How do clothes make a man? Margaret Waller’s talk will draw on her book, Napoleon’s Closet, which explores the paradoxes of modern male power as a matter of attire in the lives of two “emperors" before and after the French Revolution. Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart, crowned himself emperor of the French. His equally unlikely contemporary, Pierre Joseph Antoine Leboux La Mésangère, a defrocked priest, invented the “women’s” fashion press and made it his empire. After the French Revolution, the two men helped redefine male power dressing as a matter of dressing up, dressing down, and closeting. Together, their stories illuminate how uniformity, misogyny, and homophobia shaped recognizably modern notions of normative masculinity, queerness, and “the closet.”
Margaret Waller is Professor Emerita of French at Pomona College and author of The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel. Her newest book is Napoleon’s Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion (Columbia University Press).
Anne Higonnet is Barbara Novak Professor of Art History at Barnard College. Her most recent books include Liberty, Equality, Fashion; the Women Who Styled the French Revolution (Norton & Co., 2024); A Museum of One's Own; Private Collecting, Public Gift (Periscope Publishing, 2009); and Lewis Carroll (Phaidon, 2008). Most recently, she directed a website about the world’s rarest and most radical fashion plates: https://stylerevolution.github.io/.
