Embroidered Linen "Merveilleuse" Gown, French, 1796-1800

Guillotine necklaces and hair a la victime: how survivors of the French Revolution used fashion to evoke it

Incroyables and Merveilleuses

The Incroyables (French: [ɛ̃kʁwajabl], "incredibles") and their female counterparts, the Merveilleuses (French: [mɛʁvɛjøz], "marvelous women"), were members of a fashionable aristocratic subculture in Paris during the French Directory (1795–1799). Whether as catharsis or in a need to reconnect with other survivors of the Reign of Terror, they greeted the new regime with an outbreak of luxury, decadence, and even silliness. They held hundreds of balls and started fashion trends in clothing and mannerisms that today seem exaggerated, affected, or even effete. They were also mockingly called "incoyable" or "meveilleuse", without the letter R, reflecting their upper class accent in which that letter was lightly pronounced, almost inaudibly. When this period ended, society took a more sober and modest turn.

^Picture from Les Français sous la Révolution by Augustin Challamel & Wilhelm Ténint

Ornate carriages reappeared on the streets of Paris the day after the execution (28 July 1794) of Maximilien Robespierre, which brought an end to the Jacobin-era Committee of Public Safety and signaled the commencement of the Thermidorian Reaction. There were masters and servants once more in Paris, and the city erupted in a furor of pleasure-seeking and entertainment. Theaters thrived, and popular music satirized the excesses of the Revolution.

Many public balls were bals des victimes at which young aristocrats who had lost loved ones to the guillotine danced in mourning dress or wore black armbands, greeting one another with violent movements of the head as if in decapitation.[n 2] A ball held at the Hôtel Thellusson on the rue de Provence in the 9th arrondissement of Paris restricted its guest list to the grown children of the guillotined.

^Painting Un Incroyable, by Carle Vernet, perhaps the first image of a top hat (1796)

The Merveilleuses scandalized Paris with dresses and tunics modeled after the ancient Greeks and Romans, cut of light or even transparent linen and gauze. Sometimes so revealing they were termed "woven air", many gowns displayed cleavage and were too tight to allow pockets. In some caricaturized representations, the gowns were dampened in order to further cling to the figure.[3] To carry even a handkerchief, the ladies had to use small bags known as reticules.[4] They were fond of wigs, often choosing blonde because the Paris Commune had banned blonde wigs, but they also wore them in black, blue, and green. Enormous hats, short curls like those on Roman busts, and Greek-style sandals were the rage. The sandals tied above the ankle with crossed ribbons or strings of pearls. Exotic and expensive scents fabricated by perfume houses like Parfums Lubin were worn both for style and as indicators of social station. Thérésa Tallien, known as "Our Lady of Thermidor", wore expensive rings on the toes of her bare feet and gold circlets on her legs.

^Paris Ladies in their Winter dress (1799). English caricature by Isaac Cruikshank

The Incroyables wore eccentric outfits: large earrings, green jackets, wide trousers, huge neckties, thick glasses, and hats topped by "dog ears", their hair falling on their ears. Their musk-based fragrances earned the derogatory nickname muscadins for them and their immediate predecessors, a more middle-class group of anti-Jacobins. They wore bicorne hats and carried distinctive knobbled bludgeons or canes, which they referred to as their "executive power." Hair was often shoulder-length, sometimes pulled up in the back with a comb to imitate the hairstyles of the condemned. Some sported large monocles. They frequently affected a lisp, allegedly to avoid the letter "R" as in revolution, and sometimes a stooped, hunchbacked posture or slouch, as caricatured in numerous cartoons of the time.[5]

Oil Painting, 1798, French.

By Andrea Appiani.

Portraying Fortunée Hamelin.

Musée Carnavalet.

Ce que je fais?...

je vis une routine

D'aube en aube je me transforme en image...

Dans une toile inédite, à l'aquarelle, en toile,

Où n'importe quel endroit qui brille merveilleusement...

Larisa Miller

La Mode nationale, no. 86, 17 décembre 1887, Paris. No. 16. — Travesti. Costume de merveilleuse en satin crème. No. 19. — Travesti. Costume d'Espagnole. Bibliothèque nationale de France

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