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Nicole Wu
Andrew Zornoza
Int. Seminar
12 December 2013
Thesis Paper
The Modern Marie
“Let them eat cake,” Marie Antoinette supposedly uttered during a famine that
occurred during the reign of her husband, Louis XVI, when she was told that people
were suffering from widespread bread shortages. Known for her obliviousness and
selfishness, Antoinette spent immense amounts of the royal family’s money on
extravagant gowns and an abundance shoes. Much like Antoinette, Anna Dello Russo
is also known as a woman of lavishness, and is in fact one of the most fabulous women
in the fashion industry. Dello Russo is known to wear multiple outfits per day during
fashion week, and claims she needs over fifty-thousand dollars for an outfit each day.
This extravagant need to be the center of attention and express personality through
luxurious clothing seems to be a strong desire of both Antoniete and Dello Russo,
making Anna Dello Russo the modern Marie Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette was the 15th child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the
powerful Habsburg empress Maria Theresa. She was born in Vienne, Austria, in 1775,
which was an age of great instability for European monarchies. Antoinette was married
to Louis XVI, the future king of France at the time at the age of 15. Their lavish wedding
ceremony took place in the royal chapel at Versailles with over 5,000 guests. French
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queens had no political role, could never inherit the throne or exercise royal power, and
Marie Antoinette had arrived at Versailles with no experience at all. Antoinette may very
well have felt that her personal style was all she had control of in her life.
As depicted in the 2006 film Marie Antoinette, Antoinette, played by Kirsten
Dunst, was accustomed to living an opulent life. Becoming queen was just the
beginning of her reign as “Madame Deficit.” To make up for her husband’s lack of
affection and her mother’s endless criticism, Antoinette began to spend more on
gambling and clothing, with cards, horse-betting, trips to the city, and new clothing, and
shoes. She was expected by tradition to spend money on her attire to outshine other
woman in Court, being the leading example of fashion in Versailles. Antoinette had to
wear unfashionably heavy dresses supported by old-style, long, rigid corsets,
accompanied by thick rouge and stiff curls while preforming her court duties. Because of
her dislike of her stiff court style, once queen, she ordered did not hesitate to order the
newest looks from Rose Bertin, the leading Paris courturiere. Among One of the most
famous and them the provocative looks, “robe a la poloanise,” included features like,”
with it’s bosom-enhancing odic and its billowy, ankle-baring skirts, a 3 foot mountain of
powdered hair decked with plumes, veils, and other objects.
Anna Dello Russo, on the other hand, was born in Bari in 1962, and currently
lives in Milan. She grew up as a psychiatric’s daughter in Puglia, and started collecting
clothes when she was eight years old. She took on the fashion world when she began
working for Donna Magazine. She later spent 18 years at Conde Nast Italia as Fashion
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Editor at Vogue Italia and served as Editor of L’Uomo Vogue from 2000-2006. After
growing tired of working in a man’s world, Dello Russo left her position at Vogue to work
as a freelance journalist which did not last long as evidenced by her current position as
editor-in-chief and creative consultant for Vogue Japan.
With her love and passion for fashion she has etched her name in fashion history
as a fashion maniac. Known for her outlandish and extravagant outfits, she caught the
attention of and is constantly present on many popular street style blogs like The
Sartorialist, Jak & Jill, and Tommyton. She makes a point to faithfully recreate designer
looks precisely as they are shown on the international fashion-week catwalks. She
always sports designer pieces; gold brocade trimmed military coats with absurdly
flouncy skirts and matching gold wedges, feather Jason Wu cocktail dresses, pink cat’seye sunglasses and glittering explosions of Balenciaga ball gowns. W Magazine did a
feature on Dello Russo’s closet in 2012 in which she admitted to having over 4,000
pairs of shoes that included brand names like Prada, Yves Saint Laurent, and
Louboutin.
Both Marie Antoinette and Anna Dello Russo found a love of expressing their
personality through expensive and extravagant accessories and articles of clothing.
Della Russo is the modern Antoinette not only because she too spends an abundance
of money on clothes, but also because this defines how people perceive them. I believe
they do this in order to please both the public and themselves. When a person is such
an important public icon they must represent themselves in interesting ways to be
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impressionable and both Antoinette and Dello Russo do just that. Constantly ingrained
in our minds are the elegant French gowns that Antoinette wore as well as Dello
Russo’s more current ones, and we mentally identify and define both of them through
their clothing choices. The two gowns may not look the same due to the different time
periods that the two women exist in, but they are very much the same in terms of being
special to not only the wearer but the viewer as well.