Maria Antonietta in abito di mussola

When Vigée Le Brun showed this portrait of Marie Antoinette at the Paris Salon of 1783, it had to be taken down. The trouble was the dress. Instead of the stiff silk and jewels a queen was expected to wear, she stands in a loose white muslin gown gathered at the waist with a sash, a wide straw hat above it, a rose in her hand. To many eyes she looked as though painted in her underclothes. Worse, the muslin was imported cotton rather than the silk of Lyon, whose weavers lived on royal fashion, so the picture read as careless of French trade and French dignity. The queen already had a name for frivolity, and this only fed it, six years before the Revolution reached her. The gown itself soon swept France and England, known as the chemise of the queen.