“Throughout history rulers have used clothes as a form
of legitimization and propaganda. While palaces, pictures, and jewels might
reflect the choice of a monarch’s predecessors or advisers, clothes reflected
the preferences of the monarch himself. Being both personal and visible, the
right costume at the right time could transform and define a monarch’s
reputation. Many royal leaders have known this, from Louis XIV to Catherine the
Great and from Napoleon I to Princess Diana.
This intriguing book explores how rulers have sought
to control their image through their appearance. Mansel shows how individual
styles of dress throw light on the personalities of particular monarchs, on
their court system, and on their ambitions. The book looks also at the
economics of the costume industry, at patronage, at the etiquette involved in
mourning dress, and at the act of dressing itself. Fascinating glimpses into
the lives of European monarchs and contemporary potentates reveal the intimate
connection between power and the way it is packaged.”
“Queen Maud of Norway was renowned for her stylish
dress. Daughter of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, she was born a princess and
became Queen of Norway in 1905. She had exemplary taste and a strong interest
in fashion, and her royal lifestyle required appropriate dress for every occasion.
Her wardrobe includes a range of stunning creations dating from her wedding
trousseau of 1896 to the latest Worth designs purchased just months before her
death in 1938.
Queen Maud's clothes document an extraordinary era of
fashion history, from the decorative but elaborate dress of the Victorian era
to the streamlined chic of the 1930s: clothes for the modern working monarch.
Her wardrobe encompasses the public and private like no other collection, from
sumptuous state gowns and elegant evening dresses for official occasions to
riding habits, winter sportswear, and simple tailored suits for afternoons in
the garden with her grandchildren.
Maud engaged with contemporary fashion throughout her
long life, and commissioned many of the great designers of the day, notably,
Worth, Blancquaert and Morin-Blossier. Her wardrobe illustrates the impeccable
standards of couture dressmaking and tailoring of the period. Flawlessly beaded
gowns, perfectly cut and hand-finished suits, beautifully embroidered and
appliqued dresses all exemplify the superb workmanship of the era. Style and
Splendour showcases some of the most spectacular garments now in the collection
of the National Museum of Art/Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo, and
sets them properly in the context of Queen Maud's life and times.”
Power
dressing
Anne
Kjellberg and Susan North's Style and Splendour and Philip Mansel's Dressed to
Rule give differing accounts of Europe's fashion revolutions, says Veronica
Horwell
Veronica
Horwell
Saturday 2
July 2005 01.22 BST First published on Saturday 2 July 2005 01.22 BST
Dressed to
Rule
by Philip
Mansel
237pp,
Yale, £19.95
Style and
Splendour
by Anne
Kjellberg and Susan North
112pp,
Victoria & Albert Museum, £30
Louis
Leroy, who has a walk-on part in Philip Mansel's history of court costume,
began work as an accessories hand for Marie Antoinette's couturier, then
escaped the French revolution by using his talents in service of the stage and
theatrical republican regimes. He found a patron in Josephine de Beauharnais,
mistress of the Directoire's senior monster; she went on to be style adviser,
and more, to scruffy officer Napoleon Bonaparte, and when emperor Boney became
obsessed with impressing Europe and rescuing French luxury industries, Leroy
robed Josephine and her successor empress Marie-Louise, plus the Bonaparte
family and retinues.
Post Waterloo,
the wives of the gallant allies made Leroy's maison their first destination in
conquered Paris, and he outfitted the restored Bourbons. "Turncoat"
is an inadequate description for a designer in continuous employment from the
diamond shoebuckles of the ancient regime, through the gold bees of the empire,
to the diamond swordhilts of the revived monarchy - a designer who could,
moreover, pleat a tricolor cockade on command.
Leroy's
eras, when the wrong choice of clothes could doom the wearer, provide Mansel
with great material. He is comfortable with punctilio, exactly specifying the
width of embroidery proper to the pocket of a premier officier - 122mm, since
you ask - but his sharpest observations are made in the discomfort zones where
rules were overruled. Revolutionary taste in 1789, he points out, detested the
red heels and silks of Louis XVI's courtiers less because they advertised
privilege than because they were out of fashion in a world where power had
already changed into a coat of plain wool (the frac), or military uniform.
During the 18th century, men with money from bank, bourse and land, especially
the land of America, doffed silks for cloth outfits that evolved into the
modern suit. While the soldiers of Sweden, Prussia, Russia, Austria and Britain
were standardised and glamourised by the use of uniform, "the king's
coat", des Kaisers Rock, soon adopted by actual monarchs, although not the
Bourbons. Frederick the Great's was snuff-stained and gone at the elbows - like
Stalin long after him, he asserted autocrat status through shabbiness yet gave
a dressing down to anyone who did not dress up.
Balzac
wrote that the French revolution had been a debate between silk and wool cloth,
but the real winner was gold braid. Napoleon, having to motivate an army, a
state and annexed countries, supervised the invention of his own peculiar court
wear and battledress of spectacular fraudulence (although it looked great in
long shot, the leopardskin was fake, and not top-quality fake, either), and
uniformed civil officials, a practice widely imitated after the Congress of
Vienna.
Only
Englishmen and Americans were left preferring civvies, something the US made up
for later by insisting on livery for park rangers and the serfs of
Mac-commerce. For melodramatic swank, English royals could always misuse Scots
highland dress: Prince Albert insisted that kilts at Balmoral almost cover the
knee, which real lairds laughed at as "so very German"; the Duke of
Windsor, in exile after his 1936 abdication, draped himself and minions in more
tartan than the Old and Young Pretender put together.
Mansel
draws a remarkable global panorama from 1840 to 1914, with monarchs and top
brass "fishing for uniforms", as Queen Victoria once sniffed - that
is, claiming the right to wear the grandest regalia of friends and ex-enemies,
so that Kaiser Wilhelm II was "quite giddy" to dress like Nelson,
while Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary had to swap kit so often and fast that he
felt sympathy for actors.
Further
down the social scale, vestments established not just authority but identity;
servants of the new post and transport companies, schoolchildren and students
wore uniform from the Atlantic to Siberia. (And in Japan after it was prised
open; its schoolgirl get-ups preserve the fashion for rigging out regal heirs
as sailors on holiday in Osborne, Baden-Baden and St Petersburg.) An empire
could pass for modern with assistance from tailors. The Ottoman sultan shed his
sublime kaftan for an epauletted tunic and unwound his turban to reveal the
east-west compromise fez - the foundation of the imperial fez factory was a
Turkish move towards Europe.
Even
clothes that rebelled against militarism were conscripted. The liberal Hapsburg
Archduke Johann retreated to the Alps, there to flaunt himself in protest gear
- hunting jacket and lederhosen, both later drafted into the service of
nationalism. Loyal followers of Garibaldi in their casual red shirts (which
their leader likely borrowed from Argentinian slaughterhouse workers) were easy
targets for ex-comrades who had put on the blue coat of King Victor Emmanuel
II's troops. Garibaldi's mono-colour garment worn as a political statement did
become the power dressing of the 20th century, but not the way he would have
wanted: millions massed, willingly or not, in black or brown shirts, or Chinese
blue jackets. Mansel has a wicked eye for meaning, especially in his postcript
about Osama bin Laden, whose broadcast kit is the white robe and headgear of
Wahabite purity, with a US combat jacket atop to communicate command of macho,
techno and potency.
Queens and
empresses were subject to the conflicting requirements above, plus a demand
that they set fashion, at least while young; after that, it could be all
pinning and shawling, plus gumboots. Empresses Eugénie of the French second
empire and Elizabeth of Austria patronised a second Leroy, couturier Charles
Worth, whose creations (and those of his heirs) clad the rulers of rival, even
warring, states until after the second world war. Queen Maud of Norway, the
subject of Style and Splendour, had Worth ensembles in the vast lifetime
wardrobe she left in the royal palace in Oslo. Born the daughter of the Prince
and Princess of Wales (later Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) in 1869, she had
modern model proportions, petite and neat-waisted, and constantly updated her
taste; she seemed to grow ever younger, from her postbridal going-away gown,
upholstered in the mode of 1896, to her final purchases around 1938. By then,
her Worth evening suit was far simpler than the lightest layer of her underwear
had been 40 years before, and after the fashion of most women skiers, she wore
tailored trousers on the slopes. Another revolution.
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