#1780s France

[digitalfashionmuseum]

Pale Green Taffeta Dress, 1775-1785, French.

Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris.

[fashionsfromhistory]

Robe à la française

1750s; Altered 1780s & Late 19th Century

France & England

The ensemble was probably made as a sack and petticoat in the 1750s. In the 1780s, the sack was updated in style. A waist seam was probably added, the skirts reconfigured, and sleeve ruffles removed. The half-stomachers were added at this time and the bodice fronts relined. The back lacing was reconfigured and more eyelets worked.

The ensemble was altered for fancy dress in the late 19th century. Hooks and eyes were added to the bodice stomacher fronts and machine-lace ruffles to the sleeves. The petticoat may have been unpicked at this point.

The petticoat was gathered onto a cotton band after acquisition for Museum display. (V&A)

Victoria & Albert Museum (Accession Number: CIRC.157-1920)

[timelessjackie]

Hi all my lovely friends, here’s some photos from when I visited Versailles, and The Tomb of Emperor Napoleon I back in October 2024. I really hope to go back one day to Versailles because it was soo hot when I went and I was wearing too many layers which kind of ruined the experience.

Paris was so amazing and I fangirled so hard at Napoleon’s tomb and at Versailles. When I seen the portraits of Marie Leszczyńska and of Marie Antoinette I actually died! They are my 2 favourite French Queens.

[jeannepompadour]

Portrait of a lady traditionally identified as Madame le Génerale d'Hautville by Pierre Rouvier, circa 1785

[wgm-beautiful-world]

Vase in the Renaissance style. Bronze, hard porcelain, gilded by Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, FRANCE (1780-1850)

[dingsthing]

'WE USED TO BE IN LOVE'

'and you actually used to be great'

[my18thcenturysource]

Planche 1, Cabinet des Modes, May 15th 1786, Bibliothèque Nationale Française.

This plate has a LONG description, and here's a (shortened) rough translation of the description:

We can say it is no longer desirable for women to dress with great adornment (...) and these fashions are no longer made but for ceremonial gatherings, weddings, formal balls, large meals, which take place in very small numbers. This justifies us to not have often representations of these garments (...), nevertheless since they re sometimes worn, we show them in plates 1 and 2. In plate 1 we can clearly see that we no longer wear the big paniers and even in the most adornment, the fashions have been simplified (except, of course, the court clothes, which do not vary much and can be traces to the clothes of our fathers) (...). The woman in Plate 1 wears a blue robe à la Turque. The petticoat is of the same fabric and colour, the sleeves are made of white gros-de-Naples or another white fabric. The trim of the dress is in white crepe in the shape of rosettes, and in the middle of each is bouquet of artificial roses. The skirt of also decorated with white crepe and rosettes similar to the dress. The cuffs attached to the sleeves are made of cut white gauze. The throat is covered with a gauze fichu, tied at the front with a rainbow ribbon bow, she wears white leather gloves, and a fan. The head is covered with a bonnet also tied with a rainbow ribbon and topped with a garland of artificial roses. The ribbon forms a large bow at the back and holds a white crepe veil that falls almost to the waist, and on top of the bonnet rises a set of feathers: two rose, two blue, one white, and one green. The hairstyle has light curls along the entire front of the head, her hair is pulled up at the back in a flat bun, and two large curls on each side fall down her length. Her shoes are blue to match the colour of the dress, and are adorned with rainbow ribbon.

I found many funny things in this description, like that the magazine writers thought in 1786 that this look was simple, the concept of rainbow ribbon (ruban à l'Arc-en-Ciel) that seems to simply be a ribbon in colourful stripes, and the size and complexity of that bonnet. How about you? Please let me know in the comments or reblog tags, what is your favorite part of this outfit, or even if you'd like to reproduce it.

Also, the plate 2, that is a men's outfit, will be posted soon :)

[empirearchives]

Napoleon gets dancing lessons in 1811 and he apparently leaps like a goat 🤭

[whats-in-a-sentence]

The Chevalier d'Éon (1728-1810) was raised in France as the male heir to the Beaumont family. The decorated soldier dressed as a man to serve as a captain of Dragoons, and as a woman named Lia de Beaumont to spy for France on Russia and England. A master fencer, the Chevalier is shown here on the right in a celebrated match against Chevalier de St Georges. This was painted by Alexandre-Auguste Robineau c.1787.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[digitalfashionmuseum]

Pink and Green Robe à la Polonaise, 1780-1785, French.

Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris.

[fashionsfromhistory]

Robe à l'anglaise

c.1785

France

Museum at FIT (Object number: 2006.56.1)

[memoriae-lectoris]

The Gazette de France, naturally, ignored the disturbance altogether. The foreign press reported it as an incident of riotous disorder, rather than suggesting any wider significance. [...] As a revolutionary event, the 1788 insurrection in Grenoble was a far more potent challenge to the ancien régime, though it scarcely now registers in the revolutionary canon. It was the newly emboldened pressmen of Paris who ensured that the storming of the Bastille did not suffer the same fate. A rush of celebratory pamphlets and illustrated broadsheets proclaimed the fall of the empty prison as the symbolic awakening of an oppressed people. [...]

The extraordinary events that unfolded in France between 1789 and 1794 were accompanied by a torrent of newsprint in every media: pamphlets, journals, broadsheet images and political song. The pre-revolutionary political crisis and the calling of the Estates General had stimulated a steadily rising drum roll of political pamphlets: around 1,500 different titles in 1788 and at least 2,600 during the elections to the Estates in the first four months of 1789: a stratospheric rise compared to the four hundred or so published in the twelve years before 1787.

The carefully constructed edifice of press control established during the ancien régime, and sustained for over 150 years, now simply evaporated. While the National Assembly engaged in long and earnest debates over press freedom, events and the book trade moved on. In the years after 1789 the pampered and privileged members of the Paris Book Guild saw their world turned upside down. For the previous two centuries it had been the conscious policy of the French monarchy to concentrate the printing industry in the capital, and to favour a small number of large firms. An effective monopoly on book production for a large and prosperous population was a predictable disincentive to innovation. [...] Now, under the pressure of unprecedented events, the market of the established printing magnates simply melted away. Despite Crown efforts to support allies in the press with substantial covert subsidies, between 1789 and 1793 many of the giants of Parisian printing filed for bankruptcy.

Their place was taken by an entirely new generation, many of them booksellers, who had detected the hunger for contemporary political works. To feed this demand they now set up their own presses. From 1789 these news publishers/booksellers also began to convert their pamphlet output into periodical series. This was neither immediately nor universally successful. Only one of the pamphlets celebrating the fall of the Bastille was announced as part of a serial. Many of the newly established titles disappeared equally rapidly. [...] From four journals published in the capital in 1788, the number skyrocketed to 184 in 1789 and 335 in 1790. During the height of the revolutionary agitation, as many as 300,000 copies a day of these various publications would have been available on the streets.

[jeannepompadour]

Mégret de Sérilly and his family by Jacques Thouron, 1787

[goalhofer]

French Catholic priest and saint Fr. St. John Vianney.

[universalambients]

Notre Dame Bridge, 1788

[milksockets]

'the toothworm (the hell inside the tooth)' by anonymous, southern france ca. 1780 in on everyone's lips: the oral cavity in art + culture - uta ruhkamp (2020)