If in the era of the topless it seems incredible to you that, in its day, Brigitte Bardot's bikini caused blisters, you will be even more surprised to know that the painting that heads this article was removed, with enormous commotion, from the Paris Salon of 1783.
In our eyes, it is nothing more than an innocent and sweet, even slick, portrait of Maria Antonia Josepha of Habsburg-Lorraine, archduchess of Austria and queen of France. For Marie Antoinette's contemporaries, as she is remembered, it was a major scandal. Apparently, the queen was posing half-naked, dressed in a kind of shirt, the undergarment that women of the time wore under her bodice and skirt. Chemise à la reine was, from then on, the nickname of this light cotton muslin dress, which would soon become all the rage throughout Europe.
Why so much fuss? Well, because the dress was worn without a corset and without a crinoline, putting feminine curves within reach. When the Count of Aranda, Spanish ambassador in Versailles, commissioned a trousseau for his fiancée, he specified that he not include this indecent garment. But if he had to specify it, it was precisely because its use was already unstoppable.
Thousands of women began to breathe and sit naturally again, an ephemeral freedom of movement that they would lose, again, in the mid-19th century and that they would not regain until Coco Chanel gave it back to them.
In reality, Marie Antoinette was not the first nor the last to wear the shirt dress that would give her name, but she was the most inopportune. Many monarchs have formed memorable couples with artists who helped them enhance their reputations. This painting had exactly the opposite effect. From the meeting between the wife of Louis XVI and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, his chamber painter, a delicate work would be born, delicious for the senses, but fatal for the fate of Marie Antoinette and perhaps, indirectly, for that of millions of Humans.
Married to the heir of Louis Her mother María Teresa pressured her to get involved in politics, and her brother José pressured her not to do so. Her official mission, to have offspring, took eight years.
Marie Antoinette only had one piece of power left: her appearance. With the help of designer Rose Bertin, nicknamed “fashion minister,” she put one style after another into vogue, each more extreme, garnering ridicule and admiration in equal measure. Those who criticized her went out of their way to imitate her, whether by sculpting headdresses so high that ladies had to travel kneeling to fit in their carriages or by adopting trends inspired by Polish folklore, English Amazons or men's clothing.
The hatred between Versailles and Marie Antoinette was mutual. The young queen hated restrictions, in life and in dress. When Vigée Le Brun met her, she spent as much time as possible absent from the palace pomp, taking refuge in the Trianon mansion, where she had created, to her liking, a world of false rural simplicity, decorated with cheerful chintz curtains instead of heavy velvets.
The artist and the queen understood each other perfectly. Vigée Le Brun was a master of pictorial intimacy. And if Marie Antoinette craved something, after giving birth to her first-born in a room packed with courtiers, it was intimacy. The painter herself was surprised by her affable and accessible treatment. At the Trianon, where only the most like-minded had access, the formalities were softened, the ranks were diluted, she dressed in white and without a corset.
That was exactly the problem. The first commission for Élisabeth was still a classroom portrait, despite the flowers and the filtered light that visually lightens the fabrics. Her attire is courtly; her pose, majestic; A crown rests next to the table and a bust of the king oversees the scene.
By painting her later, in chemise à la reine, the artist stripped the monarch of all solemnity, of all political symbolism. To make matters worse, she presented the painting to the Salon along with two other very similar ones: a self-portrait and a portrait of the Duchess of Polignac, both wearing informal shirt dresses and country straw hats, almost identical to those of the queen.
The three portraits, a faithful reflection of the perpetual Trianon picnic, forbidden to almost all nobles, unleashed the wrath of the court. The proper hierarchical difference was not appreciated between those three frivolous beauties, one of them bourgeois, the other an aristocrat, the third of imperial blood.
Nor did the people accept that unusual display of egalitarianism. The queen was already famous for her tendency to waste. The bourgeois saw in her portrait confirmation of her disinterest in any responsible occupation and, what is worse, of her anti-patriotism. Silk, which the queen so visibly despised, was a pillar of French industry. Cotton muslin, on the other hand, came from the British Indies. The gesture, perhaps tolerable in a royal favorite, was unacceptable for a monarch.
The popularity of cotton voile multiplied in the following years. With supplies from India exhausted, American landowners switched from sugar cane to cotton and the number of slaves doubled.
The controversy increased the fame of Vigée Le Brun and blessed her with a shower of commissions in other European courts. For Marie Antoinette, however, it was one more step towards the guillotine. For her walk to the scaffold, deprived of the right to mourn for her executed husband, the queen again chose white. A look that, paradoxically, the new ladies of the revolution would adopt, converted into Empire style.
This text is part of an article published in number 626 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
