The Imperial Style: Fashions of the Hapsburg Era

This is the book based on the hugely successful exhibition Fashions of the Hapsburg Era: Austria-Hungary, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 1979 through August 1980. The show presented more than 150 costumes, uniforms, and military and equestrian trappings dating from the eighteenth century in Austria and Hungary to the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918. But at the heart of the exhibition were the costumes and liveries worn at court in the late nineteenth century, during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth—one of the most highly romantic periods in European history. At mid-century the power of the empire was already waning, but the grandeur of the costumes, the vestments of the civil orders, and the gala gowns of the ladies of the court belied the aura of impending ruin.