Marie Antoinette: Versailles to the Runway;The Stylization of the World’s Most Notorious Queen

Veronica Nicole VickasDepartment of Theatre Carthage College

Celebration of Scholars 2019: Exposition of Student & Faculty Research, Scholarship & Creativity

Abstract

Marie Antoinette is most well known for her famous line “Let them eat cake!”, a quote historians are unsure she ever said. There is so much we are told about the last queen of France, but it is unclear how much is actually true. For my senior thesis, my task was to costume design the play Marie Antoinette by David Adjim. This required in-depth historical research, modern runway research, and elaborate character analysis, not only for Marie but the other characters as well. Through the design, I was entrusted with exhibiting the queen’s extravagance, as well as her humanity in order to aide with the telling of the play, and the audience’s visual understanding of Marie Antoinette. Just as Marie herself did, I used fashion and clothing to tell the narrative of France's legendary queen.

Process

I start all of my projects by reading the script at least 2 or 3 times. As I go through the final time I make a collection of themes that resonate with me. After identifying the themes, my next step is to do as much research as possible. I start off with research from the period, in this case the late 1700s. However with a stylized show, such as Marie Antoinette, my next venture in research would be looking at modern runway fashion and seeing how motifs from the 18th century appear in 21st-century fashion. The next element in this process is to attend a production meeting with the rest of the key players in the production. That would include the director, designers (set, lighting, sound, and prop), the stage manager, and assistant stage manager. In these meetings the team discuss the story of the play and what message we are trying to convey to our audience. As the costume designer, my role is to guide the audience’s experience of the play through the development of the character’s costumes. This is also referred to as a design concept; my design concept for Marie Antoinette was to examine the relationship between shapes and character traits. For example, we associate rounder shapes with soft and kind traits. Conversely, jagged and triangular shapes tend to be associated with sharp and unforgiving characteristics. To accurately embody Marie’s extreme extravagance to our contemporary audiences I added stark differentiations between the royal family’s color scheme and the other characters. I thought color would be the most effective way of doing this. To attain that concept every character, with the exception of the royal family, were in a grayscale color palette. To foster this idea further I put Marie and Louis in lavish and rich colors to put a greater wedge between the royals and their people. To keep the greyscale palette diverse there were a few exceptions. One of them being Marie's brother Emperor Joseph. While in grayscale he was also embellished in large amounts of gold to ensure that his status was differentiate from lower ranked French nobility. These two visual mechanisms supported my ability to portray the internal dynamic of the characters through their costumes.

Research Images: Examples of Period Research Images & Modern Research

Produced Garments