Mademoiselle Bertin’s shop Le Grand Mogol featured grand windows adorned with yellow and
lavender simulated marble. The windows featured displays that included displays
of: hats, fans, shawls, parasols, dresses, silk flowers, gemstones, laces,
ribbons, spangles and accessories. Framed oil paintings of the most illustrious
clients hung on the walls. The elegant boutique featured gilded moldings, full
length mirrors and expensive furniture amongst the grand display of luxurious
dresses featured with the latest accessories. Rose Bertin also sold large
bonnets, hats trimmed with flowers and feathers, pelisses, ties, collars,
mantelets, guaze fichus, silk hankerchiefs, muffs, parasols, fans, belts,
gloves, embroidered slippers, and a variety of shoes, including those
embroidered with diamonds or a row of emeralds on the back called “venez-y-voir.”
Rose Bertin was more than just the first celebrity stylist
she was the first fashion designer. In addition she founded the first couture
house and is the first designer to use the fashion sketch as part of the design
process. Previously noble women selected the fabric themselves and then sent a
note with an idea for the cut to the seamstress, dresses were not illustrated
prior to construction previously. Now Rose Bertin not only designed her dresses
she selected the fabric for them as well, while still offering her clients a
wide range to choose from for each style, she then would make recommendations
on which fabrics she felt were most flattering to her clients. She began
creating designs independently before she even met Marie Antoinette. She designed Marie Antoinette’s clothing for France without any consulations and even
created the first outfit that Marie Antoinette would wear on French soil where
she was stripped and re-dressed at the border. Rose Bertin also designed and
created Marie Antoinette’s sumptuous coronation gown which was covered in
sapphires, additional gemstones and ornate embroidery. Rose Bertin created designs and the most popular ones were selected by Marie Antoinette. Rose Bertin still featured designs not chosen
by the Queen in her showroom which featured up to 280 dresses each season in a
variety of fabrics and instead they were chosen by other leaders in fashion who
popularized them. Fabrics in the eighteenth century included satin, velvet and
taffeta, as well as silks that included ribbed, damask, brocade and moiré. The 1770s
and 1780s saw a drastic increase in the types of styles of feminine fashion,
including dress and accessories. Rose Bertin helped to usher in this change by
being the first to design seasonal collections where fashion was changing
constantly. Rose Bertin was also the first to grasp the importance of
accessories. Rose Bertin enjoyed using pastel hues, sea-greens, lavenders, lemon
yellows, lilacs, rose, pale pinks, bouquet motifs, apple greens, aquamarine and violet. Rose Bertin
also gave her dresses creative names such as ‘honest composition,’ ‘stifled
sighs,’ ‘masked desire,’ ‘Venus’ sigh,’ ‘indiscreet pleasures,’ ‘marked
attention,’ ‘an unfulfilled wish,’ and ‘regrets.’ Rose Bertin continued to
design independently after Marie Antoinette’s death on the scaffold when she
launched the empire waist silhouette for fashion in the late 1790s which endured until the 1820s.
Napoleon's first Empress Joséphine
de Beauharnais, a client of Rose Bertin’s, helped to popularize the style.
In 1776 the marchandes
des modes became an incorporated guild and gained the right not only to
trim dresses but to furnish them entirely. As head mistress of their guild Rose
Bertin gained the right to dress the large fashion doll that had the features
of the queen and traveled the merchantile centers of Europe. Rose Bertin would
first design the dress with sketches, then she would construct a sample in its
entirety of the dress including both the silhouette and the trimmings. Then for
her most illustrious clients, such as Marie Antoinette and the Queens of
Sweden, Spain and Portugal, as well as the Grand-Duchess Maria-Fedorovna of
Russia she would sew the dress entirely for them herself. For her less illustrious
European aristocrats and elite American customers Mademoiselle Bertin would
assign the creation of the dress to couturieres that she subcontracted work to
and the trimming of the dress (the hard part) to the marchandes des modes that
she hired to work in her shop.
Rose Bertin and Leonard Marie Antoinette’s famous
hairdresser also launched the popular hairstyle the pouf. It was first popularized by the Duchess de Chartres before
Marie Antoinette adopted it and it swept across the nation and even beyond its
borders. Poufs were built on
scaffolding made from wire, guaze, cloth, fake hair, horsehair and the wearer’s
own tresses. The Pouf was then
covered in powder and wearers could wear a pouf
au sentiment to express a feeling or a pouf
a la circonstance to commemorate an important event to the client. These poufs were strewn with extraordinary
objects including: flowers, fruits, diamonds, birds, vegetables, miniature
theater stages and myriad ornaments. One morning Marie Antoinette wore upon
her head an English garden with lawns, hills and silver streams. Her most
famous and enduring pouf was when she
wore a miniature warship of the Belle
Poule after a French naval victory against the English.
