During the eleven years before she gave birth to a boy, she dressed to enhance her symbolic power. Instead, Weber convincingly shows that Marie Antoinette carefully cultivated her sartorial sense. The queen’s fashion choices were neither consumerist enjoyment nor girlish whims-contrary to the impression you may have gotten from Kirsten Dunst’s portrayal in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette.

Her delightfully written, well-documented and erudite account of the interplay between politics and fashion in the lead-up to the French Revolution is a scholarly work that reads like a novel. Unable to seal the political union between Austria and France and surrounded by enemies of Austria within the Bourbon Court, Marie Antoinette’s strategy became “to combat her enemies with style,” says Caroline Weber. But the equally young Louis, who became King Louis XVI in 1774, was unable to consummate the marriage for seven years, placing the young queen in a perilous position. Her freedom was negligible and her role well defined: to produce an heir for the French court. Her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, married her off in 1770, when she was fourteen, to the French Dauphin Louis August. However, as a young girl, though surrounded by, and with access to, a garish abundance of wealth, Marie Antoinette was treated as no more than a pawn in a high-stakes geopolitical alliance. Either way, she is larger than life, as are the fashions associated with her name. The French see Marie-Antoinette in extreme terms: she is either revered or reviled. Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution By Caroline Weber New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006, 412 pp., $27.50, hardcover.

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