Rose Bertin

Traces Rose Bertin’s rise to fame and influence as Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker, examining her designs, fashion house and role in the emergence of haute couture and the international fashion industry.

Marie-Jeanne ‘Rose’ Bertin has been credited as being the first of all couturiers. If the concept of couture was specific to the consumerist modernity of the nineteenth century, Bertin is certainly a significant progenitor. There are several factors that make her case remarkable and curious. Remarkable because she made her name in a pre-branding sense before the concept was ever conceived and that she furthermore did so as women who were relegated to support services in what were still areas of craftsmanship. Curious because her rise occurred during and as a result of the reign of Marie Antoinette as Queen of France, a figure who continues to be a complex and contested historical figure. Marie Anotinette was susceptible to the gross excesses of her elite peers, but it cannot be refuted that she was active in recognising and elevating talented women to support her cause. Elizabeth Vigéee-Lebrun is arguably the first female painter of high prominence as a result of Marie Antoinette’s patronage; however, Bertin until only perhaps recently has remained in the critical shadows, perhaps most to do with the cultural hierarchies that position fashion below the fine arts. It is also due to the disrepute of many of the excesses of pre-Revolutionary life which are discordant with the tastes and priorities of modern utilitarianism. Bertin’s rise as one of the most important arbiters and purveyors of fashion in her day, known as the ‘Minister of Fashion’, was not only enabled by the queen but several of her adherents and extended family, all of them women, among the pre-eminent aristocrats of the day. Bertin clothed the queen and her circle in gowns that were sumptuous and ostentatious, as well as in more riskily pared-down styles that became influential across Europe. Bertin’s influence played a significant role in establishing Paris as the European centre of the fashion industry. In line with the most successful and magisterial fashion designers of today, Bertin was a mercurial self-styler, a marketer, a shaper of trends avant la lettre. In an age where social mobility was beginning to take hold, she knew how to manoeuvre and position herself into circles of power and influence. She was capable of acts of creative subterfuge and serial reinvention; she could name and create trends quickly and on whim, improvising with persuasiveness and rhetoric. Such instincts of galvanising audiences, elevating novelty and manufacturing a need seemingly out of nowhere are now the norms of marketing.