The French fashionista

With big hair, loose gowns and ankle-baring hems, Marie Antoinette freed fashion

To pull off what French Queen Marie Antoinette did for fashion back in her day, first lady Laura Bush would have to show up at a state function in a Nazi uniform. Her style choices were that radical and dramatic.

Yet it's hard to sense how influential Marie Antoinette was to fashion after seeing Sofia Coppola's new movie "Marie Antoinette," due out Friday at theaters, starring Kirsten Dunst in the role of the teen queen.

It's a beautiful movie, in costume and set alike, that plays up Marie Antoinette's love of parties, gambling, indulgent spending and frivolous frolicking -- the result, in part, of frustration borne from an inability to get her husband to bed her. She also needed to escape the constant angst of navigating the political and social complexities within Versailles.

The movie gives us only a superficial taste of what's recently being discussed about Marie Antoinette -- her lasting role as the first influential fashionista, one who wanted to be copied, envied, revered and remembered for her ever-changing fashion and styles.

To really understand that, you'd need go a little deeper than the movie and read Caroline Weber's new biography "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution."

Weber shows in amazing detail how Marie Antoinette was able initially to win over much of her adopted country -- then acutely fixated on appearance -- with the rebellious style choices she made, most notably absurdly tall hair styles, and later, shockingly loose-fitting gowns with hems that exposed feet and ankles. Later in the book, Weber shows how that same sense of style caused her to lose favor among both French commoners and aristocrats, leading to her ultimate downfall. And it all happened in a span of 19 years.

"Because of Marie Antoinette, we have an 'anything goes' approach to fashion," Weber said last week in a telephone interview. "Marie Antoinette broke all those rules. Now we can wear blue jeans and we can be a countess or a homeless person. She was the first of her kind, a style icon in terms of creativity and variety of different styles that she tried on."

Both the movie and the book show life in France before Marie Antoinette, when the French court was so stuffy and devoted to etiquette and rules that only a select few people had what was considered the daily honor of dressing Marie Antoinette. Anything that strayed from tradition was fodder for gossip among the court.

Marie Antoinette, however, was feisty, smart and manipulative. She figured the way to win hearts was to dazzle with her evolving sense of style.

Initial shocks

Her first act of rebellion was to try, unsuccessfully, to shed her stifling corsets. Then she shocked the court by wearing men's style riding clothes. Finally, at her husband Louis XVI's coronation, she debuted her most significant fashion statement, the tall beehive hair style known then as "the pouf." Towering, heavily powdered and embellished with white feathers, the coronation pouf was so tall, "her face appeared to be the midpoint between the top of her hair and the hem of her gown," Weber writes in the book.

Some guests left the coronation upset; Marie Antoinette's hair had blocked their view of the king's coronation.

But she made an indelible statement. Soon after, the pouf -- created from a scaffolding made of wire, cloth, gauze, horse hair, fake hair and real hair -- was so widely copied that fashion plates and fashion almanacs showed the look in various forms, spiralling ever higher. One was even embellished with a tall sailing ship. Some women couldn't fit into carriages. At one point, the French considered raising the heights of doorways so women could easily pass through.