Fashion and Otherness: The Passionate Journey of Coppola's Marie Antoinette from a Semiotic Perspective

Abstract

Louis XIV used his body as a political territory to strengthen the power of the State. On the contrary, Marie Antoinette used her body as a subjective territory to recuperate her autonomy. Through fashion, Marie Antoinette created a narrative program that expressed both her wish for recognition and her need for independence. This article reconstructs, from the perspective of the Semiotics of passion, Marie Antoinette's passionate journey as it is narrated by Sofia Coppola, showing how fashion allowed her to challenge the French court and expressed her subjectivity. By using the fashion system as a defensive strategy of legitimization, Marie Antoinette contributed to undermine the political structures that supported the aristocratic order. Simultaneously, she strengthened her individuality and confronted those who denied her recognition. From this perspective, Marie Antoinette appears as a contemporary character, as a subject other, a teenager, a foreigner, a woman who, in an inhospitable space, seeks beauty to construct a public image that expresses her identity.

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