page_title: Incroyables and merveilleuses
section_title: Clothing and fashion
hierarchical_section_title: Incroyables and merveilleuses / Clothing and fashion
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Cafe des Incroyables. Ma parole d’honneur ils le plaisante.
context_page_description: The Incroyables and their female counterparts, the Merveilleuses, were members of a fashionable aristocratic subculture in Paris during the French Directory. 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 posh accent in which that letter was lightly pronounced, almost inaudibly. When this period ended, society took a more sober and modest turn.
  Members of the ruling classes were also among the movement's leading figures, and the group heavily influenced the politics, clothing, and arts of the period. They emerged from the muscadins, a term for dandyish anti-Jacobin street gangs in Paris from 1793 who were important politically for some two years; the terms are often used interchangeably, though the muscadins were of a lower social background, being largely middle-class.
context_section_description: 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. To carry even a handkerchief, the ladies had to use small bags known as reticules. 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.
  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.
  In addition to Madame Tallien, famous Merveilleuses included Mademoiselle Lange, Juliette Récamier, and two very popular Créoles: Fortunée Hamelin and Hortense de Beauharnais. Hortense, a daughter of the Empress Josephine, married Louis Bonaparte and became the mother of Napoleon III. Fortunée was not born rich, but she became famous for her salons and her string of prominent lovers. Parisian society compared Germaine de Staël and Mme Raguet to Minerva and Juno and named their garments for Roman deities: gowns were styled Flora or Diana, and tunics were styled à la Ceres or Minerva.
  The leading Incroyable, Paul François Jean Nicolas, vicomte de Barras, was one of five directors who ran the Republic of France and gave the period its name. He hosted luxurious feasts attended by royalists, repentant Jacobins, ladies, and courtesans. Since divorce was now legal, sexuality was looser than in the past. However, de Barras' reputation for immorality may have been a factor in his later overthrow, a coup that brought the French Consulate to power and paved the way for Napoleon Bonaparte.
caption: Cafe des Incroyables
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