Clothes unmake the woman

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"Even after her husband was executed, Marie Antoinette defied her captors by ordering mourning dress, seeking solace in the illusion that had set her on her unlucky course: the notion that by controlling her image, she could master her fate. Bound for the chopping block, deprived of her widow’s weeds, she still contrived to have a clean-lined martyr’s costume smuggled into her cell. She was the first woman of whom it truthfully could be said that she shopped until she dropped"

Liesl Schillinger reviewing

QUEEN OF FASHION
What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.
By Caroline Weber

in The New York Times Book Review

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