Marie-Jeanne Rose Bertin (2 July 1747, Abbeville, Picardy,
France – 22 September 1813, Épinay-sur-Seine) was a French milliner (Marchandes
de modes), known as the dressmaker to Queen Marie Antoinette. She was the first
celebrated French fashion designer and is widely credited with having brought
fashion and haute couture to the forefront of popular culture.
Life
Rose Bertin was the daughter of Nicolas Bertin (d. 1754) and
Marie-Marguerite Méquignon, and spent her childhood in St Gilles in Picardie.
She came from a family of small means; her mother worked as a sick nurse, which
at the time was a profession with very low salary and status, and the financial
situation became even worse after the death of her father. She and her brother Jean-Laurent received a
modest education, but had a high level of ambition.
Early career
At the age of sixteen, Rose Bertin moved to Paris, where she
became apprenticed to a successful milliner, Mademoiselle Pagelle, with clients
among the aristocracy. Bertin’s early
success cannot be attributed to her good relations with the Princesse de Conti,
the Duchesse de Chartres and the Princesse de Lamballe, who would one day
arrange her meeting with Marie Antoinette. After having acquired a big order
for Pagelle, she became her business partner.
In 1770, Bertin opened her own dress shop, Le Grand Mogol,
on the Rue Saint-Honoré with the support of the Duchesse de Chartres (it moved
to 26 Rue de Richelieu in 1789). She
quickly found customers among influential noble ladies at Versailles, many of
whom followed her from Mademoiselle Pagelle’s, including many ladies-in-waiting
to the new Dauphine, Marie Antoinette.
Dressmaker to Marie
Antoinette
Before Marie Antoinette arrived in France from Austria, she
had been schooled in the nuances of galant spoken French and French fashions.
She was introduced to Bertin in 1772. Twice a week, soon after Louis XVI’s
coronation, Bertin would present her newest creations to the queen and spend
hours discussing them. The queen adored her wardrobe and was passionate about
every detail, and Bertin, as her milliner, became her confidante and friend.
Her position as the designer of the queen also secured her the position as the
leading fashion designer of the French aristocracy and, as French fashion was
the leader in Europe, the central figure of European fashion.
Called "Minister of Fashion" by her detractors,
Bertin was the brains behind almost every new dress commissioned by the queen.
Dresses and hair became Marie Antoinette's personal vehicles of expression, and
Bertin clothed the queen from 1770 until her deposition in 1792. Bertin became
a powerful figure at court, and she witnessed—and sometimes effected—profound
changes in French society. Her large, ostentatious gowns ensured that their
wearer occupied at least three times as much space as her male counterpart,
thus making the woman a more imposing presence. Her creations also established
France as the center of the fashion industry, and from then on, dresses made in
Paris were sent to London, Venice, Vienna, Saint Petersburg and Constantinople.
This inimitable Parisian elegance established the worldwide reputation of
French couture.
In the mid-18th century, French women had begun to
"pouf" (raise) their hair with pads and pomade and wore oversized
luxurious gowns. Bertin used and exaggerated the leading modes of the day, and
created poufs for Marie Antoinette with heights up to three feet. The pouf
fashion reached such extremes that it became a period trademark, along with
decorating the hair with ornaments and objects which showcased current events.
Working with Léonard Autié, the queen's hairdresser, Bertin created a coiffure
that became the rage all over Europe: hair would be accessorized, stylized, cut
into defining scenes, and modeled into shapes and objects—ranging from recent
gossip to nativities to husbands' infidelities, to French naval vessels such as
the Belle Poule, to the pouf aux insurgents in honor of the American
Revolutionary War. The queen's most famous coif was the "inoculation"
pouf that she wore to publicize her success in persuading the king to be
vaccinated against smallpox.
Marie Antoinette also asked Bertin to dress dolls in the
latest fashions as gifts for her sisters and her mother, the Empress Maria
Theresa of Austria. Bertin's fashion dolls were called "Pandores,"
and were made of wax over jointed wood armatures or porcelain. There were small
ones the size of a common toy doll, or large ones as big or half as big as a
real person, petites Pandores and grandes Pandores. Fashion dolls as couriers
of modes remained in vogue until the appearance of Fashion magazines.
With the queen's patronage, Bertin's name became synonymous
with the sartorial elegance and excess of Versailles. Bertin's close
relationship with the queen provided valuable background into the social and
political significance of fashion at the French court. The frequent meetings
between the queen and her couturière were met, however, with hostility from the
poorer classes, given Bertin's high prices: her gowns and headdresses could
easily cost twenty times what a skilled worker of the time earned in a year.
During Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment, Bertin continued to
receive orders from her former prized customer, for much smaller, almost
negligible, orders of ribbons and simple alterations. She was to provide the
former queen’s mourning outfit following the execution of Louis XVI, recalling
a dream that Marie Antoinette had had years before of her favorite milliner
handing her ribbons that all turned to black.
French Revolution
The French Revolution did not immediately diminish her
business despite the emigration of many of her clients abroad, and she
continued to be in favor of the queen, though the bills were significantly
lower.
According to Léonard Autié, he, Rose Bertin and Henriette
Campan collectively contributed to the secret negotiations between the queen
and Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau by informing her about political
gossip and public opinion and the fear that Mirabeau would ally himself with
the Duke of Orléans.[1] Their information allegedly convinced the queen to meet
Auguste Marie Raymond d'Arenberg in the rooms of her maid Marie-Élisabeth
Thibault and ask him to meet with Mirabeau in the home of Florimond Claude,
Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, resulting in contact between the queen and Mirabeau.
Bertin made several journeys abroad during the Revolution,
which attracted attention. She made a trip to England and Germany in 1791-92,
leading to suspicions that she was acting as Marie Antoinette's agent.
According to these speculations, she secretly visited Francis II, Holy Roman
Emperor to deliver a message from Marie Antoinette, as the latter's
correspondence was scrutinized and an oral message through a loyal messenger
was regarded as the safest method to deliver a sensitive message across
borders. This is unconfirmed, but not
improbable, as the queen is confirmed to have used her hairdresser Léonard
Autié as a messenger during the Flight to Varennes, and it is noted that
Henriette Campan claimed that the queen managed to get secret messages to her
nephew the emperor during this period. Officially, these were business trips, and
Bertin is confirmed to have been in Germany in July 1791, when her presence is
noted at the French emigré court in the Castle Schoenbornhut in Koblenz, where
she was said to have contributed to the extravagant fashion of the women
attending the court.
Bertin was absent from France during the September
Massacres, which resulted in her being placed in the list of emigrés. She
managed to have herself removed from the list and returned to France in
December 1792 to attend to her business. During this stay, popular legend says
she destroyed her account books in order to spare the queen from having her
bills used against her during her trial.
However, this does not appear to be true: all the bills of the queen
prior to August 1792 was already in the possession of the government through
Henry, liquidator of the civil estate, and there was at that point not yet a
trial planned against Marie Antoinette. It would therefore have been pointless for
Bertin to destroy her account books for that reason, and the bills of Marie
Antoinette was in fact inherited by her heirs, who would demand payment of them
until 1830.
In February 1793, Rose Bertin left France for London. For a
while, she was able to serve her old clients among the émigrés, and her fashion
dolls continued to circulate among European capitals, as far away as Saint
Petersburg. During these years, she mainly lived on demanding the payment of
old bills owed to her by her old foreign clients, such as the queen of Sweden,
Sophia Magdalena of Denmark. Her
business in Paris still operated, despite her absence, through representatives
she appointed and the money she sent to it from London, and she still delivered
orders to Marie Antoinette.
Later career
In January 1795, Rose Bertin managed to have her name struck
from the list of emigrés through her lawyer, who claimed that she had been
absent legally since she left the country for business purposes on a legal
passport in July 1792 (omitting her stay there in December 1792-February 1793),
and she was thus free to return and resume her business. She allegedly acted as
a secret messenger for the emigrés during this trip, and it is known that she
provided them with funds, but this could have been merely a sign of her
well-known generosity.
Her business never quite recovered, partially because of the
inflation and partially because the fashion excesses of the era had waned after
the French Revolution ended, and she was eventually replaced as leading fashion
designer by Louis Hippolyte Leroy. The business did continue on a smaller
scale. Joséphine de Beauharnais was among her clients, and she had foreign
clients such as Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily (1799) and Maria Luisa of
Parma (1808).
As the 19th century dawned, Bertin transferred her business
to her nephews and retired to her estate in Epinay. She died in 1813 in
Épinay-sur-Seine.
Famous quote
Bertin is said to have remarked to Marie Antoinette in 1785,
when presenting her with a remodelled dress, "Il n'y a de nouveau que ce qui est oublié" ("There is nothing new except what has
been forgotten.").
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