Les Robes Dangereuses

In Revolution-era Paris, three radically chic media stars swept away centuries of strictures about what women should wear and how they should live. A new book unveils the other French Revolution.  

- ANNE HIGONNET

We may be facing one of the great fashion revolutions of all time, entering a clothing era in which there are no boundaries between formal and informal, between masculine and feminine. Planetary climate change may forbid fast fashion and urge us toward radical revisions of what new means. Social media content creators may govern style changes instead of brand designers. If so, we can look back and take comfort in the knowledge that a fashion revolution has happened before. It was bold, glamorous, and scandalous, and led by three self-made media stars. It began during the worst violence of the French Revolution, in May 1794. Here’s how it happened.

THE VISIONARY PRISONER

The jailers in the Paris prison of La Force could not resist stripping Térézia Cabarrus naked. Along with all of France, they had heard rumors of her beauty. The French Revolution of 1789 had spiraled down by late 1793 into a regime its own leaders called the Terror. It was a dangerous time to be a French marquise, even one born a Spanish commoner, forced to marry into aristocracy at age 14, who had divorced her dissolute, abusive husband, the Marquis de Fontenay. The jailers gloated over the curves famously called “divine” by artists and connoisseurs. Then they hacked off her glorious jet black hair, tossed her a rough chemise undergarment, and locked her in a stinking cell. Straw rotted on the floor in a mixture of things unmentionable; moisture seeped through the cracks in the stone walls.

Térézia remained in the dark for 25 days. After her solitary confinement, she was roused every morning along with her fellow prisoners by the rattling of locks and keys, made to assemble and hear a list of who would be guillotined that day. The lists kept getting longer.