Review | The improbable rise of three women who helped transform French fashion

Anne Higonnet celebrates these women in “Liberty Equality Fashion,” a triple biography that examines how they emerged as unlikely leaders of French fashion from their outsider origins in Lyon, Spain and the French Caribbean. Weaving together tales of family, fortunes, clothes and friendship, the book is a breathless, sensationalist read, racing through twists and turns of their improbable yet true experiences.

All three women used clothes to transform themselves at a time when women’s clothing itself was transforming. The fashionable silhouette moved rapidly from geometric structured lines created by stays, petticoats and enormous skirts in crisp European silks, to lighter, softer, washable cotton fabrics, especially imported Indian muslin, worn with narrower skirts and increasingly higher waistlines. This style, which Higonnet terms “revolutionary dress,” became the dominant look for two decades.

Myriad cultural and economic influences came together to create a perfect storm in 1790s fashion: centuries of imported Asian textiles and their mutual influence on European luxury goods; colonization of Caribbean and Indian areas leading to increasingly accessible cotton production; dress practices of colonial, indigenous and enslaved people in warmer climates; neo-Classical reappreciations of the ancient world and more. This complex global story has fascinated dress and textile historians for decades, and there is a great deal of excellent scholarship on it, including Sonia Ashmore’s 2012 book, “Muslin,” Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello’s ongoing work, and exhibition catalogue books such as “Revolution in fashion: European clothing, 1715-1815” (1989), edited by Jean Starobinski.

Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard, traces some of these same interconnections while examining how fashion changed and the role each of the Three Graces played. Part of the book’s breathlessness comes from excited discovery of material new to Higgonet. Within fashion history fields though, her finds are well known.

For instance, what Higonnet cites as “crucial missing evidence” whose “loss had misled historians for more than two centuries,” are 499 costume plates in the Morgan Library collection in New York, from the magazine Journal des dames et des modes. These plates, scattered decoratively in full color throughout Higonnet’s book, include many well-known images that have been used to illustrate fashion histories since at least 1965, especially Aileen Ribeiro’s 1988 book, “Fashion in the French Revolution” (which doesn’t feature in Higonnet’s source notes). Many plates were online long before the Bibliothèque Nationale de France digitized its complete collection by 2019. Describing these images as “a lost treasure trove” and the period as “a radical movement history had forgotten” is therefore a stretch. Statements like this undermine Higonnet’s claim that the book offers a “startling vision of fashion.” Instead, the book trips on its own conceptual hems. Higonnet’s argument is full contradictions and bold assertions that aren’t backed by evidence.

Central to the problem is that Higonnet mistakes correlation as causation. Yes, Juliette, Térézia and Joséphine wore the new style. They certainly didn’t concoct it “in one stroke” in 1794 and then spread it everywhere else. All the elements were long in place — as the earlier chapters show. The larger group of extreme female fashionistas dubbed the Merveilleuses also helped the style’s popularity within France. They get a single mention here. Higonnet falls into what could be called the Beau Brummell trap. Over the decades this Regency dandy has been cited as the cause of nearly every major contemporary menswear development. But he and the Three Graces are better used as exemplars. It would be more fruitful and accurate to consider why and how their style successfully encapsulated the wider fashion shifts of their age and the nature of their influence, instead of insisting they began it all.

Moreover, Higonnet’s narrowly French focus ignores other cultural influences, especially the changes created and spread by Britain’s tastemakers, Caribbean colonies and East India Company. For example, while Higonnet touches on the long history of Indo-European textile cultural exchange, her argument forces the heroines’ Indian dress elements to be singular innovation, not the product of centuries-old two-way traffic. Similarly, Orientalism influenced 18th-century fashion for decades; these three women didn’t suddenly adopt turbans inspired by one Parisian visit by Indian dignitaries in 1788. Higonnet further leaps to make masculine tailored elements long used in women’s woolen jackets and riding habits a new kind of androgynous gender challenge.

The evidence cited is sparse, used like steppingstones of facts joined by long jumps of conjecture, misinterpretation, exaggeration and speculation to mold them into the predetermined thesis. For instance, Higonnet asserts that “the revolutionary dress felt like miraculous relief. You were suddenly freed from constriction, load, and drag. You felt weightless and mobile [c]ompared to what you had been obliged to wear before.” Maybe, but we only have the author’s word for it, although there are plenty of firsthand accounts where women talk about their thoughts on these dress changes. The modern judgments and opinions on the clothing examined, combined with lack of subject familiarity reinforce many tired fashion myths while claiming to destroy them.

Juliette, Térézia and Joséphine were gutsy, powerful women who survived and thrived in the most interesting of times with outstanding intelligence and style. They rightly deserve a biography that highlights them as strong individuals rather than accessories to men. To look at their intertwined lives together is an innovative and productive approach, and they couldn’t ask for a more passionate champion than Higonnet.

However, these women are compelling enough without recasting their stories as that of super-modern girl bosses. The claims of fashion liberation are made so insistently they deny agency to the masses of other women at the time also individually making choices about what clothing to wear. The dominant perspective of 21st-century assumptions further drowns out what history relates about women’s encounters with dress. It’s a joy to get to know the Three Graces better, but as fashion history, this book is as flimsy as muslin.

Hilary Davidson is a dress, textile and fashion historian and curator. Her books include “Dress in the Age of Jane Austen” and “Jane Austen’s Wardrobe.”

The Women Who Styled the French Revolution