One day in 1779, as the French royal family rode in a carriage through the streets of Paris, Queen Marie Antoinette noticed her fashion merchant, Rose Bertin, observing the royal procession. “Ah! There is mademoiselle Bertin,” the queen exclaimed, waving her hand. Bertin responded with a curtsy. The king then stood and greeted Bertin, followed by the royal family and their entourage.* The incident shocked the public, for no common merchant had ever received such homage from royalty.

Bertin had come a long way from her humble beginnings. Born in 1747 to a poor family in northern France, she moved to Paris in the 1760s to work as a shop assistant. Bertin eventually opened her own boutique on the fashionable rue Saint-Honoré. In 1775, Bertin received the highest honor of her profession when she was selected by Marie Antoinette as one of her official purveyors.

Based on the queen’s patronage and riding the wave of the new consumer revolution, Bertin became one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Europe. Bertin established not only a large clientele but also a reputation for pride and arrogance. She refused to work for non-noble customers, claiming that the orders of the queen and the court required all her attention. She astounded courtiers by referring to her “work” with the queen, as though the two were collaborators rather than absolute monarch and lowly subject. Bertin’s close relationship with Marie Antoinette and the fortune the queen spent on her wardrobe hurt the royal family’s image. One journalist derided Bertin as a “minister of fashion,” whose influence outstripped that of all the others in royal government.

In January 1787, rumors spread through Paris that Bertin had filed for bankruptcy with debts of 2 to 3 million livres (a garment worker’s annual salary was around 200 livres). Despite her notoriously high prices and rich clients, this news did not shock Parisians because the nobility’s reluctance to pay its debts was equally well known. Bertin somehow held on to her business. Some said she had spread the bankruptcy rumors herself to shame the court into paying her bills.

Bertin remained loyal to the Crown during the tumult of the French Revolution (see Chapter 19) and sent dresses to the queen even after the arrest of the royal family. Fearing for her life, she left France for Germany in 1792 and continued to ply her profession in exile. She returned to France in 1800 and died in 1813, one year before the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy might have renewed her acclaim.^†

Rose Bertin scandalized public opinion with her self-aggrandizement and ambition, yet history was on her side. She was the first celebrity fashion stylist and one of the first self-made career women to rise from obscurity to fame and fortune based on her talent, taste, and hard work. Her legacy remains in the exalted status of today’s top fashion designers and in the dreams of small-town girls hoping to make it in the big city.

*Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France, vol. 13, 299, 5 mars 1779 (London: John Adamson, 1785).

^†On Rose Bertin, see Clare Haru Crowston, “The Queen and Her ‘Minister of Fashion’: Gender, Credit and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Gender and History 14, 1 (April 2002): 92–116.

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