Kate Berridge Read Online Free Page B

the effect was notalways what the wearers desired, and Mercier described how a sudden downpour lent ‘erstwhile exquisites the appearance of wet hens’.
    Whereas rank used to be evident from differences in appearance, now it was harder to assess, as the collective love affair with hairdressing filtered down to the lowlier ranks of society. Mercier wrote, ‘The rage for hairdressing has become universal in every class. Shopboys, bailiffs, notaries, clerks, servants, cooks and scullions all wear tails and queues, and the perfume of various essences and of amber-scented powder assails you from the general shop as well as from the oiled and scented dandy.’ Fashion was not merely frivolous: it was subversive. Self-invention, emulation and imitation were starting to bring a dangerous ambiguity to appearances. The proliferation of affordable clothes meant that people were not always quite what they seemed. A buoyant market for second-hand clothes operated from both permanent premises and market stalls. The Place de Grève, when not drawing crowds for public executions, became a colourful communal changing room, with rows of stalls putting the finery of respectable society within reach of all. Mercier writes, ‘Here the wife of a clerk haggles for a grand dress worn by the dead wife of a judge; there a prostitute tries on the lace cap of a great lady’s lady-in-waiting.’ Demand did not always match supply, spawning a singular form of daylight robbery in which women assaulted well-dressed children and stripped them of their finery, replacing it with inferior garb. Mercier again: ‘These women have lollipops and children’s clothes already prepared but of small value; they have an eye for the best-dressed children and in a turn of the wrist possess themselves of good cloth, or silk or silver buckles, and substitute coarse rags.’ A lacemaker accused of this unusual form of asset-stripping was whipped, branded and put in the pillory under a large sign saying ‘Despoiler of Children’. This public humiliation was but the preliminary punishment before she was sent to La Salpêtrière prison for nine years.
    Deception of dress also happened at the other end of the scale. Madame Roland relates how on one occasion she ventured out in her maid’s clothes ‘like a real peasant girl’. More used to the comfort of the carriage, she found the gutters and mud a shock–and even more so the experience of ‘getting pushed by people who would have made way for me if they had seen me in my fine clothes’. Much morefamous are the clichéd images of Marie Antoinette dressed down as a dairymaid in an interior designer’s dream of a dairy–all Delft tiles and clean cows–engaged in an extravagant pastoral fantasy. In fact the only time she assumed the role of innocent rustic was on the stage, as part of Versailles’ version of amateur dramatics. In reality, virtually from the moment she became queen in 1774, when Marie was a girl of thirteen, the people of Paris were the sheep following every new style that Marie Antoinette adopted. So great was the desire to copy the Queen that one night, when she appeared in her box at the opera displaying a new hairstyle for the first time in public, the resulting crush to get a closer look gave a new seriousness to the term ‘fashion victim’. Léonard, her hairdresser, was unashamed in the pleasure he took from this incident ‘People in the pit crushed one another in their endeavour to see this masterpiece. Three arms were dislocated, two ribs broken, three feet crushed–in short, my triumph was complete.’ In her memoirs, Marie relates how the Queen, aware of this mimicry of her every accessory, once played a joke on the public: ‘In the zenith of her splendour, she would often smile at the servile imitation of her dress which was displayed by ladies of the court, and those even of the lower