BY POPULAR DEMAND | POWER DRESSING: Marie Antoinette & the fashion that brought down the Ancien Regime with Sylvia Sagona

This lecture will investigate the layers of social, cultural and political significance that lay beneath the seemingly frivolous changes in fashion instigated by Marie Antoinette from the time she arrived in Paris as a teenager to her death on the scaffold.

By presenting herself as an individual with outrageous coiffures, male outfits and peasant dresses, she flouted French royal traditions and was considered a traitor to her class and country. Style does matter.

SYLVIA SAGONA is a Fellow of the School of Languages at the University of Melbourne specialising in 19^th century French art and society.