For Love of Country

START
body

Marie Antoinette is known for her excesses, but in her twenties, as she grew into her domestic role, the Queen’s style was importantly, however less famously, guided by outdoor comfort. For centuries, big-city dwellers have followed her lead in a quest for the rural experience. Though La Reine’s switch from immoderate royal to green thumb happened far too late to salvage her reputation, it did set a precedent for privileged women seeking escape from the trappings of wealth by living off the land. Office droning and relentless networking, like charming a dubious kingdom, have made commingling with nature a luxury.

By the time Marie-Antoinette gave birth to her first child, a daughter, in 1778, she had been Queen for eight years, testing the public’s faith in her producing an heir to the throne—and proving herself loyal to the French, as opposed to her native Austria. With her marriage finally consummated, the newly restored hope for a son lifted some burden from the spend-thrift monarch. Increasingly, she found herself retreating to her own private realm.

The Hameau de la Reine, a farm the Queen had built in the gardens of the Trianon, is a model of female conquest, an escape from her detractors. The more powerless she felt as Queen, the more she would retire to nature. Today, that very precedent has influenced a certain class of women, for whom money cannot buy respect or control. Marie Antoinette’s garden, like the constructed scenes she once wore on her giant wigs, was another type of diorama, made up of a smaller, more sympathetic France—this one full of gentle goats, small dogs, cattle she herself milked, and other four-leggeds who would never sell sordid stories of her affairs to the libellistes.

Antoine was so much more comfortable in her garden, she rose above the stylistic opulence that had earlier defined and made a scandal of her. Her new dress was a gaulle, made from muslin instead of French silk, shaped only by a sash around the waist. She traded her panniers for a brimmed hat and what would become known as le chemise a la reine. Yet, as fashion historian Denise Winterman notes: “The public furore did not die down. The simplicity of the garment was seen as an insult to the glory of the monarchy, as French queens were supposed to be a reflection of the greatness of the king.” Image rehab it was not. However, in her actions, the Queen made farm life a status symbol.

Muse to a modern antihero, the socialite, Marie Antoinette shares a few common traits with the original heiress reality stars, Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, deemed the faces of the nouveau riche in the early 2000s. The Simple Life gave staged agency to two women playing up their ditzy behaviors in a country setting—a modern day dethroning. But it showed, too, the accidental aristocracy meeting many rural tests with ease. Their inappropriate attire and weak gasps on working life made them novel to the world they confronted, and in turn to their viewers.

The glamazon in the wild is a beloved trope in both television (see Green Acres and Gilligan’s Island) and film (The Misfits and The African Queen). To traditional Hollywood, the high-heeled blonde stepping in mud is everything a woman out to be: a farcical representation of the virgin-whore complex. She is pristine but dirty, untouched yet childbearing.

Enacting this dichotomy was never Marie Antoinette’s goal. Her love of nature was perhaps another complex, wherein her powerlessness created a space that afforded her control. As her fixation on the farm grew, the more it began to be viewed as a kind of Garden of Eden, influenced by the idyllic Austrian countryside of her youth. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of le Petit Hameau, “In the houses I imagined rural feasting, in the meadows wanton games, along the river, baths, walks, and fish, on the trees delicious fruit, under their shade voluptuous meetings, on the mountains tubs of milk and cream, a charming laziness, peace, simplicity.

From outside the palace walls, the Queen appeared lazy. From the inside, she was in command of at least one kingdom. And it’s been fashionable for women ever since to express the same instinct for backyard wonderlands. Instead of the conquered colonies of her male counterpart, the female’s garden is representative of her ability to maintain order throughout the seasons, without shift. In manicuring a small plot of nature, the goal becomes fending off developments instead of paving over terrain.

The recreational pursuits of Maria Antoinette are still stigmatized beyond their real relationship to the failure of her rule. Her image persists as both the poorest and the richest of the poor little rich girls. Yet her plan to live in an enclosed countryside is a back-to-nature reflex shared by New Yorkers from upstate to the North Fork—the upwardly mobile who crave a life beyond the city’s rigid lines of class and status and each summer seek communion with country in some shape or form.

Yet urban neuroses don’t fade outside of the five boroughs. Life in the country mirrors that of the city. Case in point: the Hamptons, the history of which is, according to the sociologist Corey Dolgon, “a story about the power it takes to shape changes in, and over, time and space.” He adds that, “the Hamptons remain one of the most animated and high-profiled sites where modern struggles over power, property, and place expose both complex historical characteristics and possible future frameworks for people’s own perceptions of themselves and their worlds.” In other words, a piece of undisturbed yet closely guarded land that butts up against a kingdom tend to tease out human psychology, acting as a microcosm for that country. It is there that the privileged can escape the emotional and physical strain of a life too fabulously hectic. Rather than scaling the walls of the patriarchy, one can build a garden within it.

Photographs Sebastian Faena

Fashion Carine Roitfeld

END

prev link: https://crfashionbook.com/fashion/a9571830/lara-stone-cr9/
createdAt:Thu, 27 Apr 2017 18:51:17 +0000
displayType:Standard Article
section:Fashion