Anouchka De Williencourt
Anouchka De Williencourt
Anouchka De Williencourt
Anouchka De Williencourt
Anouchka De Williencourt
Anouchka De Williencourt
Fill 1
Fill 1
October 03, 2016
In The Mix

Petticoat Function

Costumes get the royal treatment in Ovation’s new series on the Sun King.

Debra Levine

In the impeccable Louis XIV wardrobe designed by Madeline Fontaine for Ovation’s Versailles , one type of garment was deliberately left out.

“Underwear? They wore none,” says the two-time César Award–winning designer, in a phone call from Paris. “It is about sex. It took way too long to get out of all those clothes. The men only had the shirt, the ladies the petticoats — nothing else.”

Fontaine brings impressive credentials to this BBC2–Canal Plus coproduction, which makes its U.S. premiere October 1 with a 10-episode first season. Her designs gave visual pop to Amélie (2001) and couture-authenticity to Yves Saint Laurent (2014).

For Versailles, she commandeered a crew of 30 to garb throngs of courtiers and courtesans for their daily dalliances in the Hall of Mirrors. Often laboring on very short lead times, they created 100 custom-fitted garments (an additional 200 were outsourced) across a muted color palette.

Fontaine and her colleagues worked in a sprawling workshop at Studios de Bry-Sur-Marne,  east of Paris, fashioning justaucorps (jacket-coats with very tight shoulders and tucked waistlines), culottes (short trousers crimped at the knee), lavallières (lacy neckwear drawn by ties), metal corsets and humongous skirts.

“Wearing them, women couldn’t sit down,” notes Fontaine, a costume scholar. “They couldn’t even fit through a doorway!”

The male actors had their own challenge: navigating in high heels.

The series features an international cast and was shot in English to facilitate international sales. British actor George Blagden (Vikings) stars as Louis, portrayed here as a ballet-dancing, hippie-haired 28-year-old with a wild sexual appetite. But he was France’s first fashionista.

“Fashion tells a lot about the evolution of society,” Fontaine observes. “Louis was cultivating his image as an absolute monarch. He was showing  off, and the court was following. They didn’t really have much to do — they focused on presenting   themselves at court. And all this vanity built an economy.

"French manufacturing was begun, in large part, to mill fabrics and create accessories for these people.”

As the reign of Louis XIV gave way to Louis XV and Louis XVI (husband of Marie Antoinette), more extreme shapes and elaborate wigs fell into fashion.

“The French Revolution changed everything,” Fontaine says. “That is when the body started to shape the clothes, rather than the other way around.”


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 8, 2016

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