WOMEN’S ROCOCO FASHION
Detail from Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Meeting (1771), part of the cycle The Progress of Love. The scene captures a young woman and her suitor in a secluded garden, their silks and gestures choreographed into a tableau of flirtation characteristic of Rococo style.
POWDER, PLEASURE AND THE ART OF PANNIERS
Text by Max
WOMEN’S ROCOCO FASHION
The Rococo era of the mid eighteenth century was an age of opulence and play, when dress operated as a refined language of status, sociability and desire. Emerging in France in the 1720s and flourishing between about 1730 and 1770, Rococo style distinguished itself from the solemn weight of the late Baroque. Curves replaced straight lines, pale colours softened dark brocades and decoration became lighter, asymmetrical and naturalistic. In women’s fashion this produced some of the most recognisable silhouettes in the history of dress: sweeping skirts in shimmering silk, tight pointed bodices, and a profusion of lace, bows and floral ornament. To moralists inclined toward classical restraint, Rococo seemed frivolous. Yet for its aristocratic wearers, it was neither trivial nor superficial. These clothes were instruments of beauty, pleasure and cultural authority.
FROM VERSAILLES TO THE SALONS
The transition from Baroque to Rococo fashion coincided with a wider social shift.
After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, Versailles remained the official centre of royal power, yet aristocratic sociability increasingly shifted toward the salons and townhouses of Paris. The rigid ceremonial of the previous reign coexisted with a new, more intimate culture that shaped the emergence of Rococo taste.Interiors changed first, adopting curved surfaces and shell motifs, and dress soon followed. As Aileen Ribeiro has shown, the lighter fabrics and pastel palettes of the 1730s reflected a deliberate rejection of Baroque heaviness in favour of a more intimate sensibility.
One of the earliest signs of this new taste was the robe volante, a loose sacque gown with fabric falling from the shoulders in long pleats. Around 1720 it offered a marked contrast to the structured bodices of Louis XIV’s reign. Over the following decades it gave way to the more formal robe à la française, which became the dominant silhouette of the 1740s to the 1760s. With its fitted bodice and wide skirt supported by side hoops, and its long back pleats that fell in soft cascades, the gown turned the wearer into a moving sculpture. The stomacher at the front could be richly embroidered or trimmed with a vertical arrangement of bows, the échelle. From Paris the style radiated outwards, adapted by courts from Vienna to St Petersburg.
England followed suit, although with characteristic moderation. The robe à l’anglaise with its fitted back was preferred, and trimmings tended to be more restrained. Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of the 1760s show English aristocrats in silks as luminous as their French counterparts, but often posed in parkland rather than in gilded interiors. Even here the Rococo fascination with natural settings remained intact, translated into an English key.
François Boucher, Portrait of Madame de Pompadour (1756). Pompadour was one of the central figures in shaping Rococo taste, and Boucher’s portrait captures the pastel palette, floral ornament and intimate elegance that defined mid eighteenth century Parisian fashion.
ARCHITECTURE IN SILK
The quintessential Rococo silhouette combined a tightly moulded torso with a striking expansion at the hips. Beneath the gown, whalebone stays shaped the upper body into a long, erect cone, lifting the bust and narrowing the waist. At the sides, panniers pushed the skirt outward. Dress historians have long remarked that these structures were not merely decorative. Daniel Roche argues that the architecture of eighteenth century clothing shaped posture, gesture and movement, and thus the social roles women enacted.
Panniers ranged from modest daytime hoops to extraordinary court versions that stretched more than two metres across. Moving through doorways, sitting, even turning required controlled, choreographed motion. The effect was a silhouette both theatrical and dignified, emphasising the smallness of the waist and the width of the skirt in a clear display of aristocratic distance from physical labour.
Surface decoration was equally significant. Museum collections preserve gowns in which the fabric itself is already costly silk, yet every seam is further embellished with ruched ribbons, pleated bands, artificial flowers or tiers of handmade lace. The engageantes at the elbows, often in two or three layers of fine needle lace, framed the hands and wrists, which became expressive instruments in conversation. Accessories such as fans, gloves and silk shoes completed the ensemble.
These garments did more than embellish the body. They created a particular mode of presence. The wide skirts defined a personal space around the wearer, while the tall coiffures that became fashionable in the 1760s and 1770s extended her silhouette upwards. Hairdressers used pads, false hair and powder to construct towering styles decorated with feathers or flowers. Satirical engravings exaggerated these heights, but they were not entirely fanciful. The full Rococo silhouette was a work of art in motion, designed to be seen and to command attention.
As the century progressed, elements of informality appeared. The robe à la polonaise, with its looped overskirt, allowed greater movement and a glimpse of the ankle. Riding habits and redingotes borrowed from English tailoring introduced cleaner lines and hints of menswear. These changes foreshadowed the shift in taste that would gather strength in the 1780s.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette en grand habit de cour (1778). The queen’s court dress, with its rigid stays, immense panniers and elaborate silk trimmings, makes visible the architectural structure of late Rococo fashion and the highly choreographed posture it demanded. Painted slightly outside the core 1730–1770 timeline, the portrait nonetheless reflects the enduring authority of the Rococo court silhouette, which persisted at Versailles well into the late 1770s even as new tastes were beginning to emerge.
DRESSING AS SOCIAL LANGUAGE
Clothing in the Rococo period did not simply adorn the body. It communicated identity, hierarchy and intention. Daniel Roche emphasises that in the Ancien Régime, dress operated as a dense semiotic system in which fabric, colour and cut carried social meaning.
One of the clearest examples of fashion as performance was the ritual of the toilette. For many elite women, dressing was a semi public ceremony at which friends, clients or suitors might be present. As Mimi Hellman has argued, the dressing room functioned as a stage where the female body, its clothing and the surrounding furniture worked together to create a multisensory tableau of refinement.
Madame de Pompadour understood this theatre better than most. Born Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, she rose from the bourgeoisie to become Louis XV’s most influential mistress. She cultivated an image of taste and learning, patronised the luxury trades of Paris and helped shape the very notion of French elegance. Portraits by François Boucher show her reclining in sumptuous gowns surrounded by books, musical scores and scientific instruments. Mary Sheriff notes that such portraits combined erotic charm with intellectual ambition, presenting Pompadour not merely as ornament but as a guiding force in the aesthetics of the reign.
François Boucher, La Toilette (1742). This intimate interior scene captures the performative nature of dressing in Rococo society. The seated woman adjusts her garter while her maid presents a garment, turning the dressing room into a semi-public stage where posture, fabric and gesture worked together to signal refinement, status and intention. The interplay between body, clothing and furnishings reflects the social choreography described by contemporaries and later scholars such as Mimi Hellman.
FASHION, PAINTING AND THE POETICS OF FLIRTATION
Painting provides some of the clearest insights into how clothing shaped social behaviour. Jean Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (c. 1767) is the quintessential image of Rococo flirtation. A woman in a frothy pink dress soars forward on a swing while a hidden admirer gazes upward from the shrubbery. Jennifer Milam has argued that the act of swinging was associated with brief, controlled moments of disorder, when the body momentarily escaped its usual decorum. The dress, with its layers of silk and lace, becomes an active participant in the flirtation. It billows to reveal a glimpse of leg and stocking, offering a carefully managed interplay of concealment and display.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing (c. 1767). This celebrated Rococo scene distils the era’s playful eroticism. As the young woman sweeps through the air, her silk dress billows and her shoe flies free, a symbolic gesture of release and invitation familiar to eighteenth-century viewers. Because women did not wear undergarments in the modern sense, the momentary lift of the skirt would have carried an unmistakably erotic charge. A hidden admirer gazes upward from the shrubbery, while an older companion propels the swing, turning the garden into a theatrical stage of flirtation. Here, clothing becomes an active agent in the drama, creating the brief, choreographed disorder that characterised Rococo notions of pleasure and desire.
Fragonard’s The Meeting from the cycle The Progress of Love similarly stages erotic encounter through fabric, gesture and setting. The blue silk dress of the heroine, open over a pale petticoat, locates her at the centre of a garden designed not for cultivation but for romance. Sheriff stresses that such paintings turn courtship into a highly codified performance, in which clothing operates as both costume and signal.
Gainsborough’s English portraits and Goya’s early Spanish works offer contrasting national inflections. Gainsborough’s sitters stand in airy landscapes, their silks rustling among trees and soft light. Goya’s The Parasol presents a more informal but still choreographed mode of elegance, where bright colours, layered fabrics and flirtatious glances capture the spirit of Spanish Rococo. Despite these differences, the shared visual language of lace, silk and structured silhouettes ties these images together across Europe.
Placed side by side, these three paintings show how Rococo fashion became a language of movement, invitation and social theatre. Goya’s The Parasol introduces a Spanish inflection, where the bright bodice, layered skirts and flirtatious tilt of the sitter’s gaze reveal a relaxed yet carefully composed charm. At the centre stands Gainsborough’s portrait of Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliott, her shimmering gold and ivory gown catching the light as she performs the polished restraint of English elegance. Fragonard’s The Meeting turns a garden into a stage for desire, with the heroine’s pale silk dress arranged like a cue in a scene of playful pursuit. Seen together, the three works highlight how Rococo dress across Europe shaped gesture, posture and the arts of flirtation.
MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE END OF AN ERA
When Marie Antoinette arrived in France in 1770, she entered a court where clothing functioned as political theatre. Caroline Weber’s study of the queen makes clear that every aspect of her appearance was scrutinised for meaning. Early in her reign she embraced the full splendour of French court dress with the assistance of the marchande de mode Rose Bertin. Towering coiffures, enormous panniers and elaborately trimmed gowns established her as a fashion leader, but they also fuelled criticism. Pamphleteers accused her of vanity, excessive spending and foreign frivolity.
Weber highlights several instances where the queen’s choices acquired political resonance. Her preference for certain French silks could be read as support for domestic industry. Her adoption of more relaxed English inspired styles suggested sympathy with naturalness and simplicity at a moment when the monarchy’s image was under strain. The most striking example was the chemise à la reine, a white muslin gown that she began wearing at the Petit Trianon in the early 1780s. When Vigée Le Brun painted her in this garment in 1783, the portrait caused a scandal. Critics saw it as indecent and inappropriate for a queen, in part because it lacked the structural symbols of royal authority: stays, brocade and weight.
Yet the chemise dress rapidly became fashionable. High waists, light fabrics and a more classical line spread through elite circles in the later 1780s. This shift predated the Revolution but aligned neatly with its ideological emphasis on simplicity and virtue. By the mid 1790s, the high waisted, narrow skirts of the Empire style had effectively replaced the wide silhouettes of the Rococo. Clothing once associated with aristocratic privilege became politically untenable, swept aside by both taste and necessity.
Marie Antoinette
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s 1783 portrait of Marie Antoinette in the chemise à la reine captures the most controversial garment of her reign. The simple white muslin gown, worn without the stiffening of stays or the breadth of panniers, broke with the visual codes of French court dress and caused an immediate scandal. Critics found it too informal for a queen, yet its natural, airy silhouette soon became a model for elite fashion in the later 1780s. The portrait marks a turning point in European dress, signalling both the erosion of Rococo splendour and the rise of a new ideal of simplicity that anticipated the Revolution.
ECHOES OF ROCOCO
Although the Rococo style vanished from everyday use after 1800, its forms and fantasies continued to inspire later generations. In the twentieth and twenty first centuries, designers have returned repeatedly to its silhouettes, colours and textures.
Vivienne Westwood drew extensively on eighteenth century fashion throughout her career. For her 1990 “Portrait” collection she reproduced a pastoral painting by François Boucher on a modern corset, creating a dialogue between historical art and contemporary dress. Her reinterpretation of the sack back gown in the mid 1990s, exhibited by the Victoria and Albert Museum alongside an original eighteenth century example, demonstrated how historical forms could be reimagined for modern bodies.
John Galliano’s work for Dior drew on Rococo in a more theatrical manner. Reviews of his early 2000s couture collections often noted direct references to Marie Antoinette, from pannier like skirts to elaborate bow trimmed bodices. These designs borrowed the sumptuous vocabulary of Rococo dress while infusing it with modern drama.
Moschino took this dialogue into the realm of pop spectacle. For the Fall 2020 collection, Jeremy Scott transformed Rococo shapes into sculpted denim, embroidered minis and exaggerated pastel silhouettes. Towering wigs, pannier inspired skirts and gilded trims echoed eighteenth century forms, but the mood was irreverent and modern. The collection made clear that Rococo can still function as a visual shorthand for excess, fantasy and theatrical play.
What endures is not only the visual splendour of Rococo clothing, but the ideas it embodied. The interplay of artifice and nature, the use of dress as a form of performance and the celebration of beauty as a social language continue to resonate. Rococo fashion may no longer shape how we dress day to day, but its legacy is visible whenever a designer cinches a waist, layers silk in sculptural folds or treats clothing as a site of theatre.
For the women who lived within this world, dress offered a means of composing identity in a society acutely attuned to appearances. Their gowns, with their whispering silks and intricate trimmings, carried meanings as rich as any spoken word. Today they survive in portraits and museum collections, reminders of an era when to dress was to delight.
These six looks from Moschino’s Fall 2020 show present one of the boldest contemporary reinterpretations of Rococo fashion. Jeremy Scott translated the silhouette of the eighteenth century into denim panniers, embroidered corsetry, exaggerated bouffant hairstyles and sculptural skirts that recall the theatrical elegance of court dress. The mix of denim, leather, satin and ornate embellishment creates a playful dialogue between past and present. Each outfit stages Rococo’s spirit of display, turning the runway into a modern counterpart to the salons and gardens where fashion once functioned as performance.
GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS
Panniers
Side hoops worn beneath the gown to extend the skirt horizontally and create the characteristic wide silhouette of mid eighteenth century court dress.
Stays
A boned, tightly laced torso garment that shaped the upper body into a long, erect cone and supported the bust. The direct precursor to the modern corset.
Stomacher
A decorative triangular panel pinned to the front of the bodice, often elaborately embroidered or trimmed with bows.
Engageantes
Delicate, tiered lace or muslin ruffles attached at the elbow of a gown’s sleeves, framing the hands and wrists.
Robe à la française
The formal sack-back gown with long, flowing back pleats and a wide skirt supported by panniers. The defining French silhouette of the Rococo period.
Robe à l’anglaise
An English variant of the eighteenth-century gown, fitted closely at the back with a more restrained use of trimmings.
Robe à la polonaise
A gown with an overskirt drawn up into three swags, revealing the petticoat and allowing greater ease of movement.
Chemise à la reine
A light, white muslin gown popularised by Marie Antoinette in the early 1780s. Its informal simplicity marked a significant departure from traditional court dress.
Marchande de mode
A specialist fashion merchant responsible for creating and coordinating trimmings, accessories and decorative elements for elite dress.
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth Century Europe 1715–1789, Yale University Press, 2002.
2. Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France 1750–1820, Yale University Press, 1995.
3. Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (trans. 1994).
4. Mary D. Sheriff, Fragonard: Art and Eroticism, University of Chicago Press, 1990.
5. Jennifer Milam, “Playful Constructions and Fragonard’s Swinging Scenes”, Eighteenth Century Studies 33, no. 4 (2000), pp. 543–559.
6. Mimi Hellman, essays in Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton (eds.), Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.
7. Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, Henry Holt, 2006.
8. Victoria and Albert Museum, Rococo style collection entries and Westwood exhibition materials.
9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, eighteenth century costume and textile collections.
