Adornment and Concealment: fashioning a neoclassical queen

Queen Louise of Prussia 

Louise of Prussia, when Crown Princess, 1796, by Tischbein. Image source: damals.de

When she began her public career at the age of seventeen as wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, just at the moment when European women's fashion was being revolutionized in the mid-1790s, Louise enthusiastically adopted the new simplified and informal style of dress that rejected the sometimes grotesque constrictions of the ancien regime.

Tischbein's meltingly lovely evocations of Louise between 1794 and 1796 show off the legendary nymph-like beauty which made her a leader of German neoclassical fashion. She loved clothes, their colours and textures, and the make-believe powers of dressing-up. When she was young, she wore daringly modern, almost transparent, dresses, cut low in front and at the back, far more avant-garde than royal ladies are allowed to wear on public duty nowadays.

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THE WAY WE DIE NOW
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