Queen of Fashion by Caroline Weber

Queen of Fashion by Caroline Weber

A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year

When her carriage first crossed over from her native Austria into France, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was taken out, stripped naked before an entourage, and dressed in French attire to please the court of her new king. For a short while, the young girl played the part.

But by the time she took the throne, everything had changed. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber tells of the radical restyling that transformed the young queen into an icon and shaped the future of the nation. With her riding gear, her white furs, her pouf hairstyles, and her intricate ballroom disguises, Marie Antoinette came to embody--gloriously and tragically--all the extravagance of the monarchy.

Caroline Weber is a French and Comparative Literature professor at Columbia University's Barnard College; she has formerly taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006) is her first book. She has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Financial Times, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and New York magazine, among other publications. She currently resides in New York City.