Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette is a figure who shows great beauty and is often regarded as a fashion icon. Her extravagant dresses and hats and hair top all the rest.

Caroline Webber talks about how Marie Antoinette's fashion choices relate to her rule over france. The stereotypical people of france are unreasonably fancy and snooty. Perhaps Marie Antoinette's obsession with fashion contributed to this stereotype. She continued to buy clothes and did not do anything about her country's deteriorating economic status. Although, she also became a fashion icon of the time. People looked at her and were incredibly jealous of her. She used this as a means for power over her subjects. She dressed like no other monarch before her. She sometimes would cross dress when she went on hunts, binding her chest to look like a man. She used clothing to make herself look more powerful. "In Truth, Marie Antoinette's Clothing expenditures accounted for a negligible portion of the overall budget outlined in Necker's report, but her ostentatious image belied the economic reality." This infuriated her subjects, but as we have talked about in class, this is one of the ways one can gain power. Not only did Marie Antoinette wear extravagant clothing, she also was famous for her extremely complicated hairdos. She didn't care about what her people needed, she used materials life flour to adorn her hair, even when the peasants had a limited supply of bread and were starving in the streets. She became a celebrity of the time, and although she was not doing the best job of running the country, people were very excited to see what she was wearing and what kind of interesting things she would comment on with her fashion. Ultimately the unhappiness of her people caught up with her, and she was beheaded, but she was still concerned with her image, even on her final days.

There is also a large power struggle depicted between Marie Antoinette and her palace. She was controlled from day one. ""in this way, Marie Antoinette and her adversaries engaged in a fierce tug-of-war to control her sartorial body : a struggle she had been waging in some form or other since her first day on French Soil.This power struggle represents the life of many kings and queens. This eventually got her into trouble.