Marie Antoinette & Marchesa Casati // BOOKS

I just bought these 2 books on Amazon. 

Two style icons, two muses, two women who changed fashion forever.

Have you read them?

- Marie

- MARIE ANTOINETTE



AMAZON.COM
$11.56

Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year

When her carriage first crossed over from her native Austria into France, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was taken out, stripped naked before an entourage, and dressed in French attire to please the court of her new king. For a short while, the young girl played the part.

But by the time she took the throne, everything had changed. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber tells of the radical restyling that transformed the young queen into an icon and shaped the future of the nation. With her riding gear, her white furs, her pouf hairstyles, and her intricate ballroom disguises, Marie Antoinette came to embody--gloriously and tragically--all the extravagance of the monarchy.

"Queen of Fashion is as richly imagined as the gowns it describes. . . . As sociology, it's nothing short of stunning."--The Washington Post Book World

"Absorbing, fascinating, a wonderful display of grace and expertise."--The New York Review of Books

"A thrilling frock-by-frock account . . . While this book is rigorously researched, Weber's narrative style is energetic and alive with her own feminine pleasure at a beautiful dress or an outrageous pouf."--Entertainment Weekly

"Wickedly enjoyable."--The New York Times Style Magazine

- MARCHESA CASATI

  

AMAZON.COM
$12.89

Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati

The Marchesa Luisa Casati was Europe's most notorious celebrity, and its most eccentric. For the first three decades of the twentieth century she astounded the continent. Nude servants gilded in gold leaf attended her. Bizarre wax mannequins sat as guests at her dining table. She wore live snakes as jewelry. And she was infamous for her evening strolls, naked beneath her furs, parading cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes. She traveled to Venice, Rome, Capri, and Paris - collecting palaces and a menagerie of exotic animals. Her outlandish homes became the setting for some of the century's most outrageous parties. Artists painted and sculpted her, poets praised her strange beauty, and fashion designers fought for her patronage.

Then the extravagance ended. By 1930, Casati was over twenty-five million dollars in debt. Her wealth gone, she fled to London, where she spent her last years, supported by family and friends and as eccentric as ever. Even today, nearly a half century after her death, Casati still fascinates.

"A beautifully written biography . . . Prepare to be astonished." -- ELLE

"A delicious edition of extremely rare and retro refinement, the biography of the mythical marquise . . . An indispensable book." -- Vogue

"A meticulously researched biography, Infinite Variety is as much art history as chronicle of personal obsession." -- New York Times

"Fascinating . . . with or without her cheetahs, Casati’s circus of the self makes her a natural for the new millennium." -- Vanity Fair