which bought it for $10.5 million. Today, it is on display along with other reclaimed jewels at the Louvre, where it is admired by visitors.

While Queen Marie Antoinette, Empress Joséphine, and Empress Eugénie had their own styles and stories, they also had many commonalities. All were married to monarchs who ended up being deposed. All were born outside France, and yet were inextricable, intrinsic parts of French history and culture. In their time, Paris was the ultimate center of luxury, as it still is, and they were its fashion leaders, still admired today.