Good lines: on fashion

 

     "The Queen is the leader of fashion. Her dresses - about 150 each year - are made by Rose Bertin, an expensive but necessary modiste with premises on the rue Saint-Honoré. Court dress is a sort of portable prison, with its bones, its vast hoops, its trains, its stiff brocades and armoured trimmings. Hairdressing and millinery are curiously fused, and vulnerable to the caprice du moment; George Washington's troops, in battle order, sway in pomaded towers, and English-style informal gardens are set into matted locks. True, the Queen would like to break away from all this, institute an age of liberty: of the finest gauzes, the softest muslins, of simple ribbons and floating shifts. It is astonishing to find that simplicity, when conceived in exquisite taste, costs just as much as the velvets and satins ever did. The Queen adores, she says, all that is natural - in dress, in etiquette. What she adores even more are diamonds; her dealings with the Paris firm of Böhmer and Bassenge are the cause of widespread and damaging scandal. In her apartments she throws out furniture, tears down hangings, orders new - then moves elsewhere.

'I am terrified of being bored,' she says."

From A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

Comments

[Audrey]

I just read an interesting book about the Gilded Age (the Vanderbilts, the Astors, etc.) and the Queen (especially in the last two lines) would find herself right at home in that age!

[LizF]

I was going to rush out and acquire a copy of this as the French Revolution is a period of history that I know relatively little about but I was delighted to discover, while searching for something else, that not only do I already have one but I also have a copy of Fludd and the Elizabeth Taylor for next month's book group - yippee!

[Cornflower]

Lovely when you come upon forgotten treasures, (well, I hope you'll think they are 'treasures' when you've read them!).