Qhen, in the summer of 1779, Marie-Antoinette, having just returned from childbirth, appeared before her subjects dressed in a vaporous indoor dress, the entire court was inflamed. It must be said that the fashion is for richly decorated toilets, which the queen, known to be frivolous and spendthrift, has until now imposed. However, it is free of these heavy trappings that the Austrian likes to stroll in the heart of the Petit Trianon estate, her haven of rural peace in Versailles.
“Living in particular far from the monarchical pomp, escaping the tyranny of etiquette, abandoning the sumptuous but cumbersome court clothes for “a white percale dress, a gauze kerchief, a straw hat” made Marie happy -Antoinette”, recounts the historian Jean-François Solnon in The Court of France (Fayard, 1987).
The said white percale dress is in reality a so-called “en gaulle” dress, designed by Rose Bertin, his fashion minister. It is in a similar negligee, largely revealing the chest and barely tight at the waist, that the Queen of France was immortalized in 1783 by the portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
Courtney Love and Madonna
Although Marie-Antoinette wore it boldly, the interior dress remained confined to the bedroom for a long time. In the middle of the 20th centurye century, it goes up just above the knees, comes in wrinkle-free nylon, is called a nightie, but still doesn’t get out of bed.
However, it is gaining popularity thanks to Hollywood icons. Marilyn Monroe, in Niagara (1953), then Elizabeth Taylor, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and The Mink Venus (1960), thus make the white nightie a true symbol of sensuality.
Because it remains the symbol of a very clichéd femininity, the nightie is then logically diverted by a generation eager to break the codes. When, during the 1990s, Courtney Love and Madonna broke the image of the naive baby doll by reappropriating her satin underwear on stage, the new fashionable models Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford began to wear it city. Fashion is also taking hold of it: Jean Paul Gaultier, a past master in the art of top-down, or Chantal Thomass, who navigates between lingerie and ready-to-wear, parade it on the catwalks.
Twenty years later, Phoebe Philo, at Celine, completed the introduction of the nightie into the daytime wardrobe, ridding it of any affectation by pairing it with a pair of ankle boots. Since then, the nightie has continued to hit the pavement. Warmed with a cardigan, a trench or even a parka when worn next to the skin, it becomes modernized when layered with an immaculate t-shirt or worn over pants. Far from the ultra-femininity that made her famous, without losing desirability.
