At the Queen’s Gallery: ‘Dressing the Georgians’
Brigid von Preussen, 29 June 2023
If anyone could spark a craze for dresses the colour of ingested blood, it was Marie Antoinette. In 1775, so the story goes, Louis XVI saw her in a purplish-brown dress and christened it couleur de puce – the colour of a flea. Soon dresses were being made in shades of ventre de puce (flea’s belly) and cuisse de puce (flea’s thigh), names that evoke the erotic intimacy of a...