A Stitch in Time S01E06 Marie Antoinette

clothes are the ultimate form of visual communication by looking at the way people dressed we can learn not only about them as individuals but about the society they lived in I'm amber Bouchard fashion historian and in the words of louis xiv i believe that fashion is the mirror of history so taking historical works of art as our inspiration traditional tale Erminia Michaela and the team will be recreating historical clothing using only authentic methods oh look at that it's changing color in the air and I'll be finding out what they tell us about the people who boredom I'm assuming the King wouldn't be dressing himself oh right and the times they lived in and seeing what they like to wear [Music] Marie Antoinette is seen as history's ultimate fashion icon and its ultimate fashion victim her extravagant wardrobe is the stuff of legend and yet not a single gown known to have been worn by her survives today what we do have a portraits like this one painted in 1783 by the Queen's favorite artists vision Lebrun and its story and the story of the dress she wears in it are as scandalous and as intriguing as the Queen herself when this portrait was unveiled it caused huge damage to an already unpopular monarchy it looks really informal for a court portrait especially those of Marie Antoinette who we associate with this very lavish sumptuous clothing so I'm really keen to unravel the story behind it a fashion and dress took on a really ideological role during the fall of the French monarchy so I really want to see what this portrait can tell us about this tumultuous period in history and especially the place of Marie Antoinette within there the chemise lrn as the gown worn in this portrait became known was a radical departure for Marie Antoinette and a complete contrast to the highly structured garments favored by the rest of the court I'm keen to find out from ninya if the dress is as simple as it looks so Marie Antoinette as a figure still looms large in the history of fashion and in pop culture in general but this portrait of her is a very different Marie Antoinette from the very wide skirts Andrea laborat silks that were used to seeing her in so what is this dress actually made of it's actually made of a very fine cotton muslin so I've got some samples here it comes in super super fine or I'm slightly more opaque so soft it's more like well hence why it was so shocking at the time it's more like a night dress or underwear really yeah my understanding of the time is that with this style of gown the chemise Anna Wren you'd still have your stays and your petticoat underneath and they would still be silk in the tradition so how do we know that she's wearing stays this it was still a very strong convention at this date is a radical thing to be bearing the chemise on the outside when it's essentially a piece of underwear but it's a whole nother step for a lady to just let go of her state altogether so how will you make the stays well I'm going to get Harriet make this tape and she'll be making them from a linen foundation covered with a silk brocade and we found some really lovely brocade oh look at that I know it's got little birds and flowers and it feels to me very Marie Antoinette very Marie Antoinette definitely and so what particular sort of tools or techniques will you be using to recreate this lots of bone channels to sew and bones to prepare and insert into those channels it's quite hard on the hands you have to be quite strong actually to make a pair of stays and then the chemise it's really just an awful lot of fine hand sewing because all the sewing is very much on show with the fabric being very sheer and it's really important that all of the edges of the muslin are very very straight it sounds incredibly fiddly it's very beautiful again like you read so often say the it looks like oh this will be a simple one but there's a lot of yards of hand sewing in that as it's held in private ownership we don't have access to the original painting but it's sister portrait hangs at Marie Antoinette's private Versailles get away la petit trianon where the austrian-born Queen escaped the stall to fiying etiquette of the French Court and the chemise gown became the unofficial uniform among in a circle it's also where I'm meeting our curator Juliette ray so Marie Antoinette's pose in this portrait is very similar to the Shimizu Lorraine portraits what's the relationship between the two our very close this portrait is actually a kind of replica the portrait with the shimmies dress was shown at the sanno in 1783 and it caused a great scandal and so visually Omaha had to take the painting away and replace it straight away so she kept exactly the same pose but changed she changed the dress and so what was so shocking about this amis dress portraits so the salon is a public exhibition that takes place at the Louvre every two years and absolutely everybody goes to the salon the shemish dress was worn already at Versailles but it could be worn inside it could be worn at the British piano but it could not be worn as a formal dress and the problem with the saloon is that the Queen appears in front of all the people who come to visit the salon it's as if she's here herself and she could not appear in front of everyone in a linen formal dress so that was quite inappropriate cutting with a muslin which were used for the dress we're also the materials you would use for underwear it was also shocking that way to see the Queen showing herself in her underwear so to say so it was more the audacity of having this painting shown in public than the actual dress itself that was shocking absolutely that goes completely against the idea vaches the quinn she should be very for her pupil and tissued assume her responsibility as a monarch how much did this damage the reputation of Marie Antoinette it's hard to say exactly because she was never very much loved by the French people but we could say that it is the beginning of her downfall but I've got the lovely silk brocade for the Marie Antoinette's days and I'm just looking to see where the pattern lies because obviously we don't want to cut it wastefully and we want the final pattern to be displayed best on the the actual pieces of the this days early stage you you have some whale bone very very expensive but many stays stiffened with reeds they've called bents it's like dried grasses like these so you can see individually they have no strength at all but when you bundle them up together and hold them very tightly inside a channel it's very good very flexible it's a wonderful material and even up to the 19th century there's there's records of women poor women going and seeking down by the riverside seeking rushes to just dip in their own stays movies I think this is Marie Antoinette shimmies Wow that's exactly isn't it really lovely so that's her sash muslin be lovely yeah it's going to look very fresh she is as with everything worn by Marie Antoinette the chemise a lorraine became the height of fashion chemise gowns are so delicate there are only two known to be in existence one is held at a small Museum near the Palace of Versailles when we think about 18th century women's clothing we tend to think about court dress very formal very structured the silks the panty A's you know the enormous shapes whereas this I just would love to put it on and roll around on a chaise longue so it looks like it would feel luxurious and comfortable and soft and just amazing and looking at it from a 21st century perspective this dress does look very simple that kind of pastoral shepherd s style that Marie Antoinette was so in love with in Petit Trianon in the grounds of Versailles wearing something like this swirling around her gardens you've got this kind of romantic rural ideal but what we also see is that simple as it is it would still have been very expensive the muslin itself was actually very expensive it was an imported fabric but crucially at this time keeping something white is very laborious very time-consuming and so very very expensive it's kind of like wearing a status symbol so essentially what it is is a very wealthy woman's idea a Queen's idea of how a peasant might dress or how a shepherdess might dress which is incredibly patronizing when you think about it and you can really see why that misquote let them eat cake really stuck to mary antoinette when you look at a dress like this [Music] Wow lots of different things going on here not so different colors we've all got different bits of mary antoinette hungry so take me through in stages i have the chemise lrn a feature of this garment is a very fine hem all the way well lots of very fine hems and the only way you can do really find him on a very thin fabric like this is if it's dead straight on the grain and the way to get it dead straight on the grain is to draw out a thread first you're drawing out one thread from across this whole length of your right how you do that I have a pin I pick up the thread with the pin and lift it up Macie and you see how it makes it pucker yeah so I'm left with this very faint kind of line where I've pulled the thread out yeah that's where I'll cut along with my shares and then I'll know that I can do a nice hem yeah really really fiddly so what are you working on well I'm working on the stays these get worn underneath so these are quite tough garments they were cut out by men big responsibility cutting fabric yeah if you ruin the silk then that's that's a lot of money a lot of money isn't it how are you with scissors okay let's throw caution to the winds if you cut around this cut around the edge this I feel quite stressed about this so do I so literally I'm just cutting you're just this exact shape and it's all pinned on so actually on it it can't go anywhere okay less I take it away and if I do that stop cutting because something's gone wrong all right so I'm going in going in he's doing it keep these up right yes right [Laughter] screaming it's like my head yeah okay it it's at all right yes how you all stop work well she's got my shoes I was gonna cut come along with Prentice feel like I'm gonna lose control so you feel like the end of them is so far away from my hand oh it's tricky the curves brilliant oh and so how how would you rate my cutting fare very good can I have my shoes yes [Music] for a real sense of how radical a departure the new lit was we have one remaining direct link to Marie Antoinette her wardrobe book for 1782 just one year before our portrait was painted I cannot wait to see this this is amazing Wow this book is so exciting to look at some of these swatches here you can see tiny tiny pinpricks now some historians have suggested that this is where Marie Antoinette would go through this book and choose the fabrics that she wanted to wear that day by putting a pin in them if that's the case then what we're looking at here just in these tiny holes is her making these aesthetic decisions these fashion choices that will go on to define her it just feels like such a tangible link to the past the idea that you know she may have been looking through these deciding what to wear that's something that all of us do every day we get up we decide what we're gonna wear these tiny embroidered flowers are absolutely exquisite and again just really fit into that idea of this sort of pastoral romanticism that was so in vogue this time and that Marie Antoinette herself was such a champion of really beautiful array of silks Leon in France was a huge center of silk production at this time what Marie Antoinette wore was taken up by her fellow courtiers people outside of the court everyone wanted to dress like the Queen she really set the fashions which then of course filtered down to the rest of society seeing the extent of the patterns and the colors really brings home how much of a contrast it would be to suddenly see Marie Antoinette dressed in a very simple muslin gown she was accused of putting tens of thousands of silk merchants out of work of silk manufacturers out of work from looking through these wardrobe books we really get a sense of why Marie Antoinette's attempt to simplify her wardrobe became an issue of such contention it really went against two of the most important aspects of her royal life she was expected to encourage French manufacturing support the silk industry and she was also expected to inspire respect for the throne and in dressing like this pastoral shepherdess she really didn't do that she was seen as transgressing class boundaries and she became this incredibly divisive figure I am sewing on casings for the drawstrings and the sleeves of the chemise al RN so this is one sleeve and you can see the three casings I'm sewing in and at the end of each casing there's an eyelet hole because through those eyelet holes will be threaded a tape got it's nice thin cotton tape to thread through and it will create this puffy arrangement that you can see in the portrait she's got these puffed up gathered bits I'm still working on the stays there is a lot of work in a pair of stays which is ironic when you consider that they then get covered up and not seen at all the way this stitch goes you're coming out of one side and going down into the fold of the seam allowance on the other side and you go right across it because it's going to be going through all the layers to get as much of a grip on the other side as you can and then you swing it round and you come down into the other side and do the same thing and it's it forms like a figure of eight which again kind of locks it together and really yeah I mean that's really not going anywhere you can see light through it just for those breathing holes by 1789 Marie Antoinette's popularity was at an all-time low the previous winter had been so cold the same froze over and a bad harvest meant there wasn't enough bread too many the courts and particularly the foreign-born queen symbolized all that was wrong with the country on July the 14th an angry mob stormed the Bastille prison which had become a symbol of royal dictatorial rule the French Revolution had begun Marie Antoinette spent the last nine weeks of her life here at the Conciergerie a medieval palace turned prison where she was completely stripped of her royal prestige and was known as the widow Cappy in strict mourning for her husband louis xvi headed some months earlier the queen who had railed against the lack of privacy at the French Court was under constant surveillance I'm here to meet historian Andrew Hussie to find out more about Marie Antoinette's last days so we're here in what I think is quite a beautiful ring it's so Chapel of Remembrance but it's on the site of the cell that Marie Antoinette was held in for the last nine weeks of her life do we know anything about her state of mind while she was here we know that she came here in the early hours of August the 2nd 1793 and a bit like now there's a heat wave in Paris and it was famously swell to him and she got to this cell and she arrived about two or three o'clock in the morning I think probably in 21st century terms she would say she was in deep shock and and trauma and she never really recovered from that what was her life here have been like you know what it's hard to imagine a sharper the difference between life and Versailles which was the big Society of the spectacle the great open spaces the great movies all said the fete gallant you know all these big parties they had and all of this orgies and all that kind of thing - this claustrophobic sweltering nightmarish scene out of good but the two are interlinked and in some ways they're not being too clever about it this is the direct contrast that links the society a spectacle on both sides because here now she becomes a celebrity criminal how much did her love of fashion her love of novelty and luxury how big a part at that plain her downfall I don't think my internet was guileless she wasn't a stupid woman and she knew what she was doing and what she was doing was pursuing an ecstatic life rather than a political life the problem was in France at that time anything you did was political so she was as it were caught in her in a trap whatever she did she was she was you know and gonna be judged on you know I'm she looked how she performed and so on so the fashion side of it wasn't the ditzy and Austrian queen of legend but it was always going to be portrayed in terms of decadence in terms of the dangers of absolutism now the famous misquote let them eat cake how true is this version of Marie Antoinette that we have I think on both sides of the channel in Britain actually we've got this carry on don't lose your heads you know version of blue pc version of mary antoinette and it's not true she was a real woman who was really killed and she was killed just down the road in plaster like Concorde in a city that was full of brown revolutionaries and we're as late as the early 19th century animals would not cross the bridge over to plaster la Concorde who's that the stench of blood under the pave was so powerful and I think we forget you know that this was a city that have become a slaughterhouse it was full of killers and it was full of the rabid ferocious murderous energy that goes with a great massive political upheaval and she was the woman who lost all and she started losing it here in this cell in the heatwave in August on October the 16th 1793 Marie Antoinette shed her widow's weeds and slipped on a white chemise she'd managed to keep hidden from the guards over which she wore a simple white dress and went to meet her death crowds lining the streets was stunned into silence when confronted by this modest spectral figure the prematurely white hair matching her carefully chosen clothes and so Marie Antoinette saved her most powerful fashion statement for last [Music] [Music] it is kind of architectural it's incredible oh my god there's absolutely no way that somebody would think this was an underwear she meets with all of the layers as well it's really not in any way see-through so I you also get a sense that what really angered people was this idea of class transgression that she was trying to dress like some kind of shepherdess or a farmer's daughter and you know when you're wearing this the idea of doing any kind of herding sheep it's a horrific pastiche respect it's so much more kind of meringue II it is in effect Princess Diana's wedding dress yes really but she wasn't wearing the stage that you're wearing so she had a defined curvy body and you have that the conical eighteenth-century body visage is a trial Panna yes it is it's really lovely it is weightless to wear it completely is like the only pressure on your body is the pressure of the state so then to wear something like this after having worn silks would have felt incredibly liberating I think very very freeing so fascinating wearing this having released you know spent some time inside her life almost and thinking about the magnitude of that moment when the portrait went on display yeah it's quite unlike anything that came before isn't it yeah I suppose she was damned for wearing too much silk and then damn for wearing man poor thing she really didn't win [Music] wearing this dress I wasn't expecting how much kind of volume and structure all of the interior lacing was going to give it so it had a much more dramatic silhouette and also of course you have the the physical experience of wearing stays wearing that corset underneath gives so much more structure and formality than you're expecting with a garment that has always been talked about as being too informal for a queen to wear it really gave me an understanding of why it would appeal to Marie Antoinette the lightness of the fabric it's just a completely a world away from what she would have been expected to wear at court these very sort of strict rules of etiquette and dress that we know she really did not like she felt very constrained by this so the weightlessness the freedom the liberation that this garment offered you really get a sense of that when you actually have it on clothes effect the way that we move through the world they affect the way that we stand the way we hold ourselves and so having the experience of putting these plays wearing these quotes on the body feeling the way that these people would have felt and would have moved through the world is a really invaluable experience [Music] Oh

Channel: Elizabeth

Views: 869,435

Rating: 4.9355464 out of 5

Keywords: marie antoinette, costuming, history, 18th century, fashion, fashion history, french fashion, french history, archeology

Id: fN4RQiYPSqM

Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018