ABSTRACT
In 1783 the Swiss painter Louis-Auguste Brun made a small portrait of Queen MarieAntoinette on horseback. He showed her wearing an audaciously masculine hunting costume, replete with a yellow chamois redingote and blue breeches (Fig. 8.1).1 Just how daring such a costume would have been becomes clear when one considers these lines from Le Tableau de Paris, Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s famous chronicle of contemporary Parisian life, published between 1781 and 1788: ‘Dress should be characteristic of sex; a woman’s clothing should distinguish her from us, she should be all woman from head to heels; for in so far as she imitates men she loses herself.’2 Mercier’s comment was prompted by his disapproval for the current ‘fashion of the change of sex in clothing’ that he claimed had first arisen amongst ‘ruined’ women who frequented the smaller theaters.3 We may doubt his account of the origins of the practice – women had long been cross-dressing in the theater, at masquerades, and wearing breeches for riding. It is clear from recent research that women from across the entire spectrum of French society dressed en homme. Nor was the fashion solely
the province of sexual adventurers.4 In calling for a more perfect agreement between a woman’s dress and her sex, Mercier sought to define the relationship between clothing, gender and feminine virtue as a stable, fixed one – an agenda not shared by one of the most fashionable (and one of the most womanly) women of the eighteenth century. Neither was this agenda always shared by other members of the French cultural elite during the old regime, many of whom relished the play of gender (for both sexes) that is to be found in a range of cultural productions, from theater and masquerades, to fashion prints and paintings.5
