Beloved Luise

Luise, Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was born in 1776 and grew up with her grandmother at the court of Darmstadt. Her mother died young. Frederick William II discovered Luise and her sister Friederike at a ball and brought the pretty girls to Berlin as potential brides for his sons. In a spectacular double wedding in 1794 Luise married the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William and her sister Friederike married his brother Ludwig. Luise became Queen of Prussia in 1797.

Even as a young girl Luise was fascinated by fashion. She would draw dresses, hair-dos and hats in her notebook and describe fabrics, colours and cuts with an unerring eye for detail in her letters. Later, as Crown Princess, she noted with interest on a journey to Pomerania how the country people ”made both their clothing materials and clothes with their own hands”. She found that ordinary people were not troubled by the “grandeur of the cities and the caprices of fashion, the greatest tyrants of our age”.

Gala Dress “robe à la française”
Silk: France, gown: England, ca. 1775

During the second half of the century striped silks, so-called “pekins,” which ranged from small floral bouquets and scattered flowers in bright, pastel colours to pure striped patterns, became the essence of modernity.

The fabric of this robe à la française is particularly splendid. Flower bouquets held by bows and woven silver butterflies appear between the woven gold longitudinal strips.

A colourfully coordinated, rich trimming of frills, valances, gauze, lace and tassels became part of a fashionable dress.

At
the end of the 18th Century a breath of fabric reached the Prussian
Court. Soft
body-flattering garments excited the attention and brought delight in
equal measure. In June 1794 the ‘Journal of Luxury and
Fashions‘ reported
a breathtaking shift in French fashion:
“The most remarkable thing, however, is the new style of dress they
(Parisian women) have adopted, which is already being generally worn
and should remain as national dress in future. Like the men they wear
namely pantalons in flesh-coloured light wool, over which they wear
skirts of the finest muslin … The waists are quite short and
gathered with tri-coloured belts."

The “nudity fashion” was modelled in part on the simple manner of the ‘mode à l’Anglaise’, which emphasised the form of the body, and in part on the Classical forms of the gowns of Antiquity.

The charm of the fashion-conscious sisters was immortalised by Johann Gottfried Schadow in his famous double statue of the Princesses. The sculptor wrote in his notes,

"In silent excitement the artist worked on his model, taking the dimensions from Nature; the exalted ladies gave what he picked out from their wardrobe, and thus the fashion of the time had its influence on dress."

Schadow illustrated the different attributes of the two sisters in line with the currently popular fashion for Antiquity. Luise’s gown drops more simply and emphasises her dignity. Friederike’s gown seems more full of life with its more animated folds and emphasises her physical charms.

Nevertheless, critical voices raised at the Prussian Court complained that Luise’s appearance in her dress was too immodest: “The female persons wore only a chemise and the thinnest of dresses, in which all their forms were visible.”

After the first plaster version had been received with great admiration at the Berlin Academy exhibition in 1795, small biscuit porcelain versions were quickly made and distributed.

The two young Princesses helped the new figure-accentuating fashion to make its breakthrough.

Beauty,
elegance, playfulness, staged enactment – the Luise myth has
persisted to the present day. Fashion expert Barbara Vinken analyses
the style of the Queen as one which, to a certain extent, made the
French Revolution unnecessary in Germany. She describes Luise as a
reformed queen at the heart of Prussian society, “who had become a
woman like any other in her new bourgeois leading role as mother,
wife, and housewife. Her household and her marriage became the model
for the State.”