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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
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Politics & government

LIBERTY EQUALITY FASHION

Anne Higonnet

The Women Who Styled the French Revolution

The forgotten story of how three women dazzled the world with their radical style and transformed the fashion of the French Revolution.

Joséphine Bonaparte, future consort of Napoléon; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, cast off the rigid clothing regime of the past. Overcoming forced marriages and imprisonment during the Terror, they became the first self-made fashion celebrities. From one year to the next, the Three Graces led a rebellion against corsets, petticoats, and enormous skirts. Their flowing garments not only embodied freedom for modern women, but also marked the emergence of global capitalism, shopping culture, and the rise of powerful style influencers. Joséphine combined the style of Black women from her Caribbean childhood with garments from India and Kashmir to fuse cultures and bend gender rules. Her best friend and style collaborator, Térézia, celebrated the female body and her own erotic independence. Juliette pioneered a radical minimalism, posing for portraits in pure-white, virginal gowns. After the French Revolution, a conservative reaction would keep women "buttoned up" for two centuries, making the fashion-forward story of the Three Graces even more resonant today. Anne Higonnet is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she is a prize-winning teacher, including of an extremely popular course called Clothing. Among her many awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.

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Book Published 2024-04-16 by W.W.Norton

Comments

In this ideal text for fashion course curriculums and students of fashion history, Higonnet demonstrates her meticulous research in energetic prose that vibrantly captures the lives of these three revolutionary champions of chic European finery and women's liberation. A passionately rendered history of three 'style mavericks' who ushered in a defining fashion revolution.

I read Liberty Equality Fashion with enormous pleasure. It's such an original way of looking at history and the female sex in particular. I couldn't resist galloping through it.

Russian: Azbooka

Liberty Equality Fashion is a triumphant examination of a fascinating moment in time as well as a blazing demonstration of how anything, even something as apparently innocuous as a petticoat, can make history.

A deeply scholarly, impeccably researched book that's also a genuine page-turner. Liberty, Equality, Fashion reveals how inextricably global politics is woven into - even forged by - fashion and women's personal, domestic lives. Using three influential women as a prism through which to examine one of the most critical and volatile eras in French history, Higonnet combines the fine-grained observational skills of the biographer with the assured vision and far-ranging perspective of the historian. This is important and ground-breaking scholarship - exciting, new, and profoundly feminist.

A page-turner that reads like a novel but is based on serious research. Someone should make this book into a movie.