Talk:Rose Bertin

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The German version of this article looks much better, and there is considerable information in French available online. As I can read neither, if someone who can comes along they might want to have a go at expanding this article. --Scimitar 21:23, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Reference

There is good material on Rose Bertin beginning on p. 24 of The Age of Napoleon : costume from Revolution to Empire, 1789-1815, a catalog avilable as a PDF from the Met. - PKM (talk) 01:51, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Problems

Minor: Sentences such as "...her mother was a sick nurse." (1st sentence, 2nd paragraph). I would change it, but I don't know whether her mother was sick or whether she attended sick patients. Also, it's not silly to raise the issue about nurses; it makes it sound like she was a professional who made a living wage as a nurse, at least enough to provide education for her children. That's quite an accomplishment for a woman during that time, and it requires some explanation and documentation. Minor: I don't know what is meant by a "superior sense of ambition." (2nd pararaph) Major: "She was the first celebrated French fashion designer, and is widely credited with having brought fashion and haute couture to the forefront of popular culture." (1st paragraph). I doubt she was the first celebrated French fashion designer. The French were already well-known as fashion leaders. I'm not really sure that haute couture and popular culture co-existed at the time, and it's rather doubtful that Bertin had any effect at all on anyone who wasn't at court or at least very wealthy. Her fashions might have had a negative effect on Marie Antoinette's reputation, and this is briefly alluded to, but it not at all clear from the information given that Bertin was a significant influence on the development of the French fashion industry. She may have been, but there is little evidence of that presented here, and the lack of citations makes it difficult to assess the sources that were used to write the article.Owney2011 (talk) 07:15, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

I imagine what they mean is that Rose Bertin was the first fashion designer whose name achieved recognition and fame and was almost an early "brand name" - where having a Rose Bertin dress immediately marked you as patronising the same dressmaker as the Queen of France. Mabalu (talk) 17:39, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree that this article is very badly cited. I have tried to improve the accuracy of information on this page and have added citations to several works, including Michelle Sapori's 2003 biography, which can better substantiate some claims.

Many later sections of this article (especially the French Revolution part) are drawn from unreliable sources such as Langlade's 1911 biography. While Langlade can occasionally be very helpful, much of his information about Bertin's love life and espionage career is drawn from the (mostly fictional) memoir written by Jacques Peuchet in 1824. I don't want to remove it completely from the article – it's interesting and could perhaps be true – but a lot of space is devoted to it in the Wikipedia page, while other better substantiated information is left out.

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell's 2015 book Fashion Victims and Clare Haru Crowston's Credit, Fashion, Sex are two English-language works with reliable information about Bertin. The fashion merchant's pretend bankruptcy, her cultivation of celebrity status, and her work for the Chevalier d'Eon could perhaps be added to this page to improve it. Zaralise (talk) 14:49, 24 May 2023 (UTC)